Employee-generated Content: The Worst Content Strategy in Employer Branding
One employee posting their original thoughts, opinions, and perspectives about your industry and the work they do is worth more than an army of employees sharing lame culture videos.
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Employee-generated content has long been touted as the holy grail of employer branding.
But next to EVPs, it’s the biggest myth in the industry.
There’s this idea that if you (EB champion) can get your employees to use an app to record selfie videos talking about how much they love working at your company, you’ll be able to share those videos on social and potential candidates will want to work at your company too.
This shows just how disconnected the employer branding industry—and the tech solutions that enable this illusion—is from the realities of market behavior.
The problems with this type of employee-generated content are simple:
Employees don’t care: It’s hard to get videos in the first place.
Poor quality: When employees do create videos the quality is generally low and therefore unusable.
Guardrails: The content creation requires guidelines and parameters. These need to be created and implemented. It’s too much work when the outcome is this fruitless.
Candidates don’t care: If one of these videos actually sees the light of day, it’s seen as postured culture fluff.
Bottom line: The level of friction that’s created by the lack of care of both employees and candidates combined with the heavy lift of quality control makes this the worst content strategy in employer branding.
Do this instead:
Give your employees the autonomy to create for themselves and become true SMEs in your space.
One employee posting their original thoughts, opinions, and perspectives about your industry and the work they do is worth more than an army of employees sharing lame culture videos.
The former builds trust and connection and shows that you all know your shit. The latter adds garbage to our already polluted feeds.
Your time and budget are finite. Choose your approach wisely.
This is especially true for high-growth scaleups where employer branding is led by a team of one or championed by a People or Talent leader who’s also balancing a number of more pressing responsibilities.
If this describes you, focus on what enables recruiter outcomes and makes starting conversations with candidates easier.
That is always the place to start from.
Hint: High-level culture fluff and poor attempts at video content isn’t it.
P.S. This is just a taste. Next week, James Hornick and I are going to talk about all the things wrong with mainstream employer branding — EVPs, employee profiles, culture posts, etc.
Date + time: Wednesday, November 10 at 12:00 pm PT