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Two-thirds of HR leaders globally say the labor shortage is getting worse. Fierce competition for skilled talent means that your organization needs to stand out if you want to build a high-performing team.
Employee advocacy offers a powerful solution. At its core, employee advocacy is the promotion of your company by the people who know it best: your team members. When applied to recruiting, it means empowering your current team to help attract and engage potential new hires for your organization.
This approach transforms recruitment from a siloed HR function into a company-wide collaborative effort. Your team members become authentic voices for your employer brand, helping your organization better connect with qualified job seekers.
Benefits of employee advocacy
Tapping into your team members’ potential as brand ambassadors unlocks numerous advantages that can improve your recruitment process.
Wider reach builds a bigger talent pool
Your team members bring something invaluable to your recruitment efforts: access to their personal and professional networks. These connections represent a treasure trove of potential candidates that you couldn’t reach through job boards or corporate social media alone.
When your team members share company news, job openings, and other work-related content with their networks, they tap into communities of professionals with similar skills, backgrounds, and interests. This expanded reach helps you build robust talent pools for both current and future hiring needs.
This approach creates ongoing passive recruitment channels that work even when you’re not actively hiring. Your team members’ regular sharing of company culture, achievements, and growth creates awareness that can attract candidates well before you have a specific opening.
More authentic employer brand
Candidates trust your current team members more than they trust your official careers site or recruitment materials.
When team members share their genuine experiences, they create humanized workplace stories that resonate with potential applicants. Their firsthand accounts of your culture, projects, and work environment provide insights that candidates can’t get from formal job descriptions.
This authenticity extends your visibility into niche professional communities where your team members have established credibility. A software developer sharing insights about your engineering culture reaches fellow developers with built-in trust that your corporate channels can’t match.
Lower recruitment costs
Employee advocacy delivers meaningful savings across multiple dimensions:
Faster time to hire
Every day a role remains unfilled means increased workload for other team members and potential delays in critical projects.
Employee advocacy accelerates your hiring timeline in several ways:
A faster time to hire may give you a competitive advantage when candidates are interviewing with multiple organizations simultaneously. Job seekers who are eager to start a new job will often accept the first offer they receive.
Better quality of hire
Employee ambassadors naturally attract and engage higher quality applicants in ways traditional recruiting simply cannot match.
Your team members speak the same professional language as potential candidates in their field. A developer advocating for your engineering roles understands what truly matters to other developers, whether it’s tech stack flexibility, challenging problems, or freedom from excessive meetings. This authentic peer-to-peer communication attracts candidates who value what your company genuinely offers.
Potential candidates get a realistic preview of your workplace through advocacy. They hear about the actual day-to-day experience from someone they trust rather than polished recruitment messaging. This transparency helps candidates self-select based on authentic information, leading to better matches from the start.
Getting started with employee advocacy
Employee advocacy can happen organically, though your team members may feel unsure of what they can share or how to best position your organization. A formal employee advocacy program can help guide your team’s efforts for the maximum impact.
Build a company culture worth advocating for
Before asking your team members to promote your company, ensure you’ve created an environment they genuinely want to recommend. The foundation of successful employee advocacy is an authentic, positive workplace experience.
For example:
Remember that advocacy can’t be manufactured — it must be earned through genuine team member experience. Focus first on creating a workplace people love, then invite them to share that authentic experience with others.
Assess your current state
Take time to understand your starting point before launching a formal program. Survey team members anonymously about their willingness to recommend your company to others. This provides a baseline measurement and helps identify potential challenges.
Review your current recruitment challenges and priorities. Identify which roles have been most difficult to fill and where employee advocacy might make the greatest immediate impact. This focused approach helps demonstrate value quickly, building momentum for broader implementation.
Address any significant internal concerns before asking team members to promote externally. Employee advocacy programs falter when there’s a disconnect between what team members are asked to say and what they actually experience. Authenticity remains paramount.
Identify your employee champions
You don’t need universal participation to start seeing benefits. Begin by identifying and activating your most engaged team members who already display advocacy behaviors.
For example:
When you’re ready to introduce the concept more broadly, schedule a company-wide meeting to explain the program, its benefits, and how team members can participate. Set clear expectations while emphasizing that participation remains voluntary.
Provide training and resources
Effective advocacy requires more than just enthusiasm — it needs structure and support. Provide clear guidelines and training for team members who want to participate.
After initial launch, incorporate advocacy training into your onboarding process. New team members often bring fresh enthusiasm and untapped networks that can strengthen your program over time.
Support leadership advocacy
Ensure your company leaders actively participate in advocacy efforts. When executives and managers share open positions, discuss company culture, and highlight team achievements, they signal the importance of these activities to the entire organization.
Include advocacy discussions in team meetings, making recruitment a shared responsibility rather than solely an HR function. Regular conversations about open positions and ideal candidate profiles help team members identify potential matches in their networks.
Leadership should publicly champion advocacy initiatives, recognizing participants and sharing program successes. This visible support elevates advocacy from a nice-to-have program to a core company strategy.
Recognize participation and share successes
Create a culture of appreciation around advocacy efforts. Recognize team members who participate, whether or not their activities result in hires.
For example:
How to leverage brand ambassadors for recruiting
Done right, employee ambassadors will feel enabled to create content and speak to others about working at your organization. You can also partner with them to create content, such as a video you can use on a job description.
Communicate recruiting priorities
Regularly communicate with your employee advocates to share high-priority job openings, company news, and any other specific content you’d like their help to promote. Make it optional to participate and share examples, templates, and design assets to make it easy for them to engage.
You can also link to social media posts from your company channels or company leaders, and ask your team members to engage with the content to boost your reach.
Leverage in-person networking opportunities
In-person connections remain uniquely powerful for recruitment. Give team members a budget to attend industry events where they can represent your company while developing professionally.
You might also encourage interested team members to speak at conferences or professional gatherings. Position them as thought leaders in your industry, incorporating subtle recruitment messaging into their presentations. A marketer speaking at a tech conference naturally attracts other marketers who might be interested in joining your team.
Create authentic content showcasing your culture
Work with your team members to develop content that captures the genuine experience of working at your company.
Content might include:
Amplify your referral program
If you already have an employee referral program, integrate it with your broader advocacy efforts. Communicate open positions regularly through internal channels, making it easy for your team members to share these opportunities with qualified connections.
Consider tiered rewards based on position difficulty or priority. Roles that have proven challenging to fill might warrant larger incentives, focusing your team’s advocacy efforts where they’re most needed.
Keep in mind that referrals represent just one form of advocacy. Some team members may excel at creating content, others at networking events, and still others at direct referrals. Value all forms of participation that contribute to your recruitment goals.
Final thoughts on employee advocacy
Employee advocacy can transform your company’s recruiting function into a collaborative process that leverages your greatest asset: your current team members.
Start by building a workplace culture genuinely worth advocating for, identifying your initial champions, providing simple training and resources, and recognizing participation. This effort can help you create a more effective recruitment function that ultimately helps you hire more of your top-choice candidates.
The right applicant tracking system can be instrumental in tracking employee referrals, adding employee generated content to your careers site, and providing a positive hiring experience for your candidates. Learn how JobScore can help.
