Faced with a flood of applications for open roles, Warp chief people officer Gabriella Garcia needed a way to cut through the AI spam and reach quality candidates. Her solution: Turn employees into influencers and pay them extra to post.
Garcia calls it her “employee-generated content” (EGC) program. The company helps employees grow their LinkedIn and X audiences to attract talent to the employee management startup. Each post earns employees an entry entered into a monthly raffle, where three winners receive “a couple hundred dollars,” she says. Today, about a third of Warp employees post at least twice a week.
“Over the last quarter, we hired 30 people,” Garcia says. “Pretty much every single person who jumped on a call said it was because they saw us on LinkedIn.”
Employees are encouraged to post any work-related content that matters to them, from earning a promotion to tackling technical challenges. Those with writer’s block can attend weekly brainstorming sessions with a member of Warp’s marketing team, and the company offers a Claude agent that can draft posts in an employee’s voice. Garcia says she encourages employees to edit those drafts, so they don’t sound like AI slop, and to lean into human stories over “rage-bait.”
Garcia started small, with a five-person cohort that included her CTO and head of sales before expanding company-wide.
For HR leaders who want to replicate her program, Garcia recommends three steps: Find employees interested in building their personal brands; create systems, such as brainstorming meetings or AI agents that make posting easier; and track the ROI, including how many quality hires the content generates.
Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com
Fortune Office Hours
This week, Rebecca Port, chief people officer at security company Okta, answers your burning workplace questions. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: My CEO behaves like only their time is valuable. They consistently cancel or don’t show up to meetings, citing that they are “being pulled into a crisis.” However, they expect staff to drop everything and pick up the phone nights and weekends if the CEO wants to speak or wants a proposal or situation addressed.
It’s exhausting and creates a “workplace fire-drill fatigue” that is unsustainable in my opinion. Do we push back, protect our time, and risk being fired? If so, how?
A: That does sound exhausting, and I agree it’s not sustainable. Instead of approaching this with the goal of protecting your time, I recommend tackling the pattern first. While CEOs do get dragged into crises, if everything is a crisis, you have an operating problem.
My advice is to deliver the work first (Delivering in the moment builds trust). Then, at a less stressful time, ask if you can share some feedback and walk them through the impact. Try something like: “I want to be there when you genuinely need me, but right now, we’re operating with so many fire drills that it’s hard to distinguish what’s truly urgent. I think we’d be far more effective if we agreed on what requires an immediate response, what can wait until tomorrow, and what can wait until our next one-on-one meeting.”
What support does the CEO have around them? Can they get a chief of staff to help manage their time? You might also share your observations with their EA, so they can help filter meetings and ensure the CEO only commits to what they actually consider a priority.
Setting boundaries is hard and can make you feel like you aren’t delivering. But boundaries aren’t about saying, “I’m not available.” They’re about being clear on what genuinely deserves dropping everything. If everything is urgent, eventually nothing is!
Have a workplace situation that you’re unsure how to navigate or a scenario worth unpacking? Send it our way via this form.
Watercooler
A round-up of the most important HR headlines from Fortune and beyond.
AI-exposed degrees. College grads are turning to retail and food service because they can’t find jobs with their AI-exposed majors. Fortune
Class ceiling. Being a first-generation college graduate could be more of a disadvantage than that of being a woman when it comes to hiring. New York Times
Layer losses. The middle manager purge may come back to bite some companies in the AI era. Wall Street Journal
