Employee Testimonial Best Practices

Employees Have the Upper Hand

Attracting and retaining the best talent in your organization is challenging. It’s difficult to find talent in today’s economy when employees have a lot of options available to choose from.

Freelancers are quickly becoming a major part of the American workforce. In 2023, as many as 73.3 million Americans, or 46.25% of the American workforce, are freelancers in an expanding gig economy.

More importantly, there is a significant increase in highly skilled and educated freelancers offering their services, which was already noticed between 2019 and 2021. These skills include:

• Computer programming
• Writing
• Design
• IT
• Marketing
• Business consulting

When you have to recruit top talent, you have to show that your organization has a lot to offer them.

How to Convince Employees to Join My Company?

After you’ve carefully crafted the perfect job ad that includes the salary and benefits offered, it’s time to advertise the job opening.

This is where employee testimonials play a significant role.

Statistics show that job seekers trust employees 3x more than the organization (or employer) when deciding to work in a company.

Therefore, you need to have recent and authentic employee testimonials displayed on your website. Another great way is also to display your eNPS score openly on your careers page.

Let’s go over a fool proof employee testimonial collection strategy you can implement to get new skilled employees constantly.

Best Practices for Employee Testimonials

By following these employee testimonial best practices, you can ensure that you make the most from each employee testimonial you’ll create.

Also, in addition to employee testimonials, it’s good practice to measure your current employee satisfaction.

1. Collect Video Employee Testimonials
2. Don’t Use a Script
3. Focus on Benefits
4. Have an Objective
5. Address Reservations
6. Embed Ratings

1. Collect Video Testimonials from Employees

Video content is the future of the internet. Wyzwol asked consumers how they prefer to learn about new products, 68% of respondents said they like to see short videos.

Candidates are no different.

A video testimonial by an employee that’s a minute long will potentially have much more impact than a two-page text testimonial. Videos are easy to understand and have more impact than other forms of content.

After all, a video testimonial from an existing employee gives the viewer the opportunity to hear the message directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Additionally, a video review where an employee shares their views about their current job seems more credible than a text review. Text reviews are easier to edit and even fake.

All those company reviews on Glassdoor are trusted, but they lack the human side, as they don’t include names or even faces. We can read so much from the person’s gestures and tone of voice that video testimonials can be the final straw to convince the viewer to apply.

Tips for Getting Video Testimonial from Employees

Here are a few actionable tips to get more video employee testimonials:

1. Put emphasis on your employee experience
2. Constantly offer the option to provide an employee testimonial
3. Offer incentives: Gift cards, free lunches, fun activities, …
4. Ask from key persons whether they’d be up for participating in filming a high-quality video with a professional team

2. Don’t Use a Tight Script

Whether you go with a video or text or any other form of employee testimonial, don’t use ready-written scripts. A script will ruin the testimonial and its credibility.

Additionally, your employees probably aren’t actors and every single viewer will be able to spot that they’re not speaking freely, but repeating words that they’ve rehearsed.

Your potential candidates are smart enough to spot a scripted testimonial. If all your employee testimonials are worded exactly the same way, it eats away their authenticity.

Instead of using a script, let employees use their own words. Ask questions and let the employee answer those questions in any way they like. This is a perfect technique to make testimonials follow a pattern without making them similar.

However, you should still plan the questions you’re going to ask. That way, you’ll be able to cover all the necessary topics and get a great story.

Here are 15 important questions to ask from customers, but they can easily be modified to fit employee testimonials.

3. Focus on Benefits

A new candidate is interested in one thing: What’s in it for me?

Make sure the employee testimonials highlight the benefits you offer.

Benefits can include:

• Remote working
• Flexible work hours
• Salary
• Work benefits
• Training opportunities available
• Great company culture
• Supportive atmosphere

When benefits are mentioned by real people, your current employees, who is already enjoying all those benefits, it builds trust better than just listing them in the job ad.

In order to highlight benefits in your employee testimonial videos, you don’t need to script the interviews. Just ask specific questions on the subject.

It’d be best to link benefits to the job so as to make them meaningful and relevant.

For instance, if you have an open vacancy for a creative designer, the testimonial should come from one of the existing creative designers. It’s less effective if the testimonial comes from an employee from another department.

In the long run, you should create employee stories from all different positions you are looking to fill in the future.

As an example, Trustmary has implemented video testimonials from different teams on their careers page. They highlight the benefits of working there.

4. Have an Objective

Creating employee testimonials without an objective will lead you nowhere.

Every testimonial that you create should have an objective.

Helpful Questions for Creating an Objective

1. What kind of target audience will this employee story/testimonial have?
2. Where will this be posted: on social media, posted on career page, added to job ads?
3. What are job seekers for this role most interested in?
4. What is the most effective format: rating, text, selfie video testimonial, high-quality video testimonial, …?

For instance, your objective could be to drive top talent to a very specific position. In addition to posting the employee story to your careers page, you’ll also use it in paid advertising as a lead magnet. The prospective candidates are probably most interested in your company culture and policy on remote work.

Most businesses use employee testimonials to attract new candidates.

5. Address Reservations

Most candidates have reservations and objections about certain companies and job posts. For instance, Uber lost a case regarding driver employment rights. This case could have created several reservations about Uber.

If you ever face this kind of situation, you need to use employee testimonials to address objectives that new recruits might have. Even if you haven’t had a case or an event, you still have to address general reservations about the vacancy and/or your organization.

Using Trustmary to allows you to embed also employee text reviews directly on your website or careers page with customizable testimonial carousels.

How to Identify Objections?

You can identify issues and objections by conducting exit interviews.

When an employee leaves your organization, you should get feedback. That’s the most honest feedback you’ll ever receive from your employees. Such exit interviews reveal employee objections and reservations that you need to address in testimonials.

6. Embed Ratings

There are several third-party sites and job portals that potential candidates use to hunt jobs. Think of Glassdoor, Indeed, and CareerBliss. These are a few employer review and rating sites.

If you have decent ratings on these or any other sites, you can incorporate those in employee testimonial page in your site.

Why?

Because it matters a lot. Candidates consider third-party reviews and ratings more credible than reviews posted by the employer itself. You can embed reviews from these sites easily on your website. Here is an example of how BMC does it:

If you don’t have reviews and ratings on third-party sites, don’t fake it. Don’t use bogus ratings or buy reviews. It isn’t necessary and can even lead to getting fined.

You’re good to go without it.

But if you have them, don’t forget to embed them.

Conclusion

It isn’t easy to find the right employees.

Your competitors are hunting for top talent and recruiting is costly in the first place. Employee testimonials help you target the right candidates.

Employee testimonials will help you build a team of employees who will make your business stand out from the crowd.

The first step is getting started. Here are 5 employee testimonial templates you can copy that’ll help you recruit more.

If you haven’t created employee testimonials in the past, book a meeting with our professional and we will help you figure out how to get started as easily as possible.