Startups take advocacy route to promote company to potential employees

Gaming startup Rooter allowed employees to take over its official social media channels to connect to the larger community of passionate gamers after limited results with its existing online campaigns.

Startups are opting for advocacy programmes by their employees to promote their rewards and recognition policies and learning and development opportunities in an attempt to woo potential recruits amid growing competition.

The strategy is a revamp of the traditional mode of presenting a company’s employee value proposition through official social media handles, awards and personalised branding initiatives. Advocacy also results in significant savings in marketing costs compared with celebrity branding.

Moneycontrol reported earlier that awards and recognition seem to be losing their sheen while attracting and retaining employees. Only 6.2 percent of the employees in a survey by job portal Naukri for Moneycontrol in July said they would choose an employer based on the awards and recognitions it got, compared with 61.5 percent who would pick a company recommended for good work culture.

“While efforts for both multinationals and startups would largely be similar, startups need to do slightly more to build their organisation brand. They need their employees to build a positive word of mouth to attract the right talent, build credibility and increase brand awareness,” said Neeti Sharma, co-founder of TeamLease Edtech, a part of staffing company TeamLease Services.

Startups such as Revfin, Rooter, Intellipaat, and Physics Wallah have been using various employee advocacy strategies to reach out to potential recruits.

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Gaming startup Rooter allowed employees to take over its official social media channels to connect to the larger community of passionate gamers after limited results with its existing online campaigns. Within 8-9 months of implementing the plan, the campaigns on Instagram created about 136 million impressions. One reel created by an employee drew over 4.4 million views.

“The reels are not just from one employee but a few who feature regularly and pull in more colleagues occasionally for content. And this happens 4-5 days in the week. It’s working and we will continue building this out and roping in more people who would like to engage through our channels,” Piyush Kumar, founder of Rooter told Moneycontrol.

Saving marketing costs

Experts said employee advocacy and celebrity endorsements are two forms of marketing and most marketers would agree that employee advocacy should not be treated as a pure marketing function.

According to TeamLease Edtech’s Sharma, celebrity endorsements are extremely expensive and time-consuming. However, she agreed that while influencer marketing campaigns do have a higher return on investment, employee advocacy in comparison is much cheaper.

“Employee advocacy programmes are much more targeted, designed to reach a smaller and organic target audience, whereas celebrity endorsements are designed to reach a wider and potentially diverse audience, which may or may not bring ROI,” she said, adding that companies can save as much as 50 percent with employee advocacy as compared to celebrity advocacy.

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Rooter’s marketing spend dropped 40 percent since the company stopped investing in social media and chose to run it purely organically. Companies also said employee advocacy brings in more reliability and the messages stay in the mind for a prolonged time.

“The cost savings extend beyond financial considerations – they encompass the intangible value of a genuine connection with the audience, which can lead to long-lasting brand loyalty and engagement,” said Sameer Aggarwal, CEO of Revfin.

Revfin uses initiatives such as sending employees instead of the senior leadership to receive awards on behalf of the company.