Over a couple of days in June, the Talent Works International team ran an employer brand ambassadors training workshop at Elsevier’s Head Quarters Amsterdam. The purpose of this was to enable Elsevier’s brand ambassadors to understand how to use their online presence to support the Elsevier employer brand.
In this candidate-driven market, it is important to ensure that your company’s employer brand is attractive. According to Media Planet, every organisation needs exceptional content to feed its social media engine.
So, as part of a long-term attraction strategy, employer brand ambassadors can act as representatives of your company. By having a consistent online presence, ambassadors can communicate your company culture, affecting the workplace from the inside out.
Who can be a Brand Ambassador?
The workshop included people of all ages, from all around the world. So, the question we asked was, what unites all these brand ambassadors?
These were all people who had volunteered to be ambassadors on behalf of their employer. So, what drew them together was a shared passion. Where some of them might have more online experience than others, they all had a passion for their brand in common.
In bringing them all together, we were able to create a space in which they could share and learn from one another, as well as from us. We led workshops that encouraged interaction and conversation.
We encouraged them to embrace their uniqueness
An important aspect of being an ambassador is using your individuality to promote your company. After all, no one wants to work somewhere that doesn’t value diversity of thought. So, we led them through sessions which enabled them to discover their tone of voice and how best to use it.
Ultimately, the role of an ambassador is not to become a carbon clone of your company. The purpose of an ambassador is to emphasise and represent your company while also being uniquely yourself. So, the training was less about teaching them something new, and more about enabling them to tap into the abilities they already have.
How do you promote your employer brand?
An employer brand ambassador can use social media to promote their brand. By their brand, we also mean their own personal brand.
Discovering your tone of voice is all about finding what you want to say, and how you want to say it. This understanding of yourself can come from knowing the impression you want to leave on people. That will change from person to person, and from team to team.
Authenticity is attractive to potential employees
It means they can trust the culture you portray. For example, someone who works in tech is best suited to communicate and promote to other people working in tech, and someone in marketing can communicate to others in marketing. According to Forbes, people no longer trust ads, but they do trust people.
So, when you’ve mastered your tone of voice, you can use your social media platforms to promote your employer brand as an individual. This can be as vague as sharing posts discussing or presenting company culture, to specifically promoting live vacancies.
We shared with the ambassadors the best ways to use each social media platform and how to refine their tone of voice for each one. So, they can use their platforms with confidence to attract and engage both passive and active talent.
Brand ambassadors can form an integral part of your recruitment marketing strategy. After all, who better to promote your brand to future hires than your current employees?
More than 80% of marketers find influencer marketing effective
This is because ambassadors form a trusting relationship with their audience over time, which enables them to speak to them on a personal level. Similar to content marketing, trust is the key here. Brand awareness is not about reaching as many people as possible. Rather, it is about reaching those who are right for your business and showing them why they should want to work with you.
Thanks to Elsevier for hosting the Talent Works International team. We loved working with your ambassadors and getting to know them. Heather Niblett, Client Partner for Talent Works International, said, “it’s been great to support Elsevier in educating and training their employer brand ambassadors. They’re investing in their people, and it’s been a great experience to play a part in that.”
You can check out a few pictures of the workshop below, taken by Nathalie Hennis.
