Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time today to join us. We are excited to talk to you about the connection between employee engagement, employee advocacy and talent acquisition. I am Patrick Rooney, founder of QUEsocial, and I am honored to be joined today by Carolyn Eiseman, the director of employer branding for Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rental Cars, National Rental Car and Alamo Rental Cars. She and her team have done an incredible job of building one of the most effective social recruiting programs that not only activates their recruiters and talent brand ambassadors to increase awareness of the employer brand, but also of harnessing that to lead to real, tangible Talent Acquisition results.
Today we will be talking about the intersection of three topics that have gained a lot of traction and attention, Employee engagement, employee advocacy and Talent Acquisition. Each of these, in and of themselves, are huge topics and we won’t try to tackle the enormity of each of them individually. Rather, we will talk about how they build off each other.
For our agenda today, we have a presentation that should last about 45 minutes. The first few minutes will focus on the interdependencies between employee engagement, employee advocacy and talent acquisition, and why it’s important to think of them as connected rather than separate.
The bulk of the discussion will focus on how Carolyn and her team at Enterprise have approached and built their talent acquisition-centric advocacy program.
Then we will have a few minutes for some Q&A, but please feel free to ask questions as we go and we can come back to them at the end.
Because we are talking about social media, if you’d like to tweet about anything we talk about, our twitter handles are @carolynteisement and @patrick1rooney.
As I mentioned, employee engagement, employee advocacy and talent acquisition have gained a lot of momentum in the last couple of years. If we look at the number of articles between January 2015 and 2016, you can see they have umped markedly.
This is an unscientific Google search, but even at that it shows the momentum these topics have gained – an increase of nearly 3 times for each topic. Last year, employee engagement was written about 1400 times, and this year nearly 4000 times.
Employee advocate was written about 100 times in 2015, and about 600 times this year. And talent acquisition abut 600 times in 2015, and nearly 2500 times this past January.
Why?
Increased savvy
HR/TA taking more pages out of the marketing playbook,
Technology is making it easier to engage and activate employees.
And yet, despite all of the buzz, the discussion of employee engagement, employee advocacy and talent acquisition are still largely siloed. Only employee engagement and talent acquisition were covered in the same articles, and even at that less than 250 articles connected them in January of this year.
Which seems odd when you think about the link between employee advocacy – employees telling their friends and family about their company – and talent acquisition. While employee advocacy is a huge topic these days, and largely within the HR suite, it isn’t being directed to a core business objective. We aren’t talking about advocacy for the sake of advocacy, much the same as companies have moved away from talking about social for the sake of social.
And this is really important, because
Engaged employees = happy employees.
Happy employees attract quality talent + customers.
Talent + customers share their experiences.
Their friends hear those stories, and make decisions based on them.
THOSE DECISIONS HAVE REAL BUSINESS IMPLICATIONS.
I think we can all agree, and there are libraries filled with research that underscores that an engaged employee is a happier employee. For employee advocacy, that’s important, because word of mouth has a huge impact on your ability to attract the right people.
And what are your employees saying? This is the critical question, because your employees are the most credible voice you have. Far more powerful than any advertising or marketing we can do, and even more credible than the CEO,
It’s your employees – whether recruiter, hiring manager or really happy line employee - who are connected to the people you want to reach. It’s the birds of a feather analogy. Software engineers are connected to other engineers, marketers are connected to marketers, etc. What they are saying reaches and influences they very people you want to hire.
The power of Word of mouth has long been a central theme in marketing, and is gaining steam in recruitment marketing. Why? Because research shows us that 70% of people increasingly turn to their friends and trusted sources for guidance, and employees for their transparency into the company experience.
And yet, staggeringly, only 47% of companies fold WOM or advocacy into their talent acquisition efforts. Why wouldn't’t you activate your most powerful, persuasive and authentic voices to tell the employer story?
Not only do employees provide the valuable authenticity you need, but they also extend your reach far beyond your current talent community and employer brand social properties. Carolyn is going to talk about the reach and impact their advocacy program has had, but think about the reach your employees give you beyond what you’re already doing. Activating 100 employees, who have an average of 1,000 connections across their social networks, you’re able to reach 100,000 people beyond their brand channels, who by the way probably are not in your CRM or ATS already.
And that advocacy has real value. It’s an efficient marketing channel that in many cases is more effective than traditional advertising. You can see here the ROI achieved by activating employees. Beyond these numbers, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has research that word of mouth increases advertising by 15%. So, the business case for activating employees is pretty clear.
Intrinsically, the link between employee engagement, employee advocacy and talent acquisition is hard to argue with. It goes beyond engaging for the sake of engaging, and has real business implications across the organization – from attracting the quality candidates you need to stay competitive, to attracting and retaining customers. Word of mouth, and the tools and technologies that help extend and amplify it have blurred the lines between the consumer experience, the employee experience and the candidate, and your employer brand impacts them all. And, in turn, your employer brand is heavily shaped by what your employees are saying.
And with that, I’d like to turn it over to Carolyn to talk about the Enterprise story.
