Webinars for Employer Branding—What Are They?
A webinar for employer branding is a live event that takes place online, with a group of pre-registered guests in virtual attendance. Such an event is used to showcase either an overview of, or a deep-dive into a specific aspect of, a company’s Employer Value Proposition (EVP).
As well as being a mid-funnel engagement tool designed to encourage already-engaged candidates to convert into live applicants, an employer brand webinar can also be used as a bottom-of-funnel platform to nurture loyalty from employees already working at the organisation.
In other words, a single webinar may operate as both attraction and retention tool.
What should you put in an employer brand webinar?
A webinar can showase your employer brand in one of two main ways.
Firstly, it can give an overview of “what it’s like to work here,” which is an all-encompassing look at your employer value proposition and how it comes to life at the organisation. You might cover things like values, culture, days-in-the-life, reward, and community impact.
This type of webinar specifically targets the most deeply engaged candidates. It demands absolute confidence in the their desire to apply, because it assumes that they are at the stage of doing final checks on the state of the workplace.
This makes it a high-risk conversion strategy (because around 73% of candidates are passive), which should only be delivered at the end of a very content-rich strategy that’s already done all the necessary nurturing.
The second way a webinar can showcase an employer brand is by delivering audience-focused content. By identifying the ambitions, needs, preferences, and challenges of your candidate or employee persona, you can develop a topic strategy for webinar that attracts attendees in a much more reliable way.
For example, a webinar might offer candidates the chance to “Learn Leadership Skills from our Senior Leadership Team” or it may make a promise of “Empowering More LGBTQ+ People into STEM careers” (a noted underrepresented group in the STEM sector).
This serialised, topic-led approach to webinar strategy allows you much greater potential to meet niche audiences where they’re at. This will create a far more immediate and lasting bond with potential candidates than a single, mass-targeted presentation of why you’re a good place to work.
It will also open up your webinar strategy to both candidates and existing employees, alike, acting as a supplemental Learning & Development (L&D) opportunity for the latter. Which suggests you should talk to both L&D and Internal Communications colleagues and get them to collaborate on your webinar strategy as a cost-saving, multi-purpose employer brand solution.
Read our employer brand content marketing overview to learn how to develop a topic strategy that targets multiple audience segments, both internally and externally.
How do you create an employer brand webinar
The first thing you need to do when creating a webinar is decide which platform you’re going to use to host it. This may have an impact on how you format your presentation material, how you schedule it and how well you have to know your material up front.
Our top three choices for webinar platforms are:
- eWebinar—our absolute favourite because you can pre-record your webinars, making them pitch perfect, but still deliver all the functionality of a live webinar, such as chat and interactions like quizzes, links, and private messaging
- Zoom—because it’s familiar, user-friendly, inexpensive and can be easily accessed by massive numbers of guests and presenters alike
- Demio—because it offers rich analytics, can be customised to your brand, and has loads of cool engagement features to inspire audiences to join in
Of course eWebinar is the most expensive, so this is only for committed employer brand specialists who aim to deliver a full webinar strategy, either in-house or through their content agency. (Bear in mind that a content agency will likely prove more cost-effective than in-house as they’ll have multiple clients signed up to webinar strategies so will be able to offer a discount.)
Once you know which platform you’re using, you’ll have a good indication of what it’s possible to deliver within the webinar itself.
Generally, though, your aim with an employer brand webinar is to keep the audience engaged and nurture their desire for, or loyalty to, working for you. So keep your content varied. Here are a few different types of information you can showcase within the webinar format:
- Links to additional materials on your careers website, such as videos and podcast episodes
- Polls on the topics you’re discussing to make the webinar a 2-way conversation
- Special offers—such as “sign up to our next webinar for the chance to win an extra day’s holiday”
- Spot quizzes to help you filter out the most enthusiastic candidates
- Downloadable eBooks so candidates and employees have something to take away and keep engaging with
The last thing a webinar attendee wants is to be walked through an hour-long slide deck with no chance to click anything, type anything or say anything. So make your content come alive.
How do webinars convert candidates?
A candidate who regularly engages with your employer brand content marketing will have already learned a lot about what it’s like to work for you.
They may have read carousels, watched short-form videos and listened to audio clips through your LinkedIn content strategy. They might have found your employer brand blog multiple times on Google, thanks to your SEO strategy. And, as they’ve been moving down the recruitment marketing funnel, they may also have become a regular listener to your employer brand podcast series or signed up to regular emails from you.
When they get to this level of engagement, we can consider this candidate to be what’s known as a “warm lead” in B2B and B2C marketing terminology. Because the increasing depth of their continued engagements with your employer brand suggests that they’re becoming more receptive to the idea of working for you.
It’s at this point that you can introduce the idea of attending a webinar to the candidate, so we can move them from deep engagement to application.
Promote a talent attraction webinar via social media posts (video, audio, infographics, etc.,) encouraging sign-up via a landing page on your careers site. Also send out a multi-output email campaign to your mailing list leading to the same landing page.
When attendees show up at the webinar, this is your opportunity to convert this captive audience into live role applicants. So make sure there are visible Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons on-screen that lead through to live roles on your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). And use the appropriate sales closing technique—such as a soft close or an assumptive close—for your particular candidate persona to convince them to apply as you deliver the webinar.
How do webinars help employee retention?
In addition to being remunerated for their efforts, employees who already work at your organisation typically want:
- A healthy workplace culture
- Work-life balance
- Career development
- A sense of inclusion and belonging
- Strong leadership
These are all aspects of your employer brand that can be showcased via webinars. By packaging your webinars as niche targeted masterclasses that show colleagues how to get more of the things they want from their working lives, you position your employer brand as the strategist behind these methods.
In other words, you earn a reputation as the kind of employer that empowers all these great working life wins. That gives employees as much of a reason to stay with you as it does candidates to join you. So, again, when you create a masterclass webinar to encourage employee retention, don’t forget to invite an external audience of engaged candidates so it can double up as attraction content.
Webinars are a fantastic way to captivate, dialogue one-to-one with, and convert engaged candidates into live role applicants. Making them a must-have part of a mid-to-bottom-of-funnel employer brand marketing strategy.
To learn more about how you can leverage webinars in your people communications—including how to repurpose content from across your wider strategy as a way to keep costs down while keeping engagement high—book an intro with Chezz.