Last week, I had a conversation with an employer branding lead at a global organisation and one line stayed with me. "Candidates are no longer starting on the careers site. They're starting in an AI engine."
Last week, I had a conversation with an employer branding lead at a global organisation and one line stayed with me. "Candidates are no longer starting on the careers site. They're starting in an AI engine."
On further investigation, the evidence backed this up. Research from PerceptionX showed that 96% of candidates had used AI to research employers, roles or prepare for interviews with 40% using it to discover employers they hadn’t previously considered and 72% using it to decide whether to apply to a company or not!
This means employer branding is now on the same mission as marketing - building brand visibility inside the AI engines. Albeit measuring against slightly different prompts, but facing the same challenge all the same.
Here's the part that most teams haven't clocked yet. The brand ambassador programme already built probably isn't helping gain AEO visibility.
From the programmes I've worked on, employer branding tends to run in one of two ways.
The first is a small, curated group of ambassadors. In a global organisation, small can still mean four or five hundred people. Whatever the size, they're a carefully selected and highly engaged group that are enthusiastic and consistently posting on LinkedIn - approx. 2-3 times a month on LinkedIn. The problem here is scale. People leave or life gets busy - activity declines and the group results are impacted.
The second is the 'everybody' model. Onboard the whole company, run them through a 'what it means to be a social ambassador' course, perhaps provide a content sharing tool to help them get active fast. Consistency is patchy. Some post, most don't and those that do are mostly reposting or engaging with others.
In both cases the dashboard looks reasonable. Post counts are up. Participation is up. Leader boards are gaining new members and people are building confidence.
Then you go looking for impact...after the programme is launched. This is the moment we're often engaged to help.
In my experience, this is the single reason why employee advocacy and employee ambassador programmes struggle to demonstrate value.
Stopping here limits the results a brand ambassador programme should be striving for.
Visibility is less about quantity and more about quality, ensuring brand ambassadors create original content that is connected to your EVP messaging framework.
How you measure against impact - I'll discuss in a mo...
Original thought leadership is what LinkedIn surfaces in the feed and we know, from research, that LinkedIn content feeds the AI engines (almost as much as Reddit).
Reposts and reshares won't carry your brand into the LLMs. That creates reach (some might say noise) but essentially it'll carry the original post. Volume, in this case, doesn't. When a candidate asks an AI engine what it's like to work at your company, there's nothing of substance for the model to draw on.
Meanwhile your competitor has forty people writing about their individual (and original) experience of the culture and the model has plenty to work with.
Employer banding programmes focused on building employee influence vs just advocacy, will be the ones that build visibility.
Here's a framework you can start to build with your ambassadors.
The connecting thread is the narrative mapping exercise. You're linking the AI visibility prompts you need as an employer brand to the content your most capable ambassadors are able to create.
Connecting this framework is the missing link for many teams. Without it, you're running a training programme, not an influencer programme. Without the measurement capability, you're running it blindfolded.
Here are the four stages we build for clients:
Most programmes report stage one - possibly stage two. The problem is that reporting that stops there will not defend an employee brand ambassador programme budget in the future.
Understanding the strategic goal (in this case, raising awareness in the AI engines using LinkedIn around the topic of sustainability) is where Trust Movement is measured and correlated back to employee ambassador activity.
Employer branding has something marketing often doesn't. Genuine, first-hand, authentic stories about what the organisation is like. That's exactly the material AI engines love and reward because those stories are unique to the person telling them. They can't be found anywhere else.
The work is around redirecting a programme that's been optimised for volume towards one that's optimised for results the board cares about. Same people. Connected messaging strategy. Measurement around impact.
I'm noticing that both marketing and employer branding teams are trying to solve the same issue - just from a slightly different lens. The teams that move first will own the answer candidates get for years to come.
Should we stop resharing altogether?
No. Resharing is a reasonable entry point and it keeps less confident people involved in your program. Just stop counting it as visibility - it's activity.
How many ambassadors do we need creating original content?
Fewer than you'd think. A committed group of twenty publishing genuine perspective will outperform four hundred resharing/reposting content.
How long before AI visibility shifts?
Expect months, not weeks although we've seen results shifting within weeks - some posts appear in days! Which is why a baseline matters. Without it you have no way of proving the movement when it comes.
If you're interested to learn more about how to measure the impact of this approach and indeed build an enablement sprint around a cohort of expert employees who are ready (we can identify who they are) get in touch as we deliver cohort enablement sprints for employees digitally mature enough for this kind of activation.