Earls: A Superb Employer Branding And Social Recruiting Case Study

When I spoke to Brenda Rigney, Vice President People Operations at Earls, she summed it up brilliantly:

‘Our employees tell our story for us, whether that be face to face with our customers, or on the social networks. They are a huge part of our recruiting success. The majority of our roles in the business are promoted from within, so everyone who joins Earls has the opportunity to progress through the company, with the full support and training that we give them.’

Earls operate a complete non-judgemental policy, therefore helping to nurture their employees use of sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Their social media strategy is really quite simple – it is all about the brand, the employees and their stories. They have created a #myearls hashtag that they encourage everyone to use when posting content, and their social media branding is cleverly focused ‘Earls Wants You’, ‘People Grow Here’ and ‘We’ve Got Soul’. And, of course, these are perfect for adding to images and sharing them across social media to constantly reinforce the recruiting messages.

Earls uses their employees and the social networks as their recruiting channels, but they don’t endlessly broadcast jobs, they let their employer brand (and their employees) do the work for them. They have promoted vacancies via a Facebook app and used PPC when launching a new restaurant in new locations, and they promote all the adverts on their career website, but you still have to apply locally for the job.

This strategy has been very successful, but could not have worked without the hard work that has created and maintained the culture and the brand at Earls, the sense of purpose they have given to their employees and the employee advocacy across social media.

They have also put together a slideshare deck sharing some of the secret sauce that makes Earls so unique. They have called it the The Leadership Log .