Empower Brand Ambassadors to Complement Your Career Channels

Empower Brand Ambassadors to Complement Your Career Channels It goes without saying that Brand Ambassadors are needed as much as your own career channels to drive your employer brand. Brand Ambassadors offer an organic representation of your company that can be perceived by some job seekers as an even more trusted source than the communications that come from your company or career specific channels. Your employees have their own personal networks online, some bigger than others, but each has the opportunity to become influential Brand Ambassadors online. The reason why Brand Ambassadors should be complementing your careers channels is simple. Trying to explain this in context, if you think of a huge rock (representing your corporate career channel) being thrown into a pond, you’ll see one big set of ripples from the impact (representing the impact of your audience engaging with the post). This action represents your corporate career channel posting to its large following online. Now if you can imagine having other smaller rocks (representing your brand ambassadors) being thrown in the same direction, smaller ripples would appear and start to overlap with other ripples and the big set of ripples from the huge rock in the pond (representing the impact of your Brand Ambassadors audiences engaging with the posts). This action represents the impact of multiple Brand Ambassadors pushing your message online to their own networks and potentially overlapping with other networks of their peers and the audience of the corporate career channel. If you’re struggling to get buy-in from your leadership team to build and implement a Brand Ambassador training program, one question you must ask them is, “Would they rather have one big splash, or do they want to make it rain?” Get them trained Yes, you will have employees ‘who know what they’re doing’. They’ll know how to optimize their social profiles, post engagingly, engage with others, and share all the best content to best represent your company. Leverage these people as ambassadors to help educate their fellow peers and ensure there is education available to the rest of your workforce who need it. Brand Ambassador Training should cover the basics around what your company expects as a minimum from its employees when it comes to representing the company online. The training can be one of the following or a mixture of; 1:1 face to face training, group training or presentations, webinars or recorded training and refreshers that can be housed on a learning management system for example. You’ll need to ensure that the training covers general best practices on social media as well as channel-specific tips for the channels that are best suited to your target audiences of talent. If your talent prospects don’t exist on Instagram, then why would you train your employees to use a channel that will not have the appropriate engaged audience to attract talent? Aside from general social media best practices and channel specific tips, your training should also be covering aspects of how to optimize your profile, where to find the best content and how to construct the best posts, as well as how to engage with others and repurpose the companies content and follow the company online. Brand Ambassadors don’t just share your latest blog posts online, they generate their own organic content and engage with others. You need to ensure this training drives that behavior of best practice. Identify who they are, measure their success and champion them Once you’ve done all you can to train up your workforce, it’s important to know who’s taken the training. If you’ve launched training on your LMS, partner with your company’s education team to look at the reporting of who’s taken the training in the first place. Once you’ve got that information, it’s important to then identify who needs to be retargeted and trained. From the reporting, you want to obviously see who’s taken the training and is now in a position to do a great job in being an ambassador externally for your brand. To see how well your employees are doing you need to use influencer tools, some of which are free online. Leveraging tools like Buzzsumo or SocialBakers where you are able to search for certain hashtags and keywords as their tools scrape keywords in bios and content shared. This is why it’s also crucial to have an employer branding hashtag like #LifeAtCA (that we use at CA Technologies) to track those users and traffic around those conversations online. Someone can say something positive about your company as an employer online but without the use of hashtags to taxonomies this traffic, it makes it increasingly more difficult to identify and measure the reach of your Brand Ambassadors. You can track traffic by searching for these types of hashtags by using the search functionally on individual social channels or using social listening tools like Hootsuite. If you’ve also invested in a social / employee advocacy tool that distributes content autonomously, be sure to check the statistics around gamification to see who’s being active in using the tool. This approach will enable you to measure the reach and how often they’re sharing content.  Identifying the success of these Brand Ambassadors and championing them should go hand in hand. Do not take these employees for granted; they’re there to be championed. When championing your Brand Ambassadors, at a minimum you should be doing the following; engaging with their posts, reposting their content on your career channels (with their permission), collaborating on careers content and promoting them internally to raise their profile for the great work they’ve done to drive your company’s employer brand. If you need to hand out a monthly, quarterly or annual award, why not? Track who’s making the most noise around your employer branding hashtag through measuring tools and always champion them to ensure you have a wave of Brand Ambassadors complementing your own career channels in driving your employer brand. About the author:  Stuart Hazell, is an Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing leader at CA Technologies. His work helps to increase CA’s employer brand through bespoke recruitment marketing strategies.

Do the thing that scares you! University of Manchester Careers Blog

Do the thing that scares you! University of Manchester Careers Blog By  former Careers Service employee  Bryony Spencer  who has recently made the move to the Big City.   Something I learned during my time at university is that you should always say “yes” to the things that scare you. Typically, these are the things that teach you more about yourself â€" what you enjoy, what you’re capable of, what drives you, and what you want to do more of in the future. For me this meant studying abroad in Sweden for six months, but examples could also include skydiving, bungee jumping or para-sailing â€" or even applying for a job that requires you to move to London. For those of you whove come to The University of Manchester from London or elsewhere down south, this might not seem like a big deal. But for a proud Northern girl who’s lived her whole life in Manchester (aside from my aforementioned study abroad period in Sweden, from which I knew I would come home after six months), a permanent move to the capital for a new job seemed a very big deal. Here’s why: London is expensive. A friend of mine from Windsor marvelled when he could get five pints for a tenner in Manchester, where before a £10 note would buy him two drinks back home. The rent per month for a double room (yes, just a room) in London’s Underground Zone 2 would get me a semi-detached three-bedroom house near Manchester. And commuting will cost me twice as much in London as in Manchester. I didnt know anyone in London and had no idea where to live or how to go about finding somewhere to live. Which areas were more expensive than others, and which areas were less desirable to live in? How did Oyster cards work, and would an Underground travel card let me on the buses too? I was going to be a five-hour drive (or two-and-a-bit hour train ride) away from my family and all my friends. Although I’d been further away in Sweden, I knew that in six months I’d be back home. My twelve-month graduate scheme in London would lead to a permanent job with the company, meaning that, aside from the odd trip home every now and then, I would be away from my loved ones for a long, long time. It’s widely held that Southern folk arent as nice as us Northerners. This is something I swiftly found to be in true in my first week as a London resident, when a lady opted to tell me where to go with two short, sharp words rather than opt for the traditional “excuse me” when I got in her way on crowded Oxford Street. So, why make the move then? Well, my enthusiasm for the job I was applying for won out over my concerns about living in London. Let’s not forget this was a job I had applied to and been rejected from just one year before. This graduate scheme would set me up for the marketing career I hoped to have, allowing me to work on truly impactful campaigns while exposing me to exciting clients and valuable contacts for my future. There was no way I could let this opportunity pass me by! My first few weeks as a London resident have already contained their fair share of challenges. I moved in to be greeted by a flat caked in dust and grime, uncleaned since the previous residents left, and so had to stock up on cleaning products and give the place several goings-over before I could get settled. I navigated two tubes and a bus to get to IKEA to fully kit out my room. Ive faced the hustle and bustle (and commuter rage) of Oxford Street, sourced a local gym that won’t break the bank, and survived scorching 31 degree heat, the likes of which the North has never seen. Tonnes of new experience racked up, and Ive still yet to start my graduate scheme â€" but I know however tough it gets, I’ll be pleased and proud to be doing something I enjoy and taking great steps for my future. I’m confident that I’ll overcome those challenges just as successfully as I overcame the limescale-riddled kitchen sink of my flat. Plus, London’s not all bad. Yes it’s busy and yes it’s pricey â€" but a visit to the British Museum, a sunny stroll through Hyde Park, a taste of Camden’s markets and my upcoming graduate scheme are all experiences I wouldnt have had access to if I had stayed home in Manchester. All Graduate Graduate-highlighted Postgrad-highlighted Postgraduate Undergraduate Undergraduate-highlighted

Four Ways To Monetize Your Blog Through Affiliate Marketing

Four Ways To Monetize Your Blog Through Affiliate Marketing Blogging is a widespread Internet activity, with many of us inspired to write about hobbies share our enthusiasm, rather than keeping it all to ourselves.   Affiliate marketing is an increasingly popular e-commerce enterprise that helps monetize your blog. It involves selling products on behalf of a retailer. You sign-up to an affiliate program, the retailer sends code which you post on your web pages, then every time a site visitor follows these hyperlinks to make a purchase, you receive a generous slice of commission. Your sales turnover is wholly dependent on how effectively you promote your items, while you dont have to concern yourself over stock control or inventory management. Combining your blog with affiliate marketing could be quite a money-spinner. Theres no reason at all why you couldnt achieve a consistent turnover, provided you follow these four principles. Marketing is not the same as advertising  First of all, its quite important to choose a product you know something about, preferably one you could tie-in with your existing blog content. Assuming you have signed-up to an appropriate affiliate program and have received links to place on your website, its important to appreciate what is involved with affiliate marketing. It is not a case of simply posting these hyperlinks and hoping site visitors will arrive on your page and be inspired to click-through and purchase a product. Its more about building up a strong reputation as an outlet for these items by engaging with your customer base. The worst thing you could do would be to come across a salesperson. It would be far more important to cultivate your trustworthiness as an advocate for the product. Content is everything  By far the best way to establish a strong sense of integrity is to make sure the articles on your website are given prominence over the product links. Your content should be concise and thoroughly engage customers. It should be well-written, devoid of spelling or grammar inconsistencies and encourage interactive responses. The links themselves should appear organically, rather than simply posted in an overly eye-catching font. It would also make sense to take the time to update your content constantly. Your blog should appear fluent and current rather than static and stale. Harness social media  Retailers offer affiliate programs because it defers responsibility for promotion onto their marketers. Once signed-up, there are many inventive ways of getting your message across. You can sign up to a TopOffers affiliate marketing cpa network which will present you with assistance, advice and even tools you can download to make your marketing strategy even more effective. But by far the best weapon you have at your disposal in terms of promoting your items is your social media platform. Whenever you have received reviews of the products, you can upload the 5-star examples onto your social media. You can invite people to make comments, insert their own reviews, and make sure you include share options. You can also set up e-mail lists, inviting valued customers to subscribe so they can receive regular bulletins. Become an authority  All this activity is geared towards highlighting your prominence, not as a salesperson, but as an authority on your subject. This is how affiliate marketing really differs from the previous models of seeding a blog with banner adverts or utilizing pay-per-click links. Your articles should convey the impression your customers need to go nowhere else if they are considering investing in product X. You should aim to be seen as the ‘go to website. If you can grasp these basic principles you will have every chance of making a substantial income.

Exploding the internship myth. Gaining experience and skills are important but it doesnt have to be called an internship. University of Manchester Careers Blog

Exploding the internship myth. Gaining experience and skills are important but it doesnt have to be called an internship. University of Manchester Careers Blog Basically an internship (in the UK) is a period of paid work experience usually  full time. Often it is in summer so that you have several months to get a decent period of experience but some are shorter. Lets look at what an internship is in more detail.. Lots of large recruiters offer an internship in the summer of your prefinal year so that they can attract talent to their organisation. They may select good interns to go onto their graduate scheme, or it may be a separate recruitment process. Students do internships to help them choose which company they want to work for and what type of work they like.   You can intern in one company but get a graduate job in a different company the experience is still valid. There are also Student Experience Internships and Q Step opportunities which can be at a variety of organisations including here at The University.   These opportunities are purely for you to enhance your skills and improve your employability. BUT NO you dont have to have something called an internship on your CV to get a graduate job. Not all work experience is called an internship.   Working in a company for 3 months over the summer is just as valid no matter what it is called. Its about the nature of the work and the skills you gain not what its called. Working as a volunteer for a charity is also a great source of work experience especially if you need to show evidence of working in the not for profit sector for a future career. Student societies and extracurricular activities are actually one of the few ways to develop leadership or management experience.   You can often show real tangible outcomes too as its all your own work. There are so may other options for getting great experience, so dont get stuck on the word internship. If you are in your first year Its likely some of your classmates will be talking about internships, but actually not all the opportunities for 1st year students are called internships at all. They are usually shorter, may happen in summer or Easter, or if its just a visit day, pretty much at any time. See information on spring weeks and insight days Want to do an internship or get experience overseas? Just be aware that the meaning of an internship differs in different countries. It may be considered to be something you do as a graduate, it may not fit into a summer vacation,  it will often be unpaid and you will also  find opportunities you have to pay to do.   Do your research and talk to us about your plans. All