Reading Time: 4 minutes

Talent attracts talent. That much has always been true in collectives. However, successful companies have taken it to another level with employee ambassadors.

Focusing on the human aspect, teamwork and collaboration has been companies’ ticket to success. In fact, businesses with more employee engagement have 147% higher earnings than their competitors.

And while employee advocacy is great at attracting new customers, it’s even better at attracting new employees who are here to stay (and engage).

So let’s take a look at the best practices you can use to hire the right people for the job. All you need is a little help from your employees.

Leverage your employees to increase hiring leads

HR departments already have enough on their plate without selecting the right candidates for a role. It can take months (and, in some cases, years) to source out quality candidates and interview them.

With employee advocacy, you can rely on your best employees to attract new candidates similar to them. Chances are that your great hires know even more great people.

How does it work?

According to MSLGroup, employees have on average 10x more connections than brand channels do.

This means that the hiring pool is automatically bigger. On average, employee advocates have 420 Facebook friends, 400 LinkedIn contacts, and 360 Twitter followers (Smarp). If only 1% of these are interested in your company, that’s already at least 3 suitable people.

Considering that they are associated with employees you’re satisfied with (your employee ambassadors), chances for success are automatically higher.

And since 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search, and we can’t imagine living without social media, the answer to leveraging your employees to increase hiring leads is: social media.

After all, if it’s not on Twitter, it didn’t happen.

Using social media for hiring through employee advocacy

Social media marketing can do more than just attract new customers. If you want to hire through your employee advocates, here’s what you can do:

• Focus on company culture
• Educate employees
• Reward employees
• Gamify employee ambassadorship
• Establish metrics and goals

If you focus on company culture from the get-go and reward your employees, they’ll feel enthusiastic about being ambassadors for your business. Brand advocacy is very hard without enthusiasm and without something to share.

.

Example: Reebok

Reebok has an amazing employee advocacy program. It might’ve caught your attention with the hashtag: #FitAssCompany.

Featured Image Source: StephLemeza17 on Twitter

Reebok’s turning their employees into ambassadors by encouraging them to share photos of daily office activities (while wearing Reebok items). And if you can see them doing burpees during work hours, it’s an example of company culture done right.

After all, the golden rule is: if you want to be shared on social media, give them something to share.

Reebok’s employees also know what to do, as they’ve been given guidelines. It’s great to give everyone free rein, but it’s best to consolidate ideas and form a strategy.

Example: Electronic Arts

EA, a big video game publisher, launched their EA Insiders program in 2014.

To encourage engagement, they gamified their brand advocacy system. They created leaderboards and competitions with rewards like official certificates.

This program didn’t just generate millions of shares – it also made the employees feel more connected to each other, and highlighted EA’s culture as one new employees would love to be a part of.

Metrics and KPIs

In order to know whether your brand advocacy program is helping you hire new talent, you should track metrics such as the number of new applicants and successful hires.

Have the applicants state how they found out about your company, and in case of successful hires, you can even consider rewarding your employees.

Which social channels work best for employee ambassadors and hiring?

This depends heavily on what kind of employees you are looking for.

For example, EA (which needs developers and video game designers) can consider social platforms like Reddit, which the IT crowd frequents.

If your company’s potential hires are on LinkedIn, that’s where your employee ambassadors should be.

But mainly, your employee advocates can tell you where to post. You’re trying to find people like them and increase your visibility among that group.

If your best employees use Twitter the most, that’s where they can post job ads and other posts. The key is to attract similar people, so the channels your employee ambassadors are using are the channels you want to target.

For successful social media marketing, you just have to ask your audience.

Save time managing your social media accounts

---

Are you still managing your social media accounts directly from Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn? Make your life easier by managing all your social media in one place, schedule posts, repeat posts, curate content and more. Try DrumUp now, it's free, forever.

And that’s exactly what your employee ambassadors are.

How to recognize good employee ambassadors?

The main requirement for employee advocacy is that advocates are social media users.

After that, these are some indicators that can show if an employee is fit to be your advocate:

• Engagement at work (Do they actively participate, or just perform their tasks and clock out?)
• Enthusiasm about their role
• Online image (What are their social media profiles like? Would you like them to be formally affiliated with your company online, or would that hurt your brand reputation?)
• Well informed (You want your employee advocates to be well informed and stay up-to-date on industry news)

[IMAGE source: interact-intranet.com]

Make hiring with employee advocacy easy

Everyone wants to work in a company with great culture, and even better people.

By showing that your company is one of the perfect employers through employee advocates, you’ll be one step closer to finding the right people.

Of course, it can be time-consuming to organize every part of your employee advocacy program yourself, which is exactly why we’ve created DrumUp.

With features like content curation, one-click scheduling, notifications, RSS feeds, news streams, gamification, administration, and analytics, we’ve created a one-stop solution for everything you need to successfully launch an employee advocacy program.

All you need to do now is get your employees on board. And with DrumUp’s simplicity, it won’t be hard at all.