It’s estimated that 90% of people trust the recommendations of people they know, according to Nielsen. Given our human nature to listen to our peers, leveraging an employee advocate program to recruit new employees seems like a no-brainer.
Your employees should be your best brand ambassadors. It is their employee experience and willingness to share that with their peers that can create true employee advocacy and jumpstart your recruiting efforts.
Consider these three keys to leveraging an employee advocate program to help recruit talent:
Set clear goals and objectives for your employee advocate program
No program will be successful without first setting clear goals and objectives. These goals and objectives will vary from organization to organization, so give some thought to what you truly want to accomplish and how to create a program that will help reach your objectives.
Remember: if you’re leveraging an employee advocate program to recruit new talent, the goal(s) should not only be to drive awareness, but to drive employee referrals and applications of qualified candidates.
Create a plan of action
Once your goals and objectives are aligned and finalized, it’s time to move forward with an integrated plan of action.
You’ll need to consider how you’ll ask your employees to participate in the employee advocate program. Will you be creating approved content for employees to share, or will employees be asked to create their own content? How, when, and where should they share the content? How will you promote the program internally and engage employees in participating? Your plan of action should lay all of this out.
A best practice for employee advocate programs is to create an incentive or reward structure for your employees and make sure it’s legally compliant. Since they’ll be helping your company strengthen its employer brand and helping to recruit new talent – a few prizes and incentives are definitely worth it!
“Train” your employees
Of course there can also be risks involved in leveraging an employee advocacy program for recruiting purposes, especially when social media is being leveraged as a communication channel. Most of your employees would not maliciously share information that would hurt the organization or its reputation, but this can happen when employees are simply unaware of postings or online behaviors that can put your company at risk. So you’ll need to make sure your employees fully understand the guidelines, policies, and procedures of the employee advocate program.
What else are you doing within your organization to partner with your current employees to recruit new talent? We want to hear about it in the comments section below!
Interested in learning more? Join your peers at Innovations in Talent Acquisition.