Companies Can Attract Talent With Employee Testimonials

There’s no one better able to tell the story of an organization than its employees. They can talk about their career path at the company, explain what they do in their role and how they contribute to a project, the industry or the greater good. But one of the best things  these videos can do is turn abstract corporate mission statements and organizational values into personal stories.

Video testimonials from employees talking about their work experience has become an employer branding best practice for many reasons: It’s more engaging and authentic than written narratives and offers a valuable, if limited, preview for job seekers.

“Employee stories are the most important recruiting content you can create,” said Lori Sylvia, founder and CEO of Rally Recruitment Marketing, an online community forum focused on the emerging discipline of using marketing techniques to attract talent. “By featuring employee stories on your career site, you can educate potential candidates about your employer value proposition (EVP) before you present them with your open requisitions. If you lead with promoting jobs instead, you may get applicants who aren’t aligned with your culture, which can lead to attrition and put you back at the beginning.”

“Employee stories are the most important recruiting content you can create.”

“Videos make hiring tangible,” explained Abby Cheesman, co-founder of Skill Scout, a recruitment services company that uses video and other media to enhance the hiring process. “Candidates crave a window into what the experience working in a company is actually like, and a video helps them get closer than ever to experiencing it themselves.”

Lauryn Sargent, a former recruiter and co-founder of Stories Incorporated, a recruitment marketing content producer, recently presented a powerful example of this at an event held in Bethesda, Md., by RecruitDC, a networking group for talent acquisition professionals in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

Sargent worked with financial services company Kasasa, headquartered in Austin, Texas. Love is one of Kasasa’s core values. That’s nice, but what does that actually mean?

In a video produced by Stories, Rae Williams, a technical support engineer supervisor at Kasasa, begins speaking. Back in 2012, she was about to undergo major surgery and was obviously stressed and anxious. She was separated from her family, who lived in North Carolina. The company gave a colleague the day off to stay with her in the hospital, but he could only make it the day after the surgery. She speaks about feeling panicked and scared about being alone on the day of her operation. When she woke up from the procedure, her manager was sitting in her room. When she woke up again later in the day, another team member was there. As she gets emotional remembering it, she explains that seeing those familiar faces lessened her fear during a time of vulnerability. The video, which runs about one minute, gives “love” a meaning.

Copyright 2017 SHRM. This article is excerpted from https://www.shrm.org with permission from SHRM. All rights reserved. The original article was written by Roy Maurer. The full article can be found here.