Your organization’s branding can determine the type of prospects you attract. It’s not just about doing a job anymore—employees want to be associated with a great work culture that fosters trust and their growth.
This is where employer branding comes into play.
With the right branding, you can communicate your organization’s values and vision with clarity. But how you ensure employer branding also has far-reaching consequences. Your brand pitch won’t be enough to convince prospects.
Instead, candidates want to hear about the company from present and former employees. They trust their words more than those of the brand, since they get ground-level insights about your company’s culture. With the right user-generated videos, you can effectively propagate your brand’s message to humanize the organization and attract top talent.
So, in this post, we’ll discuss how you can use employee-generated content for employer branding!
User-generated video (UGV) for employer branding entails videos created by an organization’s current employees. In these videos, the employees discuss their experiences, roles and responsibilities, and the work culture of the organization. The opinions given in the videos must be those of the employees themselves to maintain authenticity.
Bear in mind that the only level of control that the organization has over these videos is that of providing guided initiatives. They cannot direct or script the videos, as this would formalize the content.
If done correctly, UGVs can build trust and credibility with prospects and attract the best talent. Moreover, since these videos tend to be created by people who are living your brand’s work culture on the daily, they can create a better emotional connection and generate more engagement.
For example, you can create “A Day in the Life” vlogs, which discuss a particular employee’s roles and daily responsibilities. This can give a transparent idea about similar positions, the amenities, and the general atmosphere of the organization to prospects.
UGVs are changing the way that candidates consider organizations for career growth. Here are a few statistics that are worth mentioning:
These statistics indicate that your employer brand has become crucial in engaging your present employees and ensuring a steady flow of strong candidates.
Now, let’s discuss in detail how UGVs can change the way your organization is perceived by prospective candidates:
Your employees won’t just create videos for the company just at a single say-so. Here’s how you can encourage them to create employer branding videos:
If employees truly want to give an authentic review of your organization, you’ll have to allow them a certain level of freedom. Employees are often scared that any minor disagreement with an organization’s culture or policies can make them lose their jobs.
Instead, give them the space to speak their minds. You can add a few questions as prompts to ensure that any criticism can be structured as constructive. The idea behind this is to not judge them as “unprofessional”. Rather, highlight human moments that can resonate with other employees and the audience.
Your employees won’t know what to talk about without some level of guidance. Ask your marketing team to prepare some prompts or questions that the employees can refer to and answer in the videos. Let upper management be looped in on the questions and approve them.
This way, the entire process remains transparent, and your employees know exactly what to address in their employer branding videos.
Nobody’s going to create your employer branding videos if the process is complex. If you ask them to download an app or edit the videos before submitting, you’re inviting friction. This discourages employees due to the level of work involved.
Instead, tell them to create simple, selfie-styled videos that don’t require edits from their end. Create a form or add a link through which they can upload and send their videos.
Interactive video platforms like Life Inside automate the video collection process through QR codes. Employees can create their videos, scan the QR code, and upload them directly to the portal for easy collection!
Even a basic amount of recognition can go a long way to boost employee morale. You can shout out employees’ videos in meetings, appreciate their hard work over email, and even share their videos on social media (while tagging them).
Employees who are consistently creating employer branding videos or advocating for the organization can also be rewarded in different ways. You can provide them a half-day leave on a date of their choice, provide a cash reward, and so much more.
So, you’ve created your UGVs and distributed them on your channels. But how do you know that they’re providing the right results?
Define your goal with the UGVs before setting the KPIs. Do you want more visibility or to increase the average number of applications?
Some common metrics for any goal would be the following:
Of course, more specific metrics to track will depend on your goal with the UGVs.
Thanks to social media, there are easy ways to track engagement on your videos. Monitor the following:
You can also add feedback elements in your interactive videos to acquire feedback, such as:
Ultimately, the main goal of the videos is to convert and have a positive impact on your brand’s recruitment metrics. Check if the videos led to better application quality or more applications in general.
Track how the Careers page engagement has changed post-video publishing, and how many are visiting the page directly through the video.
In the longer run, it’s important to measure the cost-per-hire after the videos have been published.
While you’re getting ready to implement UGVs, there are a few issues that you might encounter during the process. Luckily for you, we’ve outlined these issues and their fixes right here:
While UGVs need to be informal and slightly unpolished for authenticity, the problem of brand consistency can pop up. To fix this, here’s what you can do:
We’ve already outlined how you can encourage participation from your employees in an earlier section. But we’ve mentioned it here because this is a genuine issue that can affect your employer branding process.
Remember to start small and make it a basic part of their onboarding training. You can also carry out an exercise in this once every quarter. This not only increases their confidence but you also get an insight into how the organization’s processes can be improved.
To sum up, ensure that the employees have a safe space to talk about their experiences, and recognize them for the effort that they put into the videos.
If you want your employees to give their authentic reviews of your workplace, you’ll have to prepare for a few negative reviews as well.
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that helps you create, collect, and automate the distribution of your interactive videos. It allows you to create employee testimonial videos in your recruitment and marketing funnels, with interactive elements for audience engagement and feedback.
In the earlier sections, we discussed how Life Inside automates the video creation and collection process. It also provides analytics for watch times and engagement rates, especially during A/B testing, to help you understand what’s working and what needs improvement.
Plus, the interactivity of these videos turns your audience (prospective candidates) into active participants in the video's narrative. With feedback forms, polls, and CTA buttons, they get to ask questions, provide their input, and check out your Careers page. This entire setup eliminates friction while adding brand credibility and trust.
So, if you want to experience the future of employer branding and video marketing, sign up for Life Inside today!