Why Portillo’s is outsourcing some social media efforts to its store workers

With the rise of the creator economy, being an Internet influencer has become a much-coveted job for many Gen-Z workers.

It can be tricky to land a full-time job as an influencer, but some aspiring creators are using their day jobs as fodder for content. This is particularly true of employees working for popular food chains, who are eager to share insider tips like making the perfect Cold Stone concoction or a Crunchwrap Supreme that hits just like Taco Bell’s.

The Chicago-area-based Portillo’s food chain is dipping its toe in the employee influencer space with an “internal influencer program,” Chief People Officer Jill Waite recently told HR Brew. By elevating the voices of Portillo’s employees on social media, the company hopes to showcase its brand in a more authentic way, as well as tap into a younger talent pool for recruitment and retention efforts, she said.

How Portillo’s’s influencer program works. Waite’s team got the idea for an employee influencer program after noticing its employees would often share content about their jobs and the brand on the company’s internal communications platform, Portillo’s Connect, which functions somewhat like an internal Instagram.

Portillo’s, which is known for Chicago specialties like hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches, employs between 8,000 and 9,000 workers depending on the season. It’s also in the midst of a significant expansion, with plans to open hundreds of new restaurants in the coming years, in locations like Arizona, Florida, and Texas.

Given the chain is “going into new markets where guests and team members may not know who we are,” Waite and her colleagues thought it would be beneficial to have “internal influencers who know our brand, love our brand, and can tell our story,” she said. The thinking behind the program was that “our team members could tell the story better than we could.”

In partnership with the marketing and PR departments, Waite’s team selected 15 employees from across the Portillo’s organization to participate in the internal influencer program.

The group is dubbed “Maxwell Street Mavens,” a nod to the chain’s Polish sausage, and has helped develop content for campaigns such as the restaurant’s “buy one, get one free” special, and a new loyalty program called Portillo’s Perks. In one video that Portillo’s recently featured on its LinkedIn page, a Portillo’s general manager participating in the program shared a behind-the-scenes video showing how the chain’s famed Italian beef sandwich is made.

While the program is still very much in its early days, Waite said eventually she’d like to have an internal influencer working at every Portillo’s location.

A tricky balance. In recent years, employers in the food service industry have had to contend with the rise of the “employee social ambassador,” with some embracing the role and others shying away from it. Last year, a Chick-fil-A employee was asked to stop posting reviews of the company’s menu items on her personal TikTok account. Seeing an opportunity where its competitor saw a risk, Shake Shack reached out to the employee and offered her a deal to make two paid, branded videos for the company.

Programs like this one from Portillo’s seem to recognize workers are interested in building a personal brand around their work, while still seeking to control the narrative around the corporate brand. Waite’s team gives internal influencers guidelines for posting about certain topics, and works with legal and operations to ensure their posts are accurate and represent the company’s values. While she recognized situations may occur when a worker posts something that doesn’t align with the parameters her team sets, she said she believed such occurrences would be rare.

“If you put too many guardrails around, then you take away the authenticity of it, and you take away the creativity,” Waite said.

The San Francisco-based Autodesk, a software company that sources heavily from employee stories for its branding efforts, leans on a “very clear social media policy” to help workers understand how best to represent their employer online, according to Kassidi Sorensen, senior global employer brand creative and marketing manager. Sorensen’s team tries to make “it very clear what they can’t do”—such as share proprietary information online—“but [inspire] them with what they can do.”

“If people don’t know what they can’t do, what I’ve encountered in this space is they’ll err on the side of caution and not share at all,” Sorensen observed.

The end goal. As more companies look to outsource content creation to employees outside of their marketing and communications teams, they’re still ironing out details—chief among them how workers should be compensated, if at all, for the additional work they’re taking on.

“I think there’s some danger in a true pay-for-play kind of activity, because you start wondering about people’s motivations for doing the work,” Allison Vaillancourt said, a VP at the HR consulting firm Segal who advises employers on how to motivate and retain employees.

Autodesk employees can earn rewards points for sharing their stories, which they can then redeem on the company’s recognition platform, Sorensen told HR Brew. Waite described the Portillo’s internal influencer role as something that could be incorporated into a paid hourly job, so long as general managers can help workers find time to shoot content while they’re on the clock in a way that doesn’t interfere with food safety or guest experience.

Another question for HR leaders running employee brand ambassador programs, Vaillaincourt added, is how to measure their success in furthering “corporate goals."

There’s both a business and an HR component to what’s driving the Portillo’s internal influencer program. By sharing worker-driven stories that demonstrate what makes the chain’s food “excessively delicious,” Waite said she and her colleagues hope to “drive sales and transactions” for the brand.

But perhaps even more valuable for the HR department is the possibility of connecting with potential Portillo’s job-seekers. College graduates are highly attuned to companies’ online presence and reputation, according to a survey from the job platform Handshake, with 73% reporting they’d be more likely to apply for a job after seeing “behind-the-scenes content from an employer.”

Waite noted that Portillo’s employs many college students that come back to work during the summer and holiday seasons. She’s focused not only on reaching many of the 18-to 22-year-olds that currently hold Portillo’s jobs, but also younger talent who may want to apply for those jobs in the next few years.

“If we don’t understand them now and how to reach them, it’s too late by the time they hit the workforce,” she said. “Understanding who’s coming up and what really resonates with them is important for us to win the battle of talent.”