Who Should Be Featured in Employee Experience Stories?

When you’ve decided that you’re going to be intentional about communicating your employer brand through employee experience stories, the next step is to decide who will be featured in your first story. Remember that the objective of employee storytelling is to answer the “Why should I work for you?” question and the answer to that question is different for different people. That means that you have to go for diversity, but to get your first story all you need to do is pinpoint one person.

We Want More of You

Ask yourself, who is the employee whom you would like to replicate if you could? That’s the person to approach for your first employee story. This is the person who emulates many of the attributes that you would like to have in everyone. What it is that sticks out about this person can be their attitude, the way they approach a challenge or their calmness under pressure in addition to their job performance.

If you’re in a position where you feel like your culture is weak and morale is low, “we want more of you” is still a good strategy for picking your employee storytelling participants. You’ll find that by becoming intentional about sharing positive stories, the overall narrative about your company can start to swing in a more positive direction.

Choose People in Different Job Roles

If you have a high impact position that is the target of your job search activities, by all means feature an employee in that position. Your overarching employee storytelling plan, however, should include employees working in different roles. Keep in mind that recruitment marketing is a proactive, long term strategy for improving your recruiting results. Just because you aren’t hiring for a position today, doesn’t mean you won’t in the future, so you need to give potential candidates many ways to envision themselves at your company.

Employees in different roles will have different perspectives depending on their job, but their stories about how your employer value proposition is played out in their lives will intersect. For example, work-life balance can be just as applicable to a senior employee as it is to an entry level employee. Their stories will be different, but the value is the same.

Choose People with Different Seniority Levels

The example that I just gave you is also a reason to choose people for employee storytelling who have different seniority levels and tenures at your company. The perspective of someone who just joined your team in the past 12 months, is going to be different from someone who’s been there for many years.

The reason why your newest employees came to you will be fresh in their minds giving you an opportunity to focus on why they decided to make a change. The employees who have been with you through many years will have stories about how your company has been a place where they’ve been able to grow and thrive, and also of how you’ve been able to navigate through the ups and downs that inevitably occur in business and in life.

Discover What Employees Value

Telling employee experience stories is the best way to uncover your employer value proposition. Your employer value proposition, or EVP, is the value that your employees receive from you in addition to salary and benefits. Your EVP is what makes your company a great place to work.

Qualitative analysis of employee interviews will very quickly reveal what’s important to your employees, whether it’s work-life balance, supporting their professional development, or creating a collaborative work environment. Once you discover your EVP, you can become intentional about communicating it, and that’s how your EVP becomes a two-way street enabling you to attract people who will be a good fit for your company.

Ask Me About Employer Value Qualitative Analysis

I have transferred a methodology that I’ve used in marketing to analyze employee interviews to uncover the components of your employer value proposition. Contact me to learn how this can help you attract more of the quality candidates that you need to meet your goals.