With plenty of options to choose from, candidates hold a great amount of power these days. Since they have so many opportunities, your job postings need to stand out and be incredibly persuasive. There is one stand-out ingredient in job postings that really compel people to apply—surprisingly, it’s video! If recruitment videos weren’t on your radar as part of your recruiting strategy yet, they will be now.
Numbers don’t lie. CareerBuilder’s internal data revealed that job postings with video icons are viewed 12% more than ones without them. The data also showed that companies receive a 34% greater application rate when they add at least one video to their job postings.
Here’s Why Video Must be One of Your Recruiting Strategies
Videos are highly effective at showing a company’s personality and capturing emotion. They’re the perfect medium for storytelling, and can make your job posting shine. This is especially true considering that candidates are used to seeing plain text in job ads.
In fact, visitors are less likely to read a webpage with large chunks of text—on average, a user only reads 20% of content on a page. That’s why online marketing experts often recommend breaking up a webpage with images and videos. This makes sense because when the human brain processes information, 90% of it is visual. Knowing this, why not consider incorporating video into your job postings? Rather than relying on just words to describe your company and its culture, use video to show it.
Before You Get Started
Before you start making phone calls to get your video produced, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the company mission and values?
- Why do employees love working there?
- What type of work benefits and perks do employees enjoy?
When you have the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to produce a clear video that answers questions job applicants want to know. Always focus on the “why.” By including this information in your video, you should attract qualified candidates who like what your company stands for and offers to its employees.
How to Make Engaging Recruitment Videos
Well-known companies like Google and Starbucks have strong recruitment videos. Not only are they great at showing the company’s story, these videos touch on all of the points applicants are curious about: company culture, work environment, benefits and what a typical day looks like. You certainly don’t have to be a household name to make an amazing video. All you need is a plan and an understanding of the best practices for recruitment videos. Here are a few of them:
- Include employees of various roles and levels
Provide a well-rounded picture of the company and its people by including employees of various roles and seniority levels. You may want the leadership team or CEO to talk about the company’s values, and the employees to talk about the types of projects they work on and what a typical day looks like for them. - Keep it under 5 minutes long
To capture viewer’s attention, ensure that your video is less than five minutes long. While it’s probably not hard for you to talk about why your company is so great at length, viewers may not have the time or attention span to watch the video in full. Many of the best recruitment videos out there are about two minutes long.
- Be authentic
Those involved in the video should know the message they’re intended to convey, but they shouldn’t sound scripted. Following a script will come off as stiff and disingenuous. Instead, embrace the company’s and employees’ personalities. If your company is casual and laidback, don’t be afraid to show it in your video.
- Add a call to action
You’ve spent time crafting a great video, so don’t forget to include a call to action at the end of your video. Since the main objective is to encourage people to apply to your job postings, include the link to direct candidates to where they should apply for jobs.
Are You Ready to Start Creating Videos?
Your recruitment video can be anything you want it to be! It can be funny, serious, insightful and everything in between. Including video to encourage candidates to apply is one of today’s most effective recruiting strategies. As long as you show why it’s so great to work at your company, you’ll be on your way to drawing more applicants into your job postings by standing out from the crowd!
As you create a whole archive of videos, use your ATS system to store and organize them in the appropriate job order records. This will also empower you to run reports for data driven insights on which videos were most successful. Make sure you select a staffing and recruiting software that supports multiple file formats with robust reporting functionality, so that you can keep up with these exciting market developments.
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