HR recruitment video marketing – How to attract the right talent

05th March 2015

Smart brands are now looking to address their potential recruits with the same care as they do their customers, especially as UK businesses report skill and talent shortages. With top business leaders such as Richard Branson arguing that your people are your biggest assets it’s hard to disagree with this strategy of targeting the candidate-customer. (Forbes)

To attract and retain talent, brands need to draw on techniques that have proved successful in consumer and B2B marketing, including content marketing. Just as video increases engagement with consumers on social media and email marketing, job postings with video icons are viewed 12% more than postings without, and on average there are 34% more applications with video (according to Careerbuilder).

To give you inspiration for your own talent-hunting campaigns, we’ve searched for good practice in recruitment video marketing.

Branding across channels

Recruitment is just another place for the ‘customer-candidate’ to engage with your brand values. You are advertising posts for potential brand advocates, and therefore you need to attract and retain people who share those values and have the talent to take the brand ahead.

Stressing the importance of attracting the right employees, Ernst and Young (EY) have developed integrated careers pages with engaging and varied video content on their owned channels which all convey brand values and messages clearly. Their YouTube channel is well-structured with videos aimed at their different audiences from school-leavers, graduates and those in employment looking for career changes, and there is regularly updated content. Video blogging via interns offers a fresh point of view which this demographic could relate to, and are shared via their dedicated careers Facebook page and a YouTube playlist.

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Let your team do the talking

Food brand, Innocent uses testimonials intercut with a talking head from their founder to reinforce their brand values and the desirable attributes of future employees. It takes a conventional approach when we may have expected something a bit more unusual from this quirky brand. However, the film does what it needs to. It clearly states their brand’s ethical positioning, the type of person they’re looking for, and how they will be developed. And sound-bites from the team, such as they love to work with their friends every day, are priceless.

 

Written employee testimonials add authenticity to your brand, and when you film them this increases exponentially. It’s just much more believable seeing their positive body language and hearing why they love working for you. Video testimonials also help prospective employees imagine how it would feel to be part of the team.  Don’t be too generic – it rings more true if it seems real.

Are you selling a dream job?

In B2B marketing, research has identified that emotion plays a role in the buying decision process. Similarly, when we’re looking for our first post or a new role, we need to make an emotional as well as logical connection with the brand. Facts about an employer are not enough. As Dorothy Mead, chief acquisition officer at Blur Group says,

“There’s probably a lot more emotion in our working day than we’d care to admit. Marketers should acknowledge that. Humans have personal goals and objectives as well as business ones.” (B2B Marketing)

With their #dreamjobs campaign, Salesforce takes a fun look at the testimonial video asking their employers to enter a confessional booth to share why Salesforce is their dream job. The set up allows the emotional (lifetime supply of animal crackers) and the logical (development opportunities) reasons for enjoying work to be presented. Their careers page gives further facts about working for Salesforce and CSR information presented in an engaging way through videos and infographics.

Taking the playfulness further, Twitter makes a humorous video parodying the conventions of a recruitment video to play with the knowing, media savvy employees they want to recruit. If you can pull this off, humour can make your video stand out from the crowd.

Animation

But testimonials are far from the only way to reveal what you do as a brand. Recently we worked alongside our partner agency, Thirty Three, to create a film for retail tech supremo, Ocado Technology (which is in competition with well-known technology brands such as Google for the most talented people). We created an animation that showed clearly the complexity of what Ocado Technology does, but then revealed that people were at the heart of the technological wizardry.

 

Attracting graduates

The audience must take centre stage in any campaign, and this video from Starbucks really speaks to its graduate target market. The talking heads mention all the things that graduates would be interested in – development opportunities, making a difference in the world, being valued in the firm – but also the little things like making friends and the transition from college to the workplace.

With the demographic of younger millennials, a different approach can help to cut through the content noise. AXA invested in such a campaign offering a once in a lifetime prize for graduates to travel the world and gain work experience at the firm. We were challenged by agency, ThirtyThree, to create a video to promote it, and decided the best way to grab attention was to put the viewer in the position of the winner with a first-person point of view video.

 

Distribution

As with any marketing campaign, the ultimate aim is to reach and engage your target audience. At the planning stage, you should be factoring in how to distribute your video. Post your video on YouTube and optimise it, add it to your other owned channels – relevant social media channels and your careers landing page. Videos can also be used to make your job adverts stand out, whilst blogger outreach can help you target specific communities. We also advise keeping back around 20% of your budget for seeding and advertising.

Will your video marketing agency fit in?

It is especially important with recruitment films to work with a video marketing agency which can fit in with your working practices. Getting these relationships right will minimise disruption to your business and get the best results.

How has video recruitment worked for your brand? If you’d like to discuss any potential internal comms or recruitment video marketing campaigns with us, feel free to get into contact.

Give us a ring: 01179 240773

Drop us a line: info@hurricanemedia.co.uk

Tweet us: @hurricanemedia

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