Employee Advocacy is something I’ve seen used very effectively to promote employer brands and solve recruiting challenges. Despite its apparent effectiveness, it is still not a technique that is being widely used in Talent Acquisition.
So how do you use Employee Advocacy effectively and how can technology help? To help us find the answers, my guest this week is Andrew Seel, CEO of Qubist. Qubist work with a number of employers on employee advocacy for talent acquisition and Andrew has some great insights to share.
In the interview we discuss:
• What is employee advocacy and what does and employer advocacy platform do?
• What recruitment challenges can employee advocacy solve
• The vital importance of trust, transparency and personal connection
• The importance of senior stakeholder buy-in
• How do you drive consistent participation?
Andrew also talks through the work Qubist have recently done with The John Lewis Partnership and gives his view of what the future looks like for employee advocacy.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment. Advertising in real time spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Matt Alder [00:01:00]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 166 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Employee advocacy is something I’ve seen used very effectively to promote employer brands and solve recruiting challenges. Despite its effectiveness, though, it’s still not a widely used technique in talent acquisition. So how do you use employee advocacy effectively and how can technology help you to help find the answers? My guest this week is Andrew Seel, CEO of Qubist. Qubist work with a number of companies on employee advocacy for talent acquisition and Andrew has some great insights to share. Enjoy the interview. Hi Andrew, and welcome to the podcast.
Andrew Seel [00:01:51]:
Hi Matt, thank you very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:53]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you tell everyone a bit about yourself and what you do?
Andrew Seel [00:02:00]:
Okay, great. Well, my name is Andrew Seel, I’m the CEO of Qubist and I’ve been involved in the Internet in the early days. I was an editor at AOL back in the dot com boom, if anyone can remember that. And almost by accident, really, I kind of got involved with online communities, forums and chat rooms and things like that before, you know, the idea of social media was even thought of, really before the idea of Facebook. You know, when I was editor there, I was managing partnerships with companies like, you know, lastminute.com and Expedia, which obviously are common knowledge now. But those days they were in their first few months of being so it was very exciting times. And later I then went on with this experience to set on Kyiv, which was a social media agency. One of the things we did, we managed social media for clients, Saatchi and Saatchi and brands like Haagen Dazs, which was great because they gave us free ice cream. And one of the things they started us to do when we were managing their online communities on Facebook was to identify their advocates, the people who were talking about them and really supporting them on social media. And they wanted us to start building A relationship with them. So we quickly saw that this is quite hard work and hard work to do, trying to manage lots of people on a spreadsheet. In those relationships and conversations, we thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool to do this? And this is where we came with the idea of Cubis, which is our advocacy platform, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about later. But this idea of customers talking about it quickly evolved into employee advocacy. And this is something we’ve really seen in the last two to three years, that more and more companies are really interested in how they can work with their employees to become advocates for their brands. And the reason that’s emerging around this is really about they’re seeing the trust in advertising is falling and particularly social platforms are making it harder and harder for brands to get their content to be seen by the audiences without having to pay for a significant amount of advertising. This is due to the changes in the algorithms and things like that. So it’s kind of whirlwind kind of journey, really, from. From the beginning to, to where we are now.
Matt Alder [00:04:17]:
So, you know, I think this, you know, this concept of employee advocacy is absolutely fascinating and I think there are some really interesting implications for, for recruitment, which we can kind of come on to and talk about a little bit later. Before I do, though, could we just sort of dig a little bit more into, you know, into your platform? Can you sort of tell us a little bit about, you know, what, what it is and what does just to position it for people? Because I know that lots of people listening will not be familiar with these types of platforms.
Andrew Seel [00:04:48]:
Okay, so Qubist, what it is an advocacy app. And this is all about making your recruitment marketing work much, much harder by utilising Resource, which is right under your nose as a brand, and that’s your employees. Often kind of underutilized in the past. Qubist as an. That can be given to all employees in a company, wherever they are, whether they’re in store, on the road, in the office, wherever it is. And it essentially creates informed, engaged and influential employees by empowering them to share content on their own social media. So it means they can be prompted to share content and they can share that onto their own Facebook page or their own LinkedIn page or Instagram, whatever it might be they use, but they’re sharing it as themselves. It’s a message that’s coming from them rather than from the brand, but it enables the brand to bring their employer brand, their recruitment marketing to life in a very easy and simple manner. How does this work? It’s focused on two areas, really. It’s all about making it really easy for employees to share content. So it makes it easy and it makes it rewarding and it’s designed to make them feel really confident, kind of become expert sharers. And it does this through nurturing them. It gives them content which is relevant to them, whether it be in what department they’re in or what region they work in, or what their expertise is. It reminds them with notifications, it provides support if they’re struggling in any way and it also rewards them with gamification. So it has ways of rewarding success through. So if they’re generating engagement themselves with their audiences, they can earn points and those points can be translated into leaderboards and badges and other forms of recognition which people really get into. And on the other side of it, it really works for brands because it enables them to quickly scale their employee advocacy. Because one of the challenges is an individual employee may on average have say around 800 across their social media platforms on their own. They’re not going to change the world. But once you combine a number of those people, you can suddenly start making a huge impact on a brand’ and that’s where the app really comes in. It brings together and combines lots and lots of employees to make a big difference. And the other side of it is, for brands is it enables them to measure the impact of what they’re doing. Again, something that’s been very hard in the areas of influencer style marketing to generate what the impact is having. But this can feedback the level of reach, it’s achieving level engagements and the level of clicks.
Matt Alder [00:07:31]:
So I think what, you know, what I find interesting about this space is there are some obvious uses for recruitment and employer branding and we can sort of talk more about those in a second. But that’s not why these kind of platforms are developed in the first place, is it? Employee advocacy, that’s something that’s fairly well established in lots of companies. I mean, could you talk about it from a non recruitment perspective? Because I think it’s important that people get the context that, you know, this is actually, you know, something, something that already exists. And, you know, this is about sort of looking at how we can extend it into recruitment rather than something that’s been created for the purposes of recruitment.
Andrew Seel [00:08:20]:
Absolutely. Well, I think the idea of your employees generating word and mouth of a better brand and talking about brand, as you say, are well established. And this is something that’s been working in the areas of Obviously in sales teams talking about their brand and sharing high value content that’s been extended into marketing and where many people are able to talk about their brand and positive things and connecting their audiences into that. And that’s naturally moved into recruitment, which is using many of the techniques now to generate and share their employer brand and generate unique position for their brand and employer recruitment space. So it’s a natural evolution really. And again, in recruitment, the idea of referrals is something that’s been around for a long time, getting employees to generate referrals, but it’s now shifting that into a social space. It’s not just people talking directly to people in person, but it’s actually extending that and utilizing the networks of employees to hugely extend the reach of those messages and conversations.
Matt Alder [00:09:36]:
So from the brands that you’ve been working with on this and the things that you perhaps observe from the market, what are the sort of common recruitment challenges that you think this approach addresses?
Andrew Seel [00:09:51]:
What’s happening is a lot of companies are coming to us and talking to us about what they are. We have talent acquisition directors, HR directors and so on, who are facing a range of recruitment challenges and very keen to see how employee advocacy can help tackle them. Because as you know, for many industries recruitment is getting good talent. It’s very, very competitive and it’s a game changer if people can get this right. So it’s very important and I think people are finding more difficult and one of the areas I think these particularly challenging how you recruit the best people. And often the best people aren’t actually looking for jobs. And if you tie this in with the idea that in general trust in advertising and people are trying to avoid advertising, particularly digital advertising as much as possible. People using ad blockers and just ignoring adverts. So people aren’t seeing the messages that brands want to get across about their employer, brand and recruitment and so on. Particularly people aren’t directly looking. So direct connection with a friend or follower where there is trust already established is a real opportunity to meet some of these challenges. Another challenge is include how do you recruit a more diverse range of talent as well and how do you reach out to people beyond the usual suspects? And again, employee advocacy is something that can help in that space as well.
Matt Alder [00:11:20]:
I think you sort of, you talked about this a little bit, but it’d be good to kind of explore it further just, just in terms of how it works in practice. Because you know, I know that the, from the, the clients that I work with, when they’re looking at you Know, trying to sort of mobilize employees to do. To share content, to do social media outreach for recruitment. Very often the biggest problem is getting people to participate or getting people to participate consistently. You know, how do you kind of overcome. How do you overcome that problem? Because that seems to be the thing that’s stopping companies doing this at a kind of, you know, doing this at scale.
Andrew Seel [00:12:03]:
Well, I think one of the things we’ve been able to do as a business and as a team and our experience is we’ve been working in social media for a long time for, you know, on behalf of brands. As an agency previously, you know, we’ve learned a lot about what works in social media and how people engage on the other side. We’ve done a lot of work in behavioral change and how you change people’s behavior through kind of nudging them through and supporting them through a process. So you combine those things. We want to put all of that into ebist with the focus on essentially achieving sustainability. So it’s exactly the thing you’re talking about is how do you get them on board and how do you keep them doing it? And we do this through. We’re kind of nudging them through and making them confident and expert sharers, really. And this is done through a combination of, as I said earlier, I think so prompting people to do things, giving them relevant content, which is really personal to them. So it’s not just a kind of feed of stuff that, you know, kind of very general and it’s not relevant to them. It’s giving them content, which is the kind of content they would share naturally, because it’s all about making them feel good and look good in front of their followers and friends. So it has to be relevant to them, but also supporting them. If they’re struggling, we’re there to nudge them through. And as I said earlier, it’s about the kind of gamification rewarding and it’s getting that kind of progress feedback. And I think this is a key motivator in people moving forward is they know that they’ve done something and they’re getting feedback on how well that’s worked. So, you know, the level of engagement they’re achieved or, you know, whether how that’s helping the company, all those different things, I think they’re absolutely key to anyone doing this in a sustainable manner. What we’re finding is for many of the brands we’re working with is, you know, they’re not rolling out to everyone all at once. They’re rolling out in phases and they have people, you know, there’s a waiting list of people trying to get on and be part of this because people really find that, you know, being invited to be part of the business and helping it grow and then getting feedback and recognition for doing so is a really big motivator for people.
Matt Alder [00:14:12]:
I mean that makes that, that, that makes perfect sense actually. And I’m sure everyone can think of, you know, can think of times that particularly social media has sort of motivated them, motivated them in that way. Do you have sort of any case studies or examples of, you know, real life companies who are doing this in practice and seeing, seeing some interesting results?
Andrew Seel [00:14:35]:
Absolutely. So let’s take one of our retail clients who are John Lewis. We’ve been working with John Lewis now for nearly a year. And they came to us the chance they came to us was really about dealing with the challenges bricks and mortar stores, real life stores have against the digital e commerce giants and competing with those both in marketing and in recruitment senses. John Lewis particularly said that own employees as their greatest attribute against the likes of these big digital companies. And that’s where Cubis, they saw Cubis as an opportunity to empower their staff to showcase the human side of the brand and then increase the reach and the authentic engagement around it with their partners, between their partners and customers. Yeah, one of the exciting things about this is Paula Nichols, who’s the managing director of John Lewis, is hugely behind this and obviously really helps if you can get a senior stakeholder supporting what you’re doing. And she did an interview with Campaign magazine earlier in the year and she talked about how she felt it was in their staff or partners as they’re called it, John Lewis personal interest to become brand ambassadors and to help grow the company. And you know, their partners have really got on board with this. And she talked about the pilot we did before Christmas where we initially rolled it out to about five or six, six stores with about 100 or so people. And this generated over 9 million impressions in the first three months. And she was, you know, she thought it was absolutely fantastic. And they then immediately commissioned us for a further 12 months and are now rolling it out across all 50 stores. So it’s been a huge success for them and it’s something that we’re finding with the other clients we’re working with and talking to. Works in the same way as you get your employees engaged and seen as part of what the business is trying to do and then make it easy for them to do it, then give them feedback Progress and recognition for doing it. It really drives results actually. Incidentally, one of the things that they really love at John Lewis is the gamification because there’s a leaderboard. It’s not just a personal leaderboard. You can have inter store leaderboards so they can see they can get the stores competing against each other, which they really love there. It’s a bit of fun but it really generates a bit of excitement between the stores.
Matt Alder [00:17:13]:
Fantastic. I mean that sounds like a great example of everything working together and really helping them, their really helping with their brand. I mean obviously this is a, you know, a really dynamic, a really interesting, a really interesting space that’s sort of, you know, most, most definitely growing. What, you know, what’s, what’s next for employee advocacy? What, you know, how are you sort of viewing the future? What, how is this going to sort of develop over, over time?
Andrew Seel [00:17:40]:
Well, I think it’s really exciting times for us and I think the whole sector in general it’s. There are more and more businesses coming and talking to us now. We’re working across a whole range of sectors, not just retail, but travel, B2B businesses, professional services, financial services and so on, and extending into others such as automotive, fashion and things like that. So there’s a lot of different types of businesses who are really seeing the value in their employees becoming a greater part of the business. And this is what’s happened in the wider world generally in social media and it’s the logical and it’s the right next step or social media and employees to become more involved in their businesses and supporting their businesses. On the other side of it, on the recruitment side, we’ve seen a significant growth in companies talking about generating more referrals from their employees. Obviously referrals is a key element for people and how they can move this out into the social space, which is again where employee advocacy that we’re doing can really work. And I think as I said earlier, what we’ve been told our clients, the decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising is not getting the ROI or they’re having to spend more to get the same roi. There’s wider concerns about disclosure and transparency in the traditional influencer style of marketing. In the general wider world, the idea of fake news and people need to trust the messages they’re receiving and talking more to friends and followers and colleagues and so on. So these kind of things are underlying this trend which is ultimately all about trust and a more personal connection with people. And you know, it’s really coming from the people we’re talking to. This is what is supporting their need for businesses to adopt employee advocacy as a, you know, as an effective means of recruitment and growing employer brands. So we genuinely believe, and this is definitely the situation, we’re getting feedback, we’re getting from people that the time for employee advocacy is right now.
Matt Alder [00:19:46]:
Andrew, thank you very much for talking to me.
Andrew Seel [00:19:48]:
Brilliant. Thank you, Matt. Pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:19:51]:
My thanks to Andrew Seel. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting feature in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
