Employee Engagement
January 11, 2024
Most companies follow employer branding best practices like posting regularly about awards, company culture, and events.
However, you’ve probably noticed that a handful of brands are talent magnets. You can see top candidates actively engaging on these brands' social media posts, and it's clear that the existing employees are proud to work there.
Below, we’ll analyze a handful of these companies and break down how they have built employer brands that organically attract top talent so that you can steal their secrets!
Archer is building electric planes, and its mission is to “unlock the skies, freeing us to reimagine how we live and spend time.”
Having a grand vision and tackling a new frontier naturally attracts top talent, though Archer’s employer brand strategy does a beautiful job of effectively communicating that vision and igniting a desire to join them.
First, they leverage employee advocacy to promote key brand initiatives and create excitement around the vision.
Here’s a great example of their VP of Manufacturing reposting a recent brand accomplishment:
To ensure the right employees share the right company initiatives at the right time, they use our employee advocacy tool, GaggleAMP. So instead of sending company-wide share requests (which are often ignored), GaggleAMP makes it easy for marketing and social media managers to create personalized engagement assignments for specific employees at scale.
Sounds interesting? You can learn more about how GaggleAMP works now.
Another outstanding employer branding social media campaign that Archer executed was “We Are Explorers." This campaign featured certain employees within the company and highlighted how the company culture attracts interesting humans and encourages curiosity and exploration.
Remember that potential employees care a lot about who they work with, so in addition to creating content that sells the company vision, showcase employee stories and let them sell the brand for you.
After watching the video above, who wouldn't feel inspired to work with interesting and intelligent people like their Senior Director of Engineering?
Archer also creates inspiring videos showing off what they're working on, and they let employees narrate the story. By letting employees lead, Archer makes it clear that it values its team members, and potential candidates can easily envision themselves as the star of the next video.
Finally, Archer also sprinkles in awards won and other social proof that it’s a successful company with excellent opportunities.
Kajabi is a course creation platform that also has a strong employer brand.
Their main strategy is highlighting their employees’ accomplishments and sharing tidbits about their work culture.
For example, they created a high-quality video highlighting their summer interns:
Interns don't usually get featured on a company's social media profile, so you can see how this would make Kajabi an attractive employer for younger talent.
They also create posts thanking individual team members, like this one featuring their People Program's Specialist:
Finally, they also create posts about key perks of working at Kajabi, like this one about their paid child preparation benefits:
This sends a strong message to potential candidates that Kajabi strives to create a positive work environment that values work-life balance.
Sendoso's LinkedIn page is a great balance of:
Culture posts
Employee achievement posts
Client success posts
Company events posts
They follow all the best practices (optimize with hashtags, post frequently, respond to comments, etc.), and virtually any post they publish is a good example of an employer branding campaign.
However, what really makes Sendoso's employer branding strategy a standout success is that they leverage employees to promote the brand for them.
For example, when they recently attended Dreamforce, many different employees posted about the experience on LinkedIn:
Social media users naturally engage more with other people than brands, so this is an excellent way to achieve more brand engagement. In addition, there were probably more than a few people sitting at their desks all day that looked at these pictures and felt at least a twinge of jealousy that they weren't getting paid to hang out at Dreamforce.
So, in addition to generating more brand visibility, this employee engagement strategy was also an excellent example of employer branding done well.
Sendoso is also a GaggleAMP client. If you want your employees to post about fun company events and aid recruitment marketing efforts, schedule a demo today.
You've probably realized by now that one of the best talent acquisition strategies is simply treating your current employees well and then trusting that they'll share the experience with their network.
Shopify is an excellent example of this.
They offer a variety of unique benefits to employees, and then employees naturally publish posts about their experience with the hashtag #lifeatshopify.
Here's just one example of a new dad who explains how Shopify gives employees four weeks of paid vacation after working at the company for five years. He used it to spend time with his son:
Here's another post from a Shopify employee, and it does an excellent job of encapsulating the company culture:
Some of the best examples of employer branding are simply employee experiences. So focus on becoming a great employer and then gently nudge employees to share their experiences.
Leaning into your company's core mission and creating posts about your impact is a great way to attract the right people to your team.
Bright Horizons's employer branding strategy is an excellent example of this concept in action.
Their primary mission is providing high-quality education and child care around the world, so most of their posts are about community impact:
If someone reading the post above resonates with it, they would probably be an excellent candidate to join the team.
Bright Horizons is also a GaggleAMP customer, and they rely heavily on their employees to share the company mission with their social networks. For example, here's a great post their recruiting director shared about an employee that used resources through Bright Horizons to complete his Master's Degree:
It's a touching story that showcases not only the impact of the brand, but also how much the brand values its employees and supports them in achieving their dreams.
Here's yet another great example of an employee testimonial that other Bright Horizons employees then jumped in and engaged with:
In addition, this strategy is a great way to improve the company’s reputation in the eyes of both job seekers and customers.
Sparktoro is a young, yet well-known marketing tool among SEOs and content marketers.
A key reason for its success is that the founder, Rand Fishkin, has a strong personal brand and regularly posts about various product use cases on his social media channels. Here's an example:
He also hired Amanda Natividad as his VP of marketing, and she has over 100,000 followers on Twitter.
The takeaway is that having an executive team of recognized thought leaders is a great way to organically attract top job candidates and improve your employer brand.
So what should you do if your current executives aren't thought leaders?
One option is to assign them prompts each week to help them build their social media presence. In GaggleAMP, we offer an engagement activity (Ask a Question), which allows you to assign prompts to specific people.
So you could assign any of the following prompts to your executive team each week:
What is something you learned related to our industry this week?
What is a common misconception you see about (topic)?
What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew last year, when you were starting out, etc.?
What is an industry trend you are excited about?
What internal project are you excited about?
Once your executives have a strong social media presence, it will be much easier to organically attract top candidates. They want to work with great talent and will feel like they already have a relationship with your team.
Stryker is a global medical device company, and despite being a highly technical company, it does an excellent job of creating human-centric content that regularly generates high engagement.
Rather than constantly posting about job opportunities and begging for applications, they highlight key employee perks and paint a rosy picture of what it would feel like to work with them.
For example, this post highlighting their new Global Services Center in Costa Rica probably made a few scrollers feel a twinge of jealousy:
To further supercharge the engagement of each post, employees jumped into the comments and shared their favorite perks of working at Stryker.
Stryker is yet another GaggleAMP customer, so if you want a tool that makes it easy to send requests to employees to post comments like this one, schedule a demo today!
Stryker also shares a lot of culture-related posts that show how they're helping local communities. These kinds of posts naturally tend to receive a lot of engagement which helps the company achieve more brand awareness and signals to potential candidates that it's a community-conscious company.
They also add a link to their careers page in most posts to capture any passive candidates who might be interested in joining the team. This is a great way to generate more candidates without littering the company page with boring job description posts.
Finally, their social media manager really understands that the key to social media success is posting content that is, well, social!
For example, rather than just writing a post about how Stryker values work-life balance, they communicate the same idea in a way that is much more appropriate for social media – showing baby pictures from their employees.
Who wouldn’t want to share this post?
So instead of just writing about key employee value propositions your company offers, use this framework to create more engaging employer branding posts:
What are some recent posts you naturally engaged with on your personal social media accounts (like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.)?
How can you mold that same topic/format to your company accounts?
Chewy is a pet supply brand, and it's easy for pet lovers to quickly become sucked into their fun social media page.
Rather than posting stale, corporate-sounding posts, they frequently post fun clips of their true end customers – dogs.
For example, this post is an excellent blend of communicating company culture through entertainment.
This kind of entertaining post naturally breaks up the monotony of most people's LinkedIn feeds, which helps skyrocket engagement and generates more brand awareness. In addition, it captures the attention of their ideal potential employees – dog lovers.
Here's yet another culture post that naturally makes any dog lover want to apply for a job at Chewy.
There are hundreds of baked goods companies, yet Crumbl has managed to become one of the most popular brands in the industry thanks to an excellent product and unique brand voice.
Their employer branding strategy is pretty simple; create an amazing product, build a loyal following, and then execute social media best practices.
So rather than unpacking an advanced social media strategy, Crumbl is a good reminder that sometimes one of the best employer branding strategy examples is an amazing product and well-told story. This post perfectly captures the essence of Crumbl's brand image:
Once you've put in the hard work of creating a brand people love, it's easier to attract top talent as people want to work for the new cool company.
Now that you have an amazing product and loyal customer base, just follow social media employer branding best practices by creating a mix of:
Culture posts
Brand achievement posts
Product "what we're working on" posts
Employee achievement posts
Here are just a few examples of Crumbl's well-optimized social media posts:
Another thing that Crumbl does well is that it has a very humble and humanistic brand voice. For example, the company shared this Crumbl Blunder posted by the CEO:
So instead of always painting a perfect picture of how amazing your brand is, don’t be afraid to share learnings, failures, and how the team has overcome them.
You probably noticed a key theme among these employer examples – they all involved employee engagement.
Unlike other marketing channels, like webinars, blogs, and ebooks, people log onto social media primarily to connect with other humans.
So a critical factor for any good employer branding strategy is employee engagement.
If you want to learn how to transform your employees into brand ambassadors and attract new talent, you can read our guide on employee advocacy.
Or, if you're ready to take the leap and implement an employee advocacy strategy, schedule a demo of GaggleAMP today to learn how it can help you automate the employee engagement process.
Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement
