How to Film Stellar Recruitment Videos and Maximize Talent Acquisition

To understand what a dramatic change recruiting has undergone, just consider the rise of recruitment videos. In this year alone, we’ve gone from an environment where mingling at networking events full of hundreds of unmasked strangers was normal to one where nearly every office is virtual, we all wear sweats, and we live on Zoom.

This shift has been sudden, but I promise you, it predates the pandemic. Remote collaboration tools, social media, and professional social networks have been creating an environment where we do less and less face-to-face interacting. Even before 2020, the Vidyard recruiting team had noticed. They responded by sending more and more personal video.

Video has become incredibly easy to record and send and is packed with emotional non-verbal cues that you don’t get otherwise. Video helps you demonstrate your enthusiasm, and helps build strong connections with candidates.

Because of video, Joel can not only explain the inexplicable (who would have thought!), but we also get to know him. We see his energy, audacity, and humor. Recruiters can send their own video right back.

And because remote work means open hunting for recruiters, the time for it has never been better. The Vidyard team is no longer just looking within Mississauga and Toronto—they’re scouring through every major city in our time zone for remote talent.

Recruiting videos are how we engage candidates and win their trust in an increasingly remote-friendly world. If your team isn’t on this trend, don’t worry. But do catch up!

What Are Recruitment Videos?

A recruitment video is just what it sounds like—it’s a video for attracting candidates to a role. That could be one general video about an open position or a one-to-one video message to someone who you think is a perfect fit. For Vidyard, recruitment videos are the perfect tool for filling niche roles in a talent market like today’s.

I’ve spent over 11 years in recruiting and I can say that even before the pandemic, things were growing more competitive. It’s harder to build pipeline and find the right candidate for each posting. But you can use recruitment videos to your advantage to help.

Recruitment videos make for a great candidate experience because they allow you to show off the company and its people. That builds trust right away. People tend to prefer watching over reading, and if your culture video is packed with ‘show-not-tell’ examples of your values, vision, and creativity, it conveys an added world of meaning.

More and more, companies are having to design for the candidate experience. After all, candidates are like customers, and even those who aren’t hired can still play a role as promoters or detractors. More than likely a candidate will tell friends and family about a bad interview or post about the experience on social. Many will completely avoid companies with negative online reviews. You have to be constantly winning candidates’ trust.

To that end, your executives can help. At Vidyard, CEO Michael Litt helps out with recruiting by posting company values videos where he gives people a look into what life here is like.

This is all to say, video can be an efficient way to recruit. When the right candidates feel drawn to the business, it speeds up recruiting times and cuts down costs. If you’re getting higher conversions, you need fewer candidates in the pipeline. All of this makes it a wonderful tool as departments everywhere are tightening their belts.

The Benefits of Video Recruitment

• Speeds up time to hire
• Creates a better candidate experience
• Reduces cost to hire
• Showcases company culture
• Builds more trust with candidates
• Inserts emotion into an otherwise formal process
• Increases retention with top performers
• Increases referrals in a crowded talent pool

How to Create Stellar Recruitment Videos

Now, the point of recruitment videos isn’t simply to film for the sake of filming. It’s to identify existing issues in your process and solve them using video. For instance, if your postings aren’t earning enough eyeballs or your response rates are low, video can probably help.

There are four types of videos for recruiting you can use to accomplish your goals at various stages of the recruitment funnel.

1. General Announcement Recruiting Videos

Does anyone out there know you’re hiring? With general announcement recruiting videos, you can explain why your company is such a great employer in a format that’s more likely to be noticed because 72% of people say they’d rather watch a video than read.

There are many places to post your general announcement videos:

On your careers page: Careers pages with video are more engaging. They help you build a relationship with candidates earlier and are 53% more likely to show up on Google’s first page.
On social media: Many social networks want to encourage video use and give preferential treatment to video posts. One study finds they generate 12 times as many shares.
On your LinkedIn profile: Add a video to your company page, your profile, and to your hiring managers’ profiles.
In your email signatures: Insert a thumbnail of the video into your email signature, complete with a “Play” button so people know to click.

2. Culture Videos

Any video that shows off your company’s personality is a culture video. Often, they’re created for employees, but they work wonders for recruiting. Culture videos can feature a montage of team events, interviews about what it’s like to work there or recount the company’s history.

3. Open Job Posting Videos

Create recruiting videos to share about open job postings. You could make one video about multiple postings, or one video for each posting, where you feature the CEO or the hiring manager. When people get to virtually meet their future team or boss, it increases application rates. But that’s just half of it.

The greatest advantage to open job posting recruitment videos is the reach. I recently ran a test and posted listings on LinkedIn and then a video talking about the same listings a week later. The text post earned 200 videos and the video post earned nearly 2,000. Just by using video, I increased my applicant network awareness by 10 times.

4. One-to-One Candidate Videos

Record and send a personal video directly to a candidate. It’s much easier to convey your excitement about the candidate, as well as talk through why they might be excited. Text-only outreach can sometimes feel presumptive, but video allows you to be candid and ramble a little without fear of being misinterpreted.

It’s hard to convey the feeling of excitement personalized videos create until you receive one. I liken it to going to a sporting event and being picked out of the crowd by the jumbotron camera. Plus, video feels high-effort when it isn’t. Candidates are left with the impression that you go to great lengths to care for them and that the halo effect can last through their interview process and well into the role.

Tips for recording one-to-one candidate videos:

• Speak directly to them, as if you were there in-person
• Start with whatever’s most likely to interest them
• Use personal details so they know it’s not just a generic recording
• If discussing sensitive information, password-protect your videos

How to Use Recruitment Videos to Attract the Right Candidates

Not much is needed in the way of equipment. Your webcam or smartphone and nice headphones will do. However, more effort can really make your recruiting video stand out and help you attract the right candidate. Below are a list of principles for filming great recruitment videos:

1. Make a personal introduction: Even if resharing an existing culture video, create a playlist with a personal introduction video to make the whole thing feel tailored.
2. Record for accessibility and mind the details: Use high-contrast captions and practice the candidate’s name to ensure you’re pronouncing it correctly.
3. Use real employees, not actors: This maybe goes without saying, but people want to see your company’s authentic self. Actors give it a bit of an uncanny valley feel.
4. Begin with why they should care: Marketers call this the “what’s in it for me” factor—hook viewers with what’s interesting first, then explain what you’re about.
5. Explain the business briefly: People care, but less than you think—stick to the mission and what’s most relevant to them, and avoid reciting company history unless it’s relevant. (E.g. Knowing that your company was founded in 1942 isn’t relevant. Knowing you invented broccolini is.)
6. Feature a clear call to action: Be very specific about what you want them to do, like share or apply. If you stick to just one call to action, people are more likely to act.
7. Give it several tries: There’s no limit to the number of takes you can do. Take a breath and repeat until satisfied.
8. Brand your video player: If you can add your color and logo to the video player, it’ll help remind viewers who they’re hearing from.

How to Write a Recruiting Video Script

Recruiters often ask whether they should write out a video script. I recommend it! But, don’t recite it. I find it easier to write a script to organize my thoughts, than speak from memory so it sounds natural. To write your own video script, answer these questions in order:

• Why should the candidate be interested?
• Why are you interested in the candidate?
• What do they need to know about this opportunity? (E.g. Urgency, many applicants)
• How can they take action?

Advanced Tips for How to Make a Recruiting Video

Starting to send videos is one thing. But if you’re curious about how you make a recruiting video truly great and really speed up your time to hire and lower the cost of those hires, consider investing in a video platform. It’ll allow you far more flexibility and help every recruiter get more value out of their recruiting videos. For example, Vidyard allows recruitment teams to:

1. Improve with analytics: You can see how much people consume of your videos. For instance, is there a sudden dropoff rate at about the halfway mark? Run tests to see if shorter videos increase watch rates, or if candidates just aren’t as interested in scenes from the holiday party as employees are.
2. Identify the most engaged applicants: You can see how many videos each candidate has watched, and how much of each video. It’s not a perfect indicator, but someone who’s binged every company video is likely much more motivated than someone who only watched half of one.
3. Store and repurpose videos: Create collections or “video hubs” for different types of videos—office tours, culture videos, team videos—and allow viewers to binge at their discretion.
4. Gate videos to capture candidate information: You can insert a form that asks for someone’s contact information, either at the beginning of the video or right before it gets to the good stuff.
5. Turn your careers page into a “you” tube: With a video platform like Vidyard, you can showcase company videos that then recommend other company videos based on what people are most likely to watch.
6. Increase application rates with calls to action: Catch people when they’re most excited—during or after an inspiring video—with a link to fill out the application.

How to Use Video to Increase Candidate Diversity

We know by now that the candidate “pipeline problem” is a myth. It’s up to companies to widen their search and examine their biases, video has a role to play here, too. When your positions are viewed and shared more widely, you expand into talent pools you hadn’t yet identified. And with open and honest videos, you can demonstrate that your business truly values diversity.

Diversity brings immense value to the business, and diversity is about much more than just race. It’s every factor that predisposes someone to think differently—anything that’ll help them see problems from new angles. It’s incumbent upon every business to recruit for greater diversity and that’s why I spend a lot of time coaching our managers on reducing bias in the interview process. When they decline a candidate, we talk through their reasoning to ensure that we’re being objective and fair-minded.

We, like many, are far from done in these efforts—and I think that being honest about it, especially in our videos, goes a long way to helping with the problem.

How to Get Started with Recruitment Videos

All that’s needed is a smartphone or computer and the will to record! With Vidyard’s free, browser- or app-based recording tool, you can make and send your own video in a matter of minutes. If you, like so many recruiters, find that video helps you, get the word out there! More video and more sharing means better matchups between the right companies and candidates, and we all have a part to play in helping people continue their careers in the ever-evolving new world of work.

This post was originally published on November 19, 2019. It was updated on April 29, 2022