Employee Spotlight: Examples for You to Write Your Own

employee spotlight

The information in the employee spotlight is centered on their professional background. Posts about employee highlights are a fantastic way to share team-related stories. It helps the network of connections among employees to expand. For employees looking to improve their performance, retain them with the company, and consistently foster a positive work culture, many organizations offer significant benefits. Employer branding is enhanced by the employee spotlight. Let’s talk about it.

What is An Employee Spotlight?

Employee spotlights are a type of content that highlight an employee’s history with your business, accomplishments, personality, work anniversaries, successes, challenges, and more. Employee spotlight posts are a fantastic way to share employee experiences, foster relationships among staff, and strengthen your company’s and employer’s brand.

A post featuring an employee can be published in a variety of formats, such as a written interview, a short video, or a picture of the employee and some accompanying text. Typically, these articles are posted on the company’s social media pages, career pages, and internal communication channels.

Employee testimonials and employee spotlight are similar. Employee Spotlight is a tool for internal employer branding, whereas testimonials from actual employees primarily serve to provide social proof for potential candidates.

How to Write An Employee Spotlight

  1. Decide which employee you will be writing about. You can use tools like a 360 review template or a 9-box matrix to help you identify potential spotlight candidates, or you can use an employee engagement survey to get crucial feedback on employee engagement and performance.
  2. Determine how content will be used. For instance, are you utilizing it to promote your mission and core values, foster professional development, encourage employee engagement, or create a positive company culture? Employer spotlights should always remain relatable and authentic, regardless of how you decide to use them.
  3. Decide on a format (video, audio, social media, blog post, newsletter, etc.)
  4. Establish employee spotlight questions (more on this below)
  5. Conduct interviews with candidates to gather information.
  6. Create your employee spotlight content (make sure you include the employee’s name, role within the company, a photo, and a description of their professional path, achievements, personal interests, successes, and challenges they’ve overcome)
  7. Publish and promote your employee spotlight.

Benefits of Employee Spotlight

Still unsure if a spotlight initiative for employees is time and effort well spent?

Consider the following benefits:

Recognizing your employees

Employee spotlight highlights the outstanding work completed by specific employees. An individual’s motivation and morale are boosted by recognition, which encourages them to work harder and put forth their best effort. Employees who are motivated are more engaged and likely to stick with your company.

Building a culture of appreciation

Employee spotlights contribute to the development of a workplace where good performance is recognized by management and peers, fostering a sense of respect and appreciation among coworkers.

Additionally, it advertises your company’s admirable workplace culture to the general public. Future employees learn about your great company culture—one in which employee respect and appreciation are encouraged—from online testimonials of a contented and active workforce.

Fostering connections among employees

People may find it difficult to get to know one another when working in a big company where there are many teams spread out across different locations or working remotely.

Collaboration and communication are essential in a hybrid or remote work environment to remove barriers between teams and coworkers.

Employee spotlights can thus serve as a conversation opener between individuals and departments. These first conversations may lead to stronger interpersonal ties.

Deeper connections between various groups foster greater engagement and teamwork. Over time, improved teamwork raises output and profits.

Authentic employer branding material

It can be difficult to find candidates who connect with your employer’s brand and company culture. People who are searching for their next position want to learn as much as they can about the company they are applying to. They are interested in the advantages and possible coworkers.

Candidates seek reputable information about what it’s like to work for you. Compared to the company, they have a 3x higher level of trust in your employees to provide this information.

It’s simple to find negative feedback about your business on job review websites like Glassdoor.

To make your company a desirable place to work, you must undoubtedly address the concerns that your former employees have raised in their reviews. An effective employee spotlight initiative can also contribute to a better perception of your company. What employees say about your company’s work environment can attest to its positive aspects.

Additionally, presenting an internal employee spotlight to candidates at various stages of the hiring process will aid them in determining whether your position and business are a good fit for them.

employee spotlight

Employee Spotlight Best Practices

Now that you’ve learned about the advantages of investing in the employee spotlight, check out the best practices when creating the posts:

1. Determine the best format

Depending on how you intend to use the content and who you want to reach with it, the format of your employee spotlight posts will vary.

It makes sense to create employee spotlight videos given the ongoing popularity of TikTok and YouTube. With a smartphone, you can record and edit a basic video.

For those who prefer to listen while commuting or driving, the podcast is a popular alternative format.

Get a pro to do it for you if you have the money to do so and want the best outcomes.

After that, you can convert your podcasts and videos into other formats, like blog posts. If you have a website or a newsletter for your business, publish a mini-interview there.

Additionally, turn your spotlight into posts for social media. the employee’s profile picture and the interview questions and answers combined. then distribute them on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

To help you come up with ideas for employee spotlights, you can also talk to your marketing team.

2. Decide who you want to feature

Your employee spotlight posts ought to showcase employees from various departments and levels (from interns to senior leadership), ideally.

Give everyone a chance to be noticed. But remember that they should be open to taking part.

3. Prepare your employee spotlight questions

Popular topics to cover in your employee spotlight include the company mission and vision, leadership, organizational culture, challenges and successes, major projects or milestones, work perks and benefits, and career development opportunities.

Here’s a sample of questions you can ask:

  1. What would you say best describes what you do?
  2. What motivates you to remain with our company?
  3. What features of our workplace culture do you like?
  4. Could you give us a brief description of your favorite aspect of your job?
  5. What is the structure of your day?
  6. Tell us about your most important project and how it affected our business.
  7. What differences do you notice between your present job and your previous positions?
  8. What about our management team stood out to you?
  9. Which corporate values most closely resemble your own?
  10. What are your biggest accomplishments while working for our company?
  11. Within our company, who most motivates you?
  12. What is your favorite perk or benefit from work, and why?
  13. What is special about working for our company?
  14. Describe your professional development since you first joined our team.
  15. What has been the most challenging situation you have faced while working for us?
  16. What questions would you like to ask our CEO, if you had the chance?
  17. In five years, where do you see yourself?
  18. What is your best recommendation for someone who wants to work for us?
  19. What project do you currently have that is the most exciting?
  20. What trade do you believe everyone ought to learn?
  21. What motivates you?

Avoid worrying about trying to provide a perfect response during the Q&A session. Instead, allow your staff to respond naturally. And when something is said that you feel necessitates a follow-up query, pursue it.

While you might be tempted to stick to your own Q&A strategy, each employee spotlight should highlight each person in a distinctive way.

4. Promote the employee spotlight

Whether it’s social media, video platforms, or your business blog, share your employee spotlight posts on the various platforms we’ve mentioned above.

Don’t forget to advertise it internally using the intranet of your business, internal messaging apps like Slack, or the company newsletter.

Keep in mind that these posts are fantastic for raising employee morale and assisting them in getting to know their colleagues better.

5. Track the results

Ask your staff their opinions after publishing and distributing a few employee spotlights. Find out what they liked and disliked about the interviews as well as the posts themselves.

Your subsequent round of employee spotlights can be enhanced using the feedback you’ve gathered.

Keep track of how the posts in the various formats performed on social media and email. In this manner, you can select the formats on which to concentrate. You can determine what format works best if, for instance, your goal is to draw visitors from your social media accounts to your website.

Employee Spotlight Examples

Do you struggle to decide which platforms or formats to use to share your employer branding and employee stories? Five instances of employee spotlights are provided below. You can use it to help you create a marketing plan for hiring.

Blogs

One of the most well-liked methods for sharing the tales of your employees is blogging. The career websites of many companies actually include a blog feature. so they can share company news, insights into the culture, and more. In any format, you choose, make sure to include call-outs and headlines. The reader will find it simpler to scan the text in search of the information that is most pertinent to them.

Video

Another widely used option for experts in employer branding is video. Especially now that there are new websites where people can upload live videos and user-generated content. Videos for employer branding used to take a lot of time and money. The demand for highly polished videos is waning, though, as social media features like Stories and live streaming gain popularity. Regardless of which option you select, make sure to include captions. because many people watch videos without sound. including captions can increase the likelihood that people will watch your videos all the way through.

Audio

Podcasting is another method for distributing employee stories. with so many people managing a myriad of tasks simultaneously. They might not have time to watch a video or read a blog. Therefore, audio can be used to tell the stories of your employees when people are unable to sit still and watch a screen.

Employee Advocacy

By giving them the freedom to express themselves directly, what better way to share your employees’ voices? There are employee advocacy tools like GaggleAmp and Bambu available. Employees can reshare content, comment on it, and suggest content that the company should share.

Another way to boost employee advocacy is to provide them with prompts, digital assets, or tools. People will be motivated to post directly on their social networking sites as a result. For instance, when you send new hire swag, include a note urging them to use your employer branding hashtag to share a photo with their LinkedIn network.

Conclusion

The success of your business is primarily due to your employees. They are the individuals who put in a lot of effort in the background each day to achieve objectives, forge new business relationships, and advance the careers of those around them. It’s a great idea to highlight both their internal and external efforts with Employee Spotlight.