When the rise in remote work opened up the global hiring pool, plenty of companies struggled to attract and hire top talent. And this continues to be the case today, especially when it comes to tech talent, such as engineers.
As one global consumer packaged goods company CMO told us “We consider ourselves a tech company.” And if they’re a tech company, then every company is a tech company.
However, this company — one of the Magnificent Seven — understood that the key to hiring success was activating its most important asset: its people.
So its talent attraction and employer branding teams joined forces with EveryoneSocial and activated 10,000 employee advocates in various roles, levels of seniority, and locations, which helped them hire a record-breaking number of people.
Here’s what they accomplished just in 2023 alone:
- Shared 600,000 pieces of content
- Generated 12 million engagements
- Accrued hundreds of millions of impressions
The tech company’s chief goal was to reach and engage with particular talent at top tech companies. Secondly, it wanted to communicate to these potential hires that its organization was the kind of place they wanted to work.
The company had tremendous success attracting the right people and growing its team exponentially. And its hiring team credits EveryoneSocial because the data we provided validated that they were reaching and engaging their target audience.
In fact, 65% of those millions of engagements came from non-employees — and from target companies the tech giant wanted to pull talent from. 🤩
The talent attraction and employer branding teams could also see that the people engaging with their content were people from roles and job titles they were targeting. For example, 50% of those engaging with their content were currently in an engineering role. 🚀
The other 35% of those engagements came from current employees, enabling the company to easily identify socially active workers who weren’t already part of the advocacy program and turn them into official advocates. 🙌
How Does This Work?
Everyone you want to reach is on social media — everyone you want to hire and will hire — which is why it’s the #1 channel for recruiting.
Advocacy is the way to reach them because content posted by your people gets far more engagement than content shared via brand handles.
Why?
- Because people engage with people.
- And social networks prioritize content shared by people.
Ogilvy’s 2024 Influencer Trends report cites a stat from LinkedIn that the collective networks of a company’s employees are on average 10x larger than their brand following. 🤯
What are the Leading Teams Doing on Social?
Let’s break it down into three simple steps.
1. They align with their CEO’s top priority: people.
The leading employer branding and talent acquisition programs we work with understand that people are their CEO’s top priority and they align their results to that objective.
No matter how big the organization is, or at what level the team operates, they know that helping the organization reach top talent is its highest priority.
2. They collaborate.
The most successful companies understand that recruiting and employer brand isn’t a job for HR alone. Everyone plays a role.
Collaboration may sound cliche, but it’s critical to the success of an advocacy program because, at its core, advocacy is about activating people across the organization to essentially serve as marketers. And that includes everyone: senior leaders, recruiters, even the interns.
Our leading clients show us again and again that embracing collaboration is a competitive advantage.
3. They prioritize distribution.
Our top customers also understand that distribution is where value is created.
Content holds no inherent value; its value is based on the audience you’re able to distribute it to. And successful distribution comes down to knowing where your target audience spends time and how to reach them effectively, efficiently, and authentically.
Social is the channel where prospective hires are found, and distributing your content through your people is how to reach them.
