Gathering and featuring authentic employee testimonials and stories is now a generally accepted best practice in employer branding content strategy and recruitment marketing content development. So if more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are doing it, will it eventually become a stale strategy?

No!

In fact, even at more than 50%, using employee stories in your recruitment marketing is an underutilized strategy. But let’s say everyone was doing it. Your goal should be to find the stories that show the real and unique you, the true stuff that, best case, couldn’t and hasn’t happened anywhere else.

And there are other reasons to use employee stories, like It Works and It’s an Efficient Way to Talk to candidates all year round. But ultimately the best reason to do it is so candidates get as real of a glimpse as possible into the employee experience.

Here are a few examples that all use a story approach, and in some cases might look the same, but ultimately reflect very different environments.

This CVS employee talks about why their exit from tobacco affected her personally:

This is one of my favorites, a Dell blog post an employee wrote (note: this is not Stories Inc’s work): “After a couple of years away, my good Dell buddies were wondering if I might be interested in returning to the fold, and indeed I was,” Jody wrote. “Other areas of my life were changing too, and issues I’d carried with me for decades were coming to a head. So, when Dell’s recruiter called me and asked if I’d like to come back, I had a whole new question to ask, a question a little different from salaries, roles and benefits.

So, “I’m changing gender. Will Dell support me in this? Will Dell still support me having a customer-facing role?”

Read the rest here.

And one of my favorite policies I’ve ever heard of. Only at The Motley Fool: you must take two weeks off right now (for a great business reason).

There’s a lot of story talk out there… and for good reason! It’s a strategy that works for most companies and the more you are yourself, the more your content resonates. Any questions?

We’re the story people, we can help. Email me at [email protected].

Lauryn Sargent is a founder at Stories Incorporated, a company that is half story consultancy and half creative studio. She has been a co-creator of a company currently working with best-in-class and emerging employer brands like Dell and EliteSEM. She has also had a direct hand in creative direction and creation of content that truly reflects the employee experience. Before founding Stories in 2011, Lauryn spent years in technical, executive, and everything (corporate) recruiting. She has a Masters in Human Resource Development from George Washington University and a Bachelors in Telecommunications (Audio/Video production management) from Ohio University.