How to use videos for recruitment
Research by LinkedIn shows that 70% of candidates are passive job seekers, so recruiters need to find ways to grab their interest if they are going to attract the top talent. With research by Statista showing that online videos have “an audience reach of up to 93% among internet users worldwide”, video is the perfect medium to capture the attention of those passive job seekers and bring your vacancies to the attention of a much wider audience.
Why use videos for recruitment
Long gone are the days when all you needed to do to recruit was place a hardcopy ad in the paper with a list of requirements. Today recruitment is very much a two-way street. Now jobseekers will often have their own list of requirements and it’s not all about the money. In fact, research conducted by Glassdoor found that the factors most likely to entice job seekers to apply were a convenient, easy commute (48%), a good work-life balance (47%) and the company culture (35%).
It can be hard to give candidates a real feel for your company within a job advert or a written recruitment pack. Using video within your recruitment campaigns or career pages can help bring your organisation to life and demonstrate your ethos to candidates. Any organisation can write in a job advert that they “encourage a good work-life balance” but using carefully crafted, story-led video is a much more authentic way to demonstrate what your brand is all about and attract candidates who will gravitate towards this.
Good candidates will be drawn to organisations that are upfront about their brand. Jobsite GrabJobs says, “Looking at the past 12 months of our job application data, we concluded that companies using a recruitment video to complement their job posts get 3x more applicants.” This in turn makes your job as a recruiter much simpler. By showcasing your brand early on in the recruitment process you will attract candidates who will reflect your ethos and values, rather than wasting resources on candidates that don’t share your ideals.
Ways to use video in recruitment
Using video can enhance your recruitment process, helping to streamline your processes and authentically display your company culture. Here are a few ways you can bring video into your recruitment:
Videos for career pages
Your website career page is an excellent way to incorporate video into your recruitment. Any candidate worth their salt will look at a company website during the application and recruitment process. Investing in well-crafted videos that tell the story of your brand and embody your company ethos will attract the right candidates for your organisation and help them understand the benefits of working for you and how they might fit into or complement your culture.
Videos should be well-edited to keep candidates’ attention (they don’t want to see a feature film), so if you’ve got a lot to say break it down into a few videos to use across your career page. One video could focus on brand ethos, while another could include current employees for their views, or use video to demonstrate how your organisation supports a good work-life balance.
Having a clear objective for your video and what you want it to convey will help to ensure the message is sharp, focused, and on point. Having a badly edited video where the messaging feels forced and unnatural can have the opposite effect and put off potential candidates.
We helped our clients, Fort Vale Engineering, create a series of videos for raising awareness of their apprenticeship scheme which covers topics like “Staff Wellbeing” and “Beyond the Factory Floor”. You can watch these videos here.
Videos for Social Media
Social media is a great tool for recruitment. Regularly using videos to create brand stories on your social pages can help candidates to understand your organisation before applying. It’s well known that posts including video perform better than text-only or posts with an image and this is the same for social ads too.
Despite this, video is often very underused by organisations on social media, particularly for recruitment, so using video effectively can really help you to stand out as an employer. Using video also helps prospective candidates to retain the advert information far more easily than a purely text-based post.
Videos for staff induction
Using video for recruitment doesn’t have to stop after the application process. Using videos instead of lengthy induction documents is much more user-friendly and can help candidates take in more information quickly.
Whether the videos are used for health and safety, essential training, or for answering FAQs for new staff, breaking the induction down into short easily digestible videos is a much less daunting way of introducing new employees to your organisation. You could even do introductory videos for each team within the organisation, which would be particularly useful for staff that may be predominantly working remotely.
Despite plenty of evidence that video provides a good return on investment, a Statista survey found that 43% of those surveyed said lack of in-house skill (filming, editing, etc.) was a challenge for producing video content. That’s where we can help. At Bigtank we help you to use video in a way that makes sense for your brand, not just video for video’s sake. By creating high-quality, story-led content we can tell the narrative of your brand in a way that speaks to prospective employees.
Using video enables you to attract the right people for your organisation who will buy into your ethos and understand the nature of the role. This sets the tone for a much smoother and more successful recruitment process, saving you time and money on things like readvertising costs. Successfully hiring candidates that you know are a good fit for the organisation will also ensure that staff retention levels will be higher.
Visit our website to find out more about how we channel our experience and expertise into crafting story-led videos that support our clients in running successful recruitment campaigns.
