LinkedIn SSI: the missing link to employer brand awareness?

It’s taken as read that LinkedIn is the preferred network for social recruiting. Yet, it’s still a social network. It’s about people. As an Employer Branding 101 would say: your people are your employer brand. What they say will lend much more credibility and authenticity to why candidates should work for you than any carefully constructed marketing campaign. But does it really matter if you’ve only got a few active employees on LinkedIn? (The short answer: yes.) And are they helping or hindering your social hiring strategy? LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) can give you the answer... Here we cover what LinkedIn SSI is, why LinkedIn employee advocacy is so vital, and how much time employees should dedicate to it.

So, what is LinkedIn SSI?

“Your SSI measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships.”

Our Managing Recruitment Consultant, Annabel Plowman’s SSI.

(Needless to say, there’s a bit of healthy competition in our offices for the highest LinkedIn SSI!)

You can find out your own LinkedIn SSI here.

Why is LinkedIn employee advocacy so vital?

Your company can share as many company updates, helpful resources and relevant third-party blogs as it likes. Yet there is a reason that LinkedIn doesn’t have an SSI for companies: building relationships relies on your people.

1. Candidates will check out your employees

Candidates are understandably intrigued by the people they may be working with. Most candidates will at least check out their hiring manager and potential team’s LinkedIn profiles to find out a little more about them. What your employees post, comment on, like and share will help form their view of your employer brand.

2. People connect with people

Connection requests come from people, not companies. Whilst a following for your company page is useful, it’s much more likely that you can build your LinkedIn network reach via your employees.   At Cast UK, we have over 3,000 followers to our company page. However, our consultants currently have 77,000 relevant industry contacts between them. That’s a 255,000 reach across 1st and 2nd-degree connections versus 3,000.

3. An opinion, insight or company update is more compelling coming from an employee

At Cast UK, our consultants are likely to get much more views, likes and comments on news updates, job adverts, insights and comments. Meaning the snowball effect of LinkedIn influence can be spread much wider the next time an on-brand post needs to be published.  

How long does it take to build effective employee advocacy on LinkedIn?

It takes our recruitment consultants around 2 hours a week to build 50 relevant new connections and engage with existing ones. (That’s in addition to posting job ads to their profiles and searching for passive candidates.)

At Cast UK, we have over 77,000 connections between us (and counting), resulting in a network of 255,000 specialist candidates. If you had one employee dedicating two hours a week to building a concentrated network of relevant connections, it would amount to 2,400 contacts a year per employee. As this would cost around £2,000 per employee (if you took a salary of £35,000), a business case for the time and a motivator for employees would be needed. That’s for another post.

In brief, if you can build a strong enough network on LinkedIn through employees establishing their own professional brand and becoming ambassadors, you could save around £1,000 per job ad. LinkedIn can be a powerful tool if used correctly. Why not discover all the tools and strategies you need to improve your employer branding by downloading our Employer Branding Checklist?

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