A Glossary of Key Terms in Employee Advocacy Platforms & Features
In today’s competitive talent landscape, leveraging employee advocacy has become a strategic imperative for HR and recruiting professionals. Understanding the core terminology associated with employee advocacy platforms and their features is crucial for effectively implementing and maximizing your initiatives. This glossary defines key terms, offering insights into how these concepts apply within the context of talent acquisition, employer branding, and organizational growth.
Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy refers to the promotion of an organization by its employees. This can include sharing company news, job postings, culture insights, or industry-related content on their personal social media channels, word-of-mouth recommendations, or direct referrals. For HR and recruiting, employee advocacy is a powerful tool to extend employer brand reach, attract passive candidates, and build trust. By empowering employees to share authentic stories, companies can significantly improve their employer reputation, reduce recruitment costs, and attract higher-quality applicants who are already aligned with the company culture.
Employee Advocacy Platform
An employee advocacy platform is a specialized software solution designed to streamline, manage, and scale employee advocacy efforts. These platforms provide a centralized hub where companies can curate content for employees to easily share, track performance metrics, and gamify participation. For HR and talent acquisition teams, these platforms simplify content distribution, ensure brand consistency, and offer analytics to measure the impact of employee shares on recruitment campaigns, social reach, and application rates. They automate the process, making it simple for employees to become active brand ambassadors.
Brand Ambassador
A brand ambassador, in the context of employee advocacy, is an employee who actively and enthusiastically promotes their organization. They embody the company’s values, culture, and mission, sharing positive experiences and content with their networks. Recruiting teams often identify and nurture these individuals, as their authentic endorsements are highly credible and influential. Brand ambassadors can significantly enhance a company’s employer brand, attracting talent who resonate with the organization’s ethos and values, ultimately leading to better candidate quality and retention.
Content Curation
Content curation in employee advocacy involves the process of discovering, selecting, and organizing relevant and shareable content for employees. This content can include company blog posts, news articles, job openings, industry insights, or thought leadership pieces. HR and marketing teams often collaborate to curate a diverse range of engaging content that employees will find valuable and be willing to share. Effective content curation ensures that employees have access to high-quality, on-brand material that strengthens the company’s narrative and appeals to potential candidates.
Gamification
Gamification in employee advocacy refers to the integration of game-like elements into the advocacy platform to encourage participation and engagement. This can include points, leaderboards, badges, and rewards for sharing content, inviting colleagues, or achieving specific milestones. For HR, gamification boosts employee participation rates, turning advocacy into an enjoyable and competitive activity. It motivates employees to consistently share content, increasing the overall reach of employer branding messages and potentially driving more qualified talent leads to open positions.
Social Selling
While often associated with sales, social selling principles apply to recruiting as well. It involves leveraging social media networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture relationships with potential candidates. Employee advocacy platforms facilitate social selling by empowering recruiters and other employees to share relevant job openings, company culture content, and industry insights directly with their networks, building trust and establishing thought leadership. This approach can lead to higher-quality inbound leads and a more engaged talent pipeline.
Employee Generated Content (EGC)
Employee Generated Content (EGC) refers to any form of content—text, images, videos—created and shared by employees about their workplace experiences. This includes testimonials, behind-the-scenes glimpses, or personal stories. EGC is highly authentic and often more trusted by job seekers than corporate-produced content. Recruiting teams actively encourage EGC as it humanizes the employer brand, provides genuine insights into company culture, and can be easily repurposed across various recruitment channels, resonating deeply with prospective talent.
Reach & Impressions
In the context of employee advocacy, “reach” refers to the total number of unique individuals who have seen a piece of content shared by an employee. “Impressions” denote the total number of times the content has been displayed, including multiple views by the same person. These metrics are crucial for HR and marketing teams to gauge the overall visibility and potential impact of employee shares. High reach and impressions on job postings or culture content directly contribute to increased employer brand awareness and a larger talent pool for recruitment efforts.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate measures how much people interact with the content shared by employees. This includes likes, comments, shares, and clicks on links. A high engagement rate indicates that the content is resonating with the audience, leading to greater visibility through social media algorithms. For recruiters, a strong engagement rate on shared job postings or career-related content signals that the message is effective in capturing interest and driving potential candidates to learn more or apply, indicating successful employer branding.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI in employee advocacy refers to the measurable benefits gained from an employee advocacy program relative to its cost. For HR and recruiting, ROI can be calculated by tracking metrics such as reduced cost-per-hire, decreased time-to-hire, increased application rates, higher quality of applicants, and improved employee retention due to stronger culture. Employee advocacy platforms often provide built-in analytics to help organizations demonstrate the tangible value and positive financial impact of their advocacy efforts on talent acquisition.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership involves positioning employees, and by extension the company, as experts and innovators in their industry. Through an employee advocacy platform, employees can share valuable insights, industry trends, and original content, establishing their credibility and the company’s authority. For talent acquisition, promoting thought leadership attracts highly skilled professionals who seek to work for organizations at the forefront of their field, enhancing the employer brand and making the company a more desirable place to work.
Employer Branding
Employer branding is the process of promoting a company’s image as an ideal workplace to potential and current employees. Employee advocacy is a cornerstone of effective employer branding, as authentic employee voices are often more credible than traditional corporate messaging. By showcasing real employee experiences and company culture through advocacy platforms, HR teams can build a strong, positive employer brand that attracts top talent, improves recruitment marketing effectiveness, and helps retain valuable employees.
Social Listening
Social listening in employee advocacy involves monitoring social media channels for mentions of your company, industry, and competitors, as well as tracking employee-shared content. It helps HR and marketing teams understand public perception, identify trending topics, and gauge the effectiveness of their messaging. By actively listening, organizations can uncover valuable insights into candidate sentiment, refine their employer branding strategies, and proactively address any negative feedback, ensuring their talent acquisition efforts are well-received.
Content Distribution
Content distribution refers to the process of disseminating curated content to employees through the advocacy platform for easy sharing. Efficient content distribution ensures that employees have immediate access to up-to-date and relevant material, from job openings to company news. For HR, this means that recruitment marketing messages, employer brand stories, and culture insights can be rapidly and widely spread across diverse professional networks, significantly expanding the reach of critical talent acquisition information without manual effort.
Compliance & Governance
Compliance and governance in employee advocacy involve establishing guidelines and rules to ensure that content shared by employees adheres to company policies, industry regulations, and legal requirements. Advocacy platforms often include features like content approval workflows, disclaimers, and tracking capabilities to maintain brand consistency and mitigate risks. For HR and legal teams, these features are essential for protecting the company’s reputation, ensuring data privacy, and avoiding misrepresentation, especially when employees share sensitive information or represent the company publicly.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Supercharging Talent Acquisition: Leveraging AI and Automation in Employee Advocacy
