Video Recruiting - Getting in Front of a Camera to Attract Talent

Getting in Front of the Camera to Attract Talent

The next piece in our series of RecTech18 webinar series pre-blogs comes from award-winning HR tech startup VideoMyJob, and explores the wonderful world of video recruitment.

There’s a lot of back and forth about the value of the video CV, with some arguing that it puts too much pressure on candidates to ‘perform’. There’s no doubt a video application can help candidates to stand out in a competitive market, but have you considered that the same advantage applies to employers?

Today’s job seeker holds the balance of power when it comes to supply and demand, with a decline of candidates per opening from 6.2 t o 1.2 over the last decade, employers are now competing to provide employment offers and create work cultures that attract and retain the best and brightest to their offices from all over the world.

Breathing life into your employer brand

It’s never been more important to effectively communicate your employer brand when competing for talent. Video job ads are a great way to tell your brand story and support your employer value proposition with evidence: a snippet of employee testimonial, a pan of your modern office space and great location and a few sentences from the hiring manager. In under 90 seconds you can build a compelling picture with video of what it’s like to work with your company, helping candidates to put themselves in the shoes of one of your employees and sparking an emotional connection. To achieve the equivalent in a text job ad would take ... well, actually it’s just not possible! A video tells a thousand words.

Who do candidates want to hear from?

I know your employer brand or marketing team probably has a lovely, polished, big budget video with prime position on your careers page - but did you know that in a recent analysis of 5000+ career sites by CareerBuilder, just 7.5 per cent of candidates actually visited the career site’s home page (where your showcase employer brand video likely sits ‘above the fold’).

Lighthouse research claims that candidates want to see videos of hiring managers 2.5 times more often than company overviews and 10 times more often than an HR/recruiter message. Smashfly’s Recruitment Marketing Benchmarks Report analysed the recruitment marketing practices Fortune 500s and declared that ‘job descriptions are still boring’ with only 1% of F500 companies used images or video in job descriptions. That’s what I call a golden opportunity.

Expanding your recruitment marketing toolbox

So what can the modern recruiter do to better communicate the role and your unique company culture to attract the right candidate? Use video, of course.

As the Lighthouse research shows, job seekers want to hear about the role from the person they will be reporting to and from employees. Do your candidates have enough information to self-select out of the application process if your workplace culture or values are not aligned with theirs? A low candidate job satisfaction highlights a mismanagement of expectations or incomplete job descriptions. Video is the easiest way to build a complete picture.

With video, you can include footage of team events, illustrate a ‘day in the life’, take the viewer on a tour of the office or local hotspots, show-off your equipment, tech or state-of-the-art meeting rooms -the options are endless. Hiring someone who is well-suited for the job has the potential to create an enormous return on investment.

Target passive candidates

Video also allows you to penetrate and reach all the unique and wonderful digital communities your ideal candidates inhabit. Use video to craft a compelling, authentic insight into your company’s culture and the opportunity, that supports the great story that your employment brand is already telling. Video allows you to leverage your company’s brand cachet on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other relevant social platforms, to make use of your employee networks and promote opportunities in niche forums and groups.

Recently a large multi-national customer of ours used video to recruit for an Electrical Site Manager role in the United Arab Emirates. The video ‘starred’ the hiring manager, was shot onsite and used some UAE tourism footage to paint a picture of the city and region the role would operate out of. The Recruitment Manager shared the video to his personal LinkedIn network and garnered almost 40,000 views in two weeks on his profile alone (in addition to 780 organic YouTube views). Within 14 days of publishing the video, they were interviewing two excellent candidates for a role that had previously been challenging to recruit for. Through video, this company is gradually improving what were previously considered static metrics, from time-to-hire to cost-per-hire to candidate experience.

In the fight for passive talent, a video is critical to success. With less than 1% adoption in job advertising, no better tool exists to tell your story and stand out in a competitive market.

VideoMyJob is an award-winning HR tech startup helping companies attract and engage talent with video.

The VideoMyJob mobile application and dashboard is an enterprise video solution that gives teams the tools to create, share and track branded video, to better engage with jobseekers and employees.

VideoMyJob co-founder Kristen Graham will be demonstrating at next week’s RecTech event, or you can head over to VideoMyJob to schedule a demo if you can’t wait!

About RecTech18

Australians are spoilt for choice when it comes to best of breed, homegrown recruitment tech solutions. But with every platform offering to deliver an easier, more efficient and more productive life, it can be difficult to identify the tools that best match your business needs.

RecTech18 will bring together leading platforms to showcase the best in Australian recruitment technology.

Unlock the power of RecTech to overcome your most pressing recruitment challenges!

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