Recruitment Videos: An Often Overlooked Employer Branding Tool
According to Gartner, almost half of all S&P 100 job postings in 2018 were targeted to fill just 39 roles, mainly in IT, research and development, marketing, sales, and customer service. Competition for top talent in these fields, it goes without saying, is stiff. And it doesn’t help that it often takes more than a month to fill a single open requisition.
Employers should have all the motivation they need to streamline the hiring process. By making hiring more effective, a company can land top candidates before competitors do and prevent turnover by ensuring they hire the right candidate the first time.
A high-quality recruitment video can help a company revamp its hiring process while boosting its branding and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Your ideal candidates are likely fielding multiple offers, and a recruitment video will differentiate your offering.
What a Great Recruitment Video Entails
A well-produced recruitment video will help define your employer brand for viewers. To that end, your video should include your company’s origin story, history, mission statement, leadership, goals, and its standing within the larger community and society. Feature any social outreach your company engages in. The goal is to present a true sense of what it would be like to work at your company.
Showcase actual employees doing real work. If a viewer can personally identify with an existing employee within your video, they will be better able to picture themselves on your staff — and, therefore, more likely to accept your job offer.
Have employees share their own stories. They should talk about:
• How they got hired
• How long they’ve worked for the company
• Whether they’ve moved up in the ranks
• What their roles and responsibilities are
• Where they see themselves in five years
Be sure to include a variety of staff members to show diversity across age, ethnicity, gender identification, physical location, job title, seniority, and tenure. Painting a full picture of your employee base will help more candidates understand how they might fit into your company.
Tout your remote office options, if they are available. Do not forget to include a section on work/life balance. Candidates straight out of college may not yet understand the value of this selling point, but anyone who has worked in corporate America for some time will.
Your final product should be around five minutes long. This is longer than the typical 90-second YouTube video, but your audience of potential candidates will be more predisposed to view your content than the casual viewer of other YouTube or other social media channels.
Check out the latest issue of Recruiter.com Magazine for more career advice and recruiting trends:
The Benefits of a Strong Recruitment Video
1. SEO
Deploy your video on every channel you own: your website, LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel, Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and through links on job-posting sites. This will help get the word out about your latest job openings and also improve your SEO. The more visible your video is, the more likely the search engines are to surface it — and many job seekers start their searches on Google today.
2. Engagement
Videos encourage engagement, getting 1,200 percent more shares than text and image combined, according to IdeaRocket. Users (read candidates) are 80 percent more likely to convert on a page with video content than on a page with just text. In recruiting terms, that means a job ad or career site with a video component will turn more job seekers into job applicants.
3. Retention
According to Glassdoor, a strong onboarding process can improve retention of new employees by 82 percent. Consider your recruitment video the very first step in your onboarding process.
Your video should present your company in a positive but true light. If it does, candidates will get an authentic sense of what your organization is like and the opportunities that await them if they sign on. This allows candidates to make more informed decisions about whether your company is right for them, and the candidates who choose to accept your offer are more likely to be good fits for your corporate culture. You’ll be able to largely avoid the nightmare scenario wherein a new hire quits after only a month because the work environment did not meet the expectations set during the hiring process.
Time Is Money
Every human resources department in the country is maxed out. If you can make your hiring process more efficient by getting ahead of the competition, that will pay dividends.
A well-produced recruitment video can streamline your hiring process by providing a powerful, evergreen tool to drive candidate engagement, cultivate culture fit, and decrease employee turnover.
And you might just get a promotion for delivering and executing on such a great idea!
Chris Bunney is founder and president of Capitola Media.