How to: Successfully Promote Your Employer Brand on Pinterest

In our Sourcing on Pinterest misson as part of the Expert Sourcing module on our Black Belt in Internet Recruitment online training course, we talk extensively about how to source for candidates on Pinterest, the types of candidates you’ll find there, how to x-ray search Pinterest, and how to go about contacting candidates once you’ve found them. But while some recruiters have discovered the power of Pinterest for sourcing candidates, there are still relatively few companies who are using Pinterest to boost their employer brand. Which is why we’d like to help you do just that today: promote your employer brand on Pinterest.

What is Pinterest?

First things first, Pinterest is a virtual inspiration board, used by people the world over to source and store great ideas for a huge variety of projects and interests. Members can ‘pin’ anything from fashion pictures to recipes to graphic design video tutorials, on their personal boards (just as you would on a physical bulletin board or scrapbook). Pinning these things helps you organise and arrange them the way you want – far more effective than just bookmarking them.

But the best thing about Pinterest (particularly as far as recruiters are concerned) is that it’s growing like crazy and, as of yet, is relatively untouched by recruiters even though it presents a great opportunity to connect with candidates you might not reach through standard means or other more common, social networks.

Promoting your Employer Brand on Pinterest

The key to successfully promoting your employer brand on Pinterest lies in the boards you choose to include on your Pinterest careers page and the quality of the pins you choose to include on those boards. However, we understand that if you’re starting out on Pinterest, it can be hard to know exactly what content it’s appropriate to pin or which types of content will be most popular with your target market. Which is why we decided to do a little research on your behalf and trawl through as many Pinterest corporate careers boards as we could, in order to put together a comprehensive list of the types of boards you should be featuring on your account, why you should be featuring those boards, the types of pins you should include on those boards, and with real life examples of companies who are smashing it on Pinterest!

So without further ado, here’s some of the best boards to use in order to promote your employer brand on Pinterest:

Meet the Team:

Successful employer branding is not about telling the company’s story, it’s about telling the people’s story. Your people really are your best asset when it comes to recruitment, and creating a special board on your Pinterest careers account is the perfect way to showcase them and help tell their story. Target, UnitedHealth Group, Taco Bell, Nestlé, Ford, FedEx, Salesforce and L’Oreal all do a fantastic job at showing off their employees on Pinterest. Each has created a dedicated board that features pins about individual employees, what they do within, why they love doing it, what their personal journey has been within the company, and why they think any potential candidates would love doing it too.

They also do so in a variety of mediums. Most companies have chosen to include a video pin about their employees, while others have decided just to post a photo of each employee and include their bio underneath. Both are equally effective and well worth including on your Meet the Team Pinterest board.

See some examples below:

Meet Our Recruiters:

Much like a Meet the Team board, a Meet Our Recruiters board is a board completely dedicated to your recruitment team in an effort to put faces, names and personalities to the people who are out there actively looking for candidates across a variety of networks. Having a Pinterest board dedicated to your recruiters makes it easy for potential candidates, who may have already been contacted by one of your recruiters, to find out more information about them and help push them towards a positive decision when it comes to responding to that recruiter. Having a board like this is also great for candidates looking to get in touch with one of your recruiters in relation to any open positions. It’s also another nice way of telling your people’s story and humanising the company.

When creating your own recruitment team board, be sure to supply a bio that introduces job seekers to your recruiters as well as a photograph or video of the recruiter in question, just like CHOP and Saks have done on their Pinterest careers accounts:

Taco Bell have gone one step further on their careers account and dedicated a board to each of their individual field recruiters and even given them the opportunity to truly express themselves by pinning pictures of their pets, memories from the office and recruitment events, the logos of their favourite sports teams etc. It adds a really nice, personal, human touch to such a large brand:

Office Locations:

It’s the place where all potential employees will be spending most of their time if they decide to accept a job with your company, so naturally, they’ll want to know a little bit more about your office space! They’ll want to know the exact location of the office, if it’s close to Starbucks, what their desk will look like, whether or not they can decorate their desk, how big the canteen is, the type of food served in that canteen, the computers they’ll be working on, whether or not there’s a recreation area etc. And a highly visual platform like Pinterest, is the perfect medium on which to show them!

Both Salesforce and Geico have done an excellent job of this by giving potential employees a sneak peak, behind the scenes look at what goes on inside each of their offices and the kinds of things their staff get up to on a daily basis within them:

If you have multiple locations, why not have multiple boards for each office on your Pinterest careers account like L’Oreal?:

Career Advice:

It’s always nice to offer a helping hand, which is why a number of companies use Pinterest to provide general and industry specific job search, career and interview advice to any potential candidates per-oozling their Pinterest careers board. Advice can come from your own employees in the form of video clips, third-party infographics, findings from industry reports, quotes from events, company blog posts or anywhere you find great career advice. All you need to do is curate the most relevant pieces and share them with your audience:

How to Apply/Hiring process:

Another great Pinterest board to include on your careers account, is a special board outlining how interested candidates can apply to your company or how the hiring process plays out within your company. Providing such a board removes any ambiguity or mystery surrounding these processes for the candidate and helps set realistic expectations for the candidate experience. A couple of companies do this quite well including; Allianz and Ford:

“A Day in the Life”:

Surprisingly, not many companies actually do this on Pinterest, but those that do, do it well and the effect is really nice. Take Saks for example. They use a special Pinterest board to document a “Day In the Life of a Saks Fifth Avenue Employee”.  At each hour of the working day (8:30am – 6:00pm), Saks detail how various employees spend their time in the office, from coffee breaks at 2:30pm to strategy sessions at 3pm. Each hourly pin includes a picture of various employees going about their day job and states what those employees are doing at that time of day and why they’re doing it:

This is the type of information any potential candidate will be delighted to see included on your careers board as, at a glance, they can get a sense of life in your company and where they’ll fit in. After all, people have to see what others are doing and experiencing in order to want to imitate it.

Diversity and Inclusion:

If you’re a proud equal opportunities employer, scream it from the rooftops! Diversity is one of the most prominent issues within the recruitment industry today, so if your company has a diversity or social inclusion policy, do what Nestlé and NBCUniversal do and dedicate an entire board on your Pinterest careers account to it:

Volunteering/Social Responsibility:

Do your company or your staff members regularly participate in voluntary or charity organisations? If they do, it’s the perfect topic on which to base a board about on your Pinterest careers account! According to talent management technology reviewer Software Advice’s research, an honest/transparent company that gives back to both their employees and the wider community is of high importance to employees, so if your company do make an active effort to give back to the community in some way, make it known.

Taco Bell have a board dedicated to their TB Foundation For Teens, UnitedHealth Group details their social responsibility activities on a board, Saks celebrate their Saks | Gives campaign with a board, while Nestlé’s team do a variety of volunteering projects, all of which are celebrated on this board:

If you’re creating your own Volunteering board, be sure to show the name/logo of the charity you’re helping and provide a bio for them, include as many photos of your team undertaking projects as you can and provide a brief description of what they’re doing.

Onboarding: 

Your Pinterest careers account doesn’t solely have to be used to attract potential candidates, it can also be used to welcome and onboard new hires. Take CHOP‘s Pinterest careers board for example.  Not only have they provided a number of boards for potential candidates like a Nursing board, a career advice board and an interview advice board, they’ve also created a board dedicated to life in Philadelphia (where the company is based) to help newcomers, who may be from outside the area, settle in to and enjoy life in their new city. The board includes a Philadelphia travel guide, an infographic detailing each of the cities main areas, 101 things to do in Philadelphia, and a restaurant guide:

How about including a clubs and pubs guide, a “things to do off the beaten track” guide to your city/town, or get your employees to write about their favourite places and pin those? If an employee is new to the city, just imagine how useful and appreciated that board will be!

Jobs:

Yes, Pinterest is yet another place on which to post your current roles – for free! Take a leaf out of Ford’s book and create a separate board for each job function, doing so makes it easier for users to find content that appeals to them:

But remember, when building your job board(s) on Pinterest, ALWAYS redirect candidates to your career site by providing a link to where the job is posted, and a short description of what they need to do next to apply for the job. Don’t leave candidates in any doubt as to how they should proceed when it comes to applying for jobs.

Hopefully, that’s given you plenty of food for thought when it comes to using Pinterest for employer branding and that the prospect of using it for the purposes of employer branding is no longer a daunting one! If you have any extra tips you’d like us to add to this blog, please feel free to share your thoughts with us and your fellow readers in the comments below, or tweet us @SocialTalent.