6 Ways To Use Video For Recruitment

In a challenging recruitment market it’s more important than ever that we make our organisation stand out from the crowd. Here are 6 ways you can use video to attract the best talent and fuel your growth plans.

This article appeared in the August / September 2023 issue of Director magazine, published by the Institute of Directors in Northern Ireland.

I’ve been using video for recruitment for the best part of 15 years now and while it’s been a great tool for all of that time, there’s no doubt that in the last 5 years its impact has been more significant than ever.

We’ve been running a series of recruitment marketing meetups over the last few months at BlueSky Video Marketing and what we’ve learned from our speakers and attendees is that authenticity, culture, values and personality need to be the cornerstones of your recruitment marketing content.

Now you’d expect me to say this – but video is the best way to do this and that’s why it should be a part of your recruitment marketing efforts.

But where do you start?

Here are 6 ways you can use video to:

Attract candidates
Reduce time to fill
Reduce hiring costs
Improve employee retention

1. Tell Your Story

If you don’t make it clear to people what your organisation does, what it stands for and what its ambitions are then it’s very difficult to make other people want to come on the journey with you.

The target for your recruitment marketing efforts is to attract the people that will be a good fit for your organisation. People that align with your values and your way of working. People who can get excited about your product or service. People who want to be a part of the success that you’re going to enjoy in the years ahead.

I’ve always been an advocate for treating a recruitment process in the same way that we treat our sales processes.

Be clear about our customer / candidate targeting – we don’t try to sell our products or services to everyone. We understand what a good customer looks like and focus our efforts on winning more of them.

Always on – we don’t stop selling because we have hit our monthly sales target. We keep building the pipeline and telling our story so that we can be sure we’ll hit our sales target every month.

Success with sales is about ‘mental availability’ – making sure we’re on the shortlist when our target customers think about the product or service that we are selling.

The same is true for recruitment marketing.

How many times have you heard people saying “the people we need aren’t looking for a job”?

It’s these inactive jobseekers that this part of your recruitment marketing will awaken to the opportunities that exist in your organisation.

This video that we produced for Crossen Engineering is a perfect example of how you can tell your story.

2. A Day In The Life

Once we’ve got our target candidates to a point where they are thinking “that looks like a place that I’d like to work”, their information requirements change.

Just like in the sales process we’ve now created the “awareness” of our organisation at the top of the funnel and now we’re into the “consideration” phase.

The questions that we need to answer here include “what is it like to work there?”

This is where ‘Day in the Life’ content can work very well. It not only paints a picture of what it’s like to work in your organisation but also allows you to profile people in the specific roles that you know you will be recruiting.

Your ‘Day in the Life’ content should present the absolute best bits of working for your organisation.

Yes, you need to show some of what the actual job involves but you also need to show how the team interacts with each other. The canteen conversations, the social events.

You and I know that not all of this great stuff happens on the same day – and so do your candidates. Your content should not simply be a representation of what happens on one day, but an outline of what new recruits can expect from the experience of working in your organisation for a prolonged period.

So now you have created demand for the roles you are promoting and given people a glimpse of what working for you is like, what happens next?

We produced this video for Scileads this year to help give potential candidates a glimpse of what it’s like to work there.

3. Have A Bit Of Fun

This content is not about your organisation or the job.

It’s about showing some personality. Loosening up and letting people find out more about the humans that occupy your organisation.

This could be content from one of your team social events, a silly video that you do for Christmas or some rapid fire questions that you ask your team that helps potential candidates feel that as well as being able to achieve their personal ambitions, they might just enjoy themselves along the way.

This is the type of content that can work very well on social media channels in particular and if it’s well considered you can create a library of video assets that will allow you to communicate with your target candidates in an engaging way over a prolonged period of time.

When producing a recruitment video for SDG, there were lots of hilarious moments and we decided to compile these into a bloopers reel for SDG to use on their social media channels.

4. Libraries Of Short Form Content

Consistency is crucial in any marketing campaign and it’s no different when you’re thinking about recruitment marketing.

Being able to communicate regularly with your target candidates helps you to reinforce your key messages and ensure that the “mental availability” with your audience is maintained.

From our experience, short form content featuring your people talking about what it’s like to work for your organisation is very well received.

One of our customers recently told me that at every interview they do, candidates are quoting directly from these videos when being asked why they had decided to apply for the role.

Leaving aside the metrics around impressions, reach, likes and shares on your social channels (which are useful metrics from a brand awareness point of view), the evidence from interviews where candidates are quoting your people, provides the evidence that this sort of content does deliver a return on investment.

The great news is that this content is relatively easy to capture and a little effort can go a long way.

On one of our projects we were able to produce 50 short form videos from one day spent interviewing people.

If you’re thinking of publishing a video per week for the next 12 months – that’s the job done.

5. Your Culture, Values & Purpose

We’ve talked a little bit about this already in the ‘Tell your story’ section.

The content that tells your story has a responsibility to outline how your organisation has got to where it is today, The reason the organisation came into being, the success journey so far.

The content that focuses on your culture, values and purpose is entirely forward looking and provides you with the opportunity to outline your ambitions for the future. It’s this message that will get potential candidates excited about being part of the journey.

Show people your direction of travel. Outline the opportunities that will present for them – not only to be a part of something special but also to achieve their own personal growth ambitions.

If all of this content you’ve created works then at this point you’ll be getting more applications from better candidates. You’ll be filling your roles more quickly and you’ll be building a pipeline of talent ready for future opportunities.

But anyone working in recruitment knows that there’s a risky period between a job offer being accepted and a new employee arriving with you for the first day.

This is the time when they can get a counter offer from their current employer, they may have other job applications running alongside the application for your role.

So how can we reduce the risk of getting the “thanks, but no thanks” email a week before their start date?

This video that we produced for Smiley Monroe shows how you can clearly present your culture, values and purpose.

6. Onboarding Content

Up until now all of the content we have discussed has been for the public domain – your website, your social media channels.

This time, it’s targeted content that is intended for the consumption of individual candidates.

If you’ve bought a car (or enquired about buying a car) over the last 10 years you’ve probably seen the videos that the sales person sends you – a walk around the car, an introduction to the features – the heated seats, the leather interior, the alloys.

I don’t know about you, but when I receive one of these videos I feel obliged to follow up with the sales person because of the effort they have put in to create the video.

Creating onboarding content for candidates who have accepted roles but haven’t started yet can have the same effect.

While they are trying to talk themselves out of the big decision that they have just made, while their current colleagues are in their ear about how they will be missed, while their partners are asking them if they’re sure they’ve made the right decision – an additional piece of content from you could be the thing that seals the deal.

It can be done in a lot of different ways – a short message from the members of the team that they will be joining, a welcome message from their line manager, an outline of what their first week / month will look like.

All of this works to make the candidate feel comfortable with the decision that they have made and ignore the doubting voices.

This video that we produced for Scileads is a great example of how you can use video to assist your onboarding process.

Work better, not harder.

“If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting what we’ve always got.”

If what we’re currently doing to try and attract the right candidates isn’t delivering the results we need it to – and is threatening our growth ambitions – then it’s probably time to try a different approach.

While video isn’t the only answer, our experience with video for recruitment marketing over the last 15 years tells us that it is definitely part of the solution.

If you want to use video to improve your recruitment strategy, you can book a call with Peter using the button below.