Employer branding on a budget: make participation easier

Asking employees to record a video sounds like an inexpensive content plan. But you’ve also asked them to find the time, work out what to say and feel comfortable filming themselves. Before chasing more volunteers, it’s worth asking whether we’ve made participation harder than it needs to be.

When Hannah King joined me on Hiring Excellence, she was head of global employer brand at Straumann Group. Her account of a roughly three-month pilot in Madrid offered a useful correction: employees were more willing to take part when someone else did the filming.

Make the task smaller for the contributor

With the Madrid hub growing, a local recruiter worked with the HR business partner to identify employees with interesting stories. She booked time, sent questions ahead and recorded them on her phone. Employees explained what the company’s values meant to them personally. Hannah’s “roving reporter” hadn’t simply requested authentic content; she’d organised a manageable way for people to contribute.

Hannah reported seeing reach rise with this less polished content. That’s encouraging, but it doesn’t mean a phone automatically beats a production crew. The work hadn’t disappeared; someone else was organising it. By the time we spoke, she’d launched a wider project with a recruiter in each core market to do the filming. She saw bringing recruiters into employer branding as a development opportunity and a way to share work she couldn’t carry alone.

Build the follow-through into the work

Tagging contributors as collaborators gave posts another route to an audience: employees’ own feeds. Hannah reported that this was doubling reach for the content. But don’t assume that agreeing to be filmed means agreeing to share the result through a personal account. She kept consent records and required permission for the tag. Less polished content didn’t mean a less careful process.

Her process also included a short performance update and a thank-you two weeks after publication. It’s an easily neglected courtesy. We ask employees to lend their voice to the organisation; showing them where it went recognises that contribution. Hannah said people had started asking to appear on the channel. Her broader impression of increased employee engagement was still anecdotal.

There’s another way to respect that effort: don’t make every post a new filming request. Hannah advocated reusing content across channels. A career story used externally could also help colleagues understand development opportunities internally. And the content owner’s boredom isn’t a reliable measure of audience familiarity. As she put it: “Just because you feel it’s tired doesn’t mean your audience does.” Repetition deserves a place in the plan, rather than an apology.

Decide what success would mean

If you try this, choose an audience you need to reach and agree who has time for filming and follow-up. Track how many invitations become usable stories, alongside the recruiter time involved. If you already collect employee stories, compare those figures with your current approach. That gives you a way to judge whether helping people participate is a sustainable use of capacity, rather than assuming low production costs mean low effort.

Then judge the content against its purpose. Hannah distinguished long-term awareness from immediate recruitment. For urgent hiring at a Swiss manufacturing site, she used job boards, making the investment case on cost per hire and hiring speed. For awareness content, look beyond reach to continued interest, such as talent-community sign-ups. A popular employee video may be worth repeating, but popularity alone won’t tell you whether it solved your hiring problem.