Employee-Generated Content: How Signify Attracts New Talent and Engages a Global Workforce with EGC

When people look for jobs, a key thing they want to know is what actually goes on in the daily life of an employee at a specific company. However, this can be hard for employers to communicate effectively. Employee-generated content (EGC) has emerged as an authentic and impactful way to do just that.

Signify, the world’s leading lighting company formerly known as Philips Lighting, wanted to raise awareness for its new brand name so it could continue to attract top talent. Understanding the value of EGC, Signify decided leveraging the content created by its current employees would be the best way to do this.

Using Stackla, Signify was able to create an employee advocate program to help aggregate and publish compelling EGC, and moreover, to engage its existing employees and promote a positive work culture that celebrates diversity and embraces the human side to what it’s like working at Signify.

Why employee-generated content is important for recruitment

Every company in the world aims to hire the best and brightest. To beat the competition for the top talent across industries and fields, it’s essential for brands to stand out, build trust and make a positive and lasting impression with candidates.

“EGC is so critical to differentiate yourself from all of the noise that’s there online,” said Reyhaan King, Recruitment Marketeer for TA Europe at Signify. “Because anyone can write a good job description, people often take them with a grain of salt; there’s a low level of trust there.”

This can be especially true for larger corporations that are looking to further improve the perception as far as employment is concerned. Employee-generated content can be an effective way to create positive connotations in people’s minds. King points out that, “What I’ve seen EGC do is demystify what it’s like to work for an organization. When candidates see a real employee loving the company so much that they’re posting about working there on their personal Instagram, it makes a real impact. For so many employees to do that on a consistent basis means there’s a level of trust and a good relationship between the employees and the company.”

“Having really good employee-generated content means that your employees are happy to contribute to your company. It’s a sign that your company is working for its employees.” – Reyhaan King, Recruitment Marketeer for TA Europe

Signify’s employee-generated content goals

When Philips Lighting became Signify, it created a recruitment challenge: how would they continue to attract top talent if the general public did not recognize the new brand?

According to King, “For Signify it was a special case. We used to be Philips Lighting, which had a strong employer brand. When we changed the name in 2018, our brand awareness changed significantly. We needed a way to build the employer brand authentically and interactively with our employees and audience.”

Recruitment marketing became crucial in informing people that Philip’s Lighting was still around, it had just changed its name. King said, “We asked ourselves, ‘how do we continue to position ourselves as a great place to work?’ We realized all of our employees around the world were a huge untapped resource. We just needed to look inward and bring to light all of the great things employees were already doing and communicate that outwardly.”

This is where Stackla came into the mix. King said, “At Signify, we wanted to achieve our awareness and recruitment goals while being more authentic, and Stackla was perfect for that.”

Signify’s employee social wall

For Signify, the first task was updating the content on its careers site. Most people were now unfamiliar with their company, but they had a great story to tell—and the employees were its best storytellers.

“With Stackla, we saw how we could really leverage our employee-generated content in a way that enhanced our careers site,” King explained.

Using Stackla to pull in, curate and publish the best #SignifyLife employee content from across top social networks, like Instagram and LinkedIn, Signify’s recruitment marketing team created an interactive social wall on its careers website to showcase this engaging EGC. King said, “It gives Signify that personal, authentic, great-place-to-work feel for those interested in applying for jobs with us.”

Because it’s also connected to the individual employees’ social media accounts, users can go on a journey to explore those. For example, someone interested in working for the tech department can see specific content from people working on the Signify tech team.

They even made some of the EGC on this social wall actionable. With Stackla’s ShopSpot functionality, Signify was able to easily add call-to-action buttons on certain pieces of content.

For example, the image below shows what some fun colleagues on the marketing team got up to on a recent zoom meeting. To help a prospective candidate act on this content that may have piqued their interest in joining the company, this ShopSpot takes them directly to the marketing team careers page in a single click.

“We found that when we put content in the social wall, our traffic and time on page increased significantly,” King explained. “People tend to linger on that social page and spend some time combing through the many visuals featured. The social wall is where the biggest value in EGC lies for us.”

Compared to other career site pages, the bounce rate for the social wall is much lower due to higher levels of engagement and perception of the content.

King said, “When people are on that social wall page, they’re clicking around and spending a full minute more there than on other pages. It garners the engagement we want and is very effective at inspiring people.”

Engaging current employees around the world

Signify HR has also been using Stackla’s Organic Influencers to grow a community of employee advocates within the company.

“Stackla’s Organic Influencers tool has given us a better way to engage our employees at different levels. There are certain departments and countries that are more engaged with corporate initiatives than others, so Stackla helps us level that playing field and bring more visibility to what our teams across the globe are doing.”

Using Organic Influencers, Signify was able to quickly create its own employee advocacy community portal. With a single community login URL, Signify could easily invite employees around the world to join and start participating in specific EGC campaigns that the recruitment marketing team developed.

Each campaign is organized and clearly communicated to employees within the employee advocacy community via creative briefs, in which the recruitment team can provide an overview of the initiative, what type of content they’re looking for employees to create and simple instructions on how to submit that content.

“It’s easy to build out these internal employee advocate initiatives using Organic Influencers,” King said. “You can reach out to anyone in the community and get content submissions from employees around the globe, see all that content in one central place and then publish it back out on our website and social channel for the wider company and potential recruits to see.”

This encourages employees to participate in company-wide initiatives and shows their passion for working at Signify while giving each employee a voice within the company.

So far, Signify’s biggest employee advocate initiatives have been the S.H.E Breast Cancer Awareness Walk and the International Women’s Day campaign.

The S.H.E Breast Cancer Awareness Walk

S.H.E is a women’s empowerment group within Signify’s US division that participates in a Breast Cancer Awareness Walk across the US every year. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the S.H.E group reached out to the recruitment marketing team wanting to open up and promote participation from everyone at Signify in its 2020 Breast Cancer Awareness Walk—no matter what country they lived in or where they chose to walk.

When asked if there was a tool the S.H.E group could use to collect and organize photos from employees participating in the walk, King responded, “Yes, we have Stackla and it would be perfect for this event.”

Easily building and sharing a creative brief for the event within its Stackla-powered employee advocate community, Signify’s team was able to offer people prizes for the best content submissions from their charity walk on top of inviting them to participate.

They were able to collect 31 submissions from employees who joined in the walk around the world. But King said the true benefit was that “even during COVID, people were able to come together in their own way to be part of something within the company.”

International Women’s Day

Signify’s initiative for its annual International Women’s Day (IWD) campaign was conducted similarly to the Breast Cancer Awareness Walk, but done on a much larger scale.

Stretching International Women’s Day into a week-long celebration, Signify’s team needed enough employee content to support posts across all its social channels for each day of the week. Again, Signify turned to creative briefs within Organic Influencers, asking all its 38,000+ employees globally to submit photos, videos and stories on what they #ChooseToChallenge for a more inclusive world.

The company selected the best submissions in the Stackla platform and then published them out to its Instagram stories—sharing curated quotes from the EGC in Stackla.

To encourage more employee submissions, Signify displayed the IWD content others had already contributed on its internal employee portal so everyone in the company could see the EGC front and center. King said, “The interactive nature of how people could submit content for IWD meant that they could upload their content to the community and then go back to the employee portal to see what their colleagues had submitted.”

In total, Signify received over 200 employee content submissions for its IWD campaign.

“We had the most participation I’ve ever seen in an internal initiative,” King said. “It turned out to be a great employee engagement campaign, and Stackla helped us fulfill all the requirements to pull it off successfully.”

Signify’s future with Stackla and EGC

In the future, the recruitment marketing team at Signify hopes to activate more types of employee advocate groups using Stackla—building out initiatives for its sustainability group and more.

Another campaign Signify is looking to launch would be focused around one of its core company values: providing an environment of continuous learning. Getting employees to submit photos and videos detailing what they’re learning, how it’s helping advance on their career path and what advice they’d give to others would provide inspirational and personal content for Signify’s audiences on Instagram and LinkedIn.

King said, “It’s about encouraging the employees internally to participate and care about the company, but it’s also about taking all of these internal activities and turning it into external content that we can leverage.”

“Publishing EGC helps us attract more talent because at the end of the day that’s our KPI. To accomplish that, we need the right assets to do it. What works in today’s recruiting landscape is more authentic, personal content with EGC and Stackla helps us collect and leverage it.”

“We want to show who we are in a proud but honest way, and that’s what Stackla has been able to do for us.” – Reyhaan King, Recruitment Marketeer for TA Europe