Impact your bottomline - use video
March 20th, 2009 • by Craig Endicott • Posted in Talent Acquisition • 1 Comment »A few months ago I was at an event listening to a speaker from YouTube telling us how important video is in recruitment - not just to differentiate but also to really communicate and reinforce the essence of the employer brand.
Of course video has been used as part of recruitment communications for a long-time before YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo and the plethora of video sites existed. Prior to joining StepStone I worked for a well known recruitment advertising and communications agency when video, distributed to (mainly graduate) candidates on DVD, was common place.
Over the years I've seen some great video produced (by my previous employer and other agencies) in the pursuit of recruitment but I have also seen some terrible wastes of money where the glossy output with silver-screen production values (and costs) completely missed the point.
The speaker from YouTube made some very strong points about the use of video sites for recruitment purposes:
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Its a rich medium - use it to communicate more than just your vacancy
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Keep video clips short – attention spans are
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The clip should reinforce the brand
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The content should reinforce messages in other media
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Dont 'over produce' the clip - quality should be in keeping with your brand but also be authentic
This final point really struck a chord with me. The other points are good but number 5 is what video sites are all about. Easy to produce, quick to distribute, fast to access, valuable, rich content consumed in a familiar, comfortable format. Why write anything again?
I was surfing through Google Video today and found this clip of a Southwest Airlines Flight Attendant rapping the pre-flight safety instructions. Its great – it’s fun, it’s authentic and it’s original.
I’m not sure if it was produced by the firm or if it is a personal video, then I found a few other similar clips featuring other Southwest employees so I checked-out the Southwest Airlines recruitment site. Interestingly the words on the page and the style of the site validated what I saw in the video – the clip reinforces tenets of the employer brand.
The site content and the video clips on Google Video work in complete harmony with each other. In many ways it doesn’t matter if the video was produced by the firm rather than by the employee – it just feels real and that is POWERFUL.
