Having strategic brand goals and a clear way of communicating your organization's story across all touchpoints is important. In fact, it's a key to attracting, engaging and hiring quality talent.
But have you considered the role your employees can play in advancing your recruiting efforts?
Or how employee advocacy technology can further fuel your hiring capabilities?
It all starts with meeting employees where they're at.
Such was the case with Sodexo, a leading, global food services and facilities management company. Its employees are well-connected, though few regularly sit in front of a computer. With 150,000 employees at 13,000 sites across all 50 U.S. states and in Canada alone, it has upwards of 60,000 open jobs at any given time. As a result, the organization had to rethink its approach to brand activation. It also needed to better leverage employees' networks and keep them engaged in a way that made sense.
Sure, the majority of companies have social properties and post content, but it's important to note few people actually see, much less engage with, those posts. By contrast, brand messages are re-shared 24 times more often when distributed by employees versus the brand.
Sodexo tackled these challenges and seized opportunities by enlisting Symphony Talent's talent advocacy tool, featuring a single, simplified dashboard, so content could easily be posted, tracked, analyzed and acted upon. Since Sodexo employees are more likely to engage while checking their phones during a break, the organization employed SMS capability to activate employee engagement, sending relevant, interesting, regular content via text. Putting the power of engagement in their hands (quite literally), employees could then click on content and effortlessly share it across their social networks with a single click. Not only did it enable them to feel more connected and involved in the company, it proved to be a powerful way to access passive job seekers.
Needless to say, Sodexo's approach to employee advocacy is paying off. In 2018, the adoption rate is 81 percent, with a total reach of 517,822. Sodexo has seen a consistent increase of 15 to 20 percent in reach over its life since adopting Symphony Talent's talent advocacy tool. What's more, the average reach per user has increased to 4,839, up 7.5 percent since 2017. All told, Sodexo has seen a total network growth of 267,000 (up 32 percent from 2017); gotten 61.1 million impressions, an increase of 19 percent from 2017; and seen an earned media equivalency of $549,927, up 19 percent since the prior year.
