You’ve heard that candidates want to hear from your employees. Yes. But, it’s still a good idea to include senior leaders in your story collection and content development project!
They tee up employee stories
Senior leaders can do for your content, what they hopefully do every day: provide vision and context, so team members can succeed.
Here’s an example from a video Frontpoint created, with a senior leader setting the outline and employees filling in the stories that support organizational values.
Using a senior leader to set up the stories your teammates tell also gives credibility to the leader, because what they’re saying clearly isn’t just lip service. Their statements are followed by substantive examples, so they are showing and not just telling.
They have the why
For founders or those who have “grown up” in the organization, leadership can sometimes provide background and context for why the organization does things the way it does and is the way it is, from a holistic and historical perspective. A video featuring senior leaders from The Motley Fool is a good example.
Within the video, one of the founders, David Gardner, explains the reasoning behind one of its popular programs, where it gives employees $1,000 as a part of their investment training:
“We realized to really live the Motley Fool’s purpose, To Help the World Invest Better, we should (start with) our employees. A lot of them come earlier in their employment career with a non-existent investing career. Not only do we want to teach them how to invest but in some cases we need to seed them some capital because they’re still trying to pay off student loans.”
Stories humanize your leaders
People want to work for humans. But, not every candidate will get to interview with a senior leader. Their opinions about the people steering the ship are going to be formed in lots of ways, and most likely it won’t be in a one-on-one setting.
The executive team at WeddingWire, for example, enjoys making dubbed music videos. Instead of keeping this to themselves, it has a whole page on its site dedicated to it, and has six videos to date. As a candidate, seeing a member of the C-suite on camera in a blonde wig helps to make the company’s “Work hard, play hard” promise hit a little closer to home.
Humanizing the person running the company makes them relatable, not just a picture on the leadership corporate website.