Recruitment Marketing Public

This article provides guidance and an overview of the discussion features & managing questions in the Employee Connections administrative platform. Administrators can manage discussions by navigating to the left-hand menu and selecting one of the discussion options:

• Last week's digest
• Unanswered
• All discussions
• Moderation
• Hidden from platform

Types of questions/discussions

There are two types of questions in Employee Connections - automated and candidate-driven.

Automated

When an insider completes and validates their profile, they will receive an automated, general question from the Employee Connections platform. This is a great way for insiders to practice responding to questions, and to have some content ready and populated on your for when you go live with Employee Connections.

Candidate-driven

These are questions asked by a candidate, to an insider or group of insiders, on your public platform.

Blacklist management

If you have any concerns about inappropriate language, Employee Connections has you covered.

Hard blacklist

By default, the platform comes with a list of pre-defined blacklisted words. Candidates will be prevented from asking questions that include these words.

Soft blacklist

Candidates may ask questions on the Employee Connections platform that aren't inappropriate but are best answered elsewhere. For example, asking about a recent application. In these scenarios, the platform doesn't prevent a candidate from asking a question, but a caution message will advise the candidate that the platform isn't intended for these types of questions.

How to plant a question

You may want to increase the volume of content on your platform or ask insiders to respond to particular questions depending on your company's priorities and initiatives. You can access your public platform at any time and ask a question as a candidate, either with your name visible or anonymously. Insiders will receive email notifications when you ask them a question, as they would if another candidate asked the question.

Last week's digest

This page provides an overview of unanswered questions, new questions and new questions from the previous week. This can be a useful tool for admins to see the level of recent platform activity at a quick glance.

Unanswered

The Unanswered page displays questions awaiting a response. Each question can be highlighted and promoted on the platform, hidden from the candidate-facing platform, re-assigned to another insider or answered by an administrator. Insiders with unanswered questions will receive automated email reminders. Admins are also notified on a regular basis when there are unanswered questions on the platform.

Reassigning a question

Sometimes it's necessary to assign a question to another insider, who is best placed to answer it. You can use the 'Reassign to someone else' button to select another insider, who will then receive a notification to respond to that question.

Respond to a question as an admin

If an admin (you) are the best person to answer a question, or the insider who asked the question is on leave/unable to answer, you can click on the 'Give an answer' button to respond to the question as an administrator.

All discussions

This page displays all discussions that have been answered and published on the candidate-facing platform. Against each question, you can see statistics such as:

• Discussion score
• Total views
• Date question asked
• Most recent activity

There are a few menu options to manage discussions:

• 'Best discussions & stories' promotes this discussion on your platform
• 'Hide from platform' removes the discussion from your public platform so it's hidden. The discussion will appear in the 'Hidden from platform' tab
• 'Reassign to someone else' allows admins to assign the question to another insider

Hiding a discussion

It may be necessary to hide a discussion from your platform without deleting it. For example, a candidate may ask a question about the progress of a recent application. Whilst not ideal, you should still respond to the candidate and point them in the right direction. However this question isn't suitable for public view so can instead be hidden, as it doesn't provide meaningful insight into working at your company.

Moderation

Moderation can be enabled to allow admins to check and approve questions and responses before they are published on your platform. The moderation page displays information in two tabs:

• Insider replies: if the moderation feature is enabled, administrators can review and edit insider responses before publishing them to the candidate-facing platform.
• Public questions & comments: this page displays all discussion posts, approved/published discussion posts, published discussion posts with warnings and blocked discussion posts. Warnings and blocked posts are detected automatically, based on the words used by the candidate's question(s) or insider's response(s).

Managing the moderation feature

The moderation feature can be enabled or disabled at any time by an admin. In the moderation section, click on the 'Insider replies' tab. On the top right if the screen, you will see a drop-down displaying the current status of the moderation feature (enabled or disabled). Click on the drop-down to update the feature setting.

Hidden from platform

This page will display any questions that have been hidden from the candidate-facing platform by administrators.

Unhide a question

To unhide a discussion, click on the discussion title. You will be directed to the public facing platform. You will see a number of menu options to manage the discussion - select the 'More actions' menu, and click 'Unhide.' The discussion will now be visible to candidates on your public platform again.

Editing a discussion

Admins can edit a discussion or response as needed. You may notice a typo or grammatical error that should be amended. From within the discussions area of the admin platform, click on a discussion title to view it from the front end. On this screen, you'll be able to see an 'Edit question' option below the discussion title and below each insider response to the question. Click this option to edit the content, make your updates, and click 'Submit'.

Deleting a discussion

Admins can delete discussions from Employee Connections if necessary - this removes the content from your platform, which cannot be undone. From within the discussions area of the admin platform, click on a discussion title to view it from the front end. On this screen, you'll be able to see a 'Delete' option below the discussion title. Click this button, and in the pop-up, select 'OK.'

Sharing/promoting discussions

Promotion is the key to successfully engaging candidates on your Employee Connections platform! Discussions with well-crafted responses from multiple insiders can be shared across social media and other platforms to attract a wide candidate audience. Two great options for promotion are our social media post generator, and sharing discussions from your platform.

Social media post generator

For instructions on how to use the built-in social media post generator tool, refer to Employee Connections Social Media & Promotion Features.

Sharing tool

When viewing a discussion on your public facing platform, there is a 'Share' button visible beneath the discussion title. Use this option to easily promote this discussion on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Make sure you are logged into the social media account you want to post from!

Sharing a URL to a discussion

You can also use the 'Share' button to copy the URL to the discussion page, to embed in a social media post created and styled by your company. Remember to only share URLs available from your public platform (i.e. already visible to candidates). Never share a URL embedded in an email or from your admin platform.