3 Simple Strategies for Better Recruitment Videos

Think of your video job advert as, well, think of it as an advertisement! Imagine you are advertising a chocolate bar, do Cadbury list every.single.ingredient in their ads? No. Do they try and tap into an emotional or physical need that will prompt you to think of their chocolate bar next time you’re hungry/sad/romantic? Yes!

Now think about how you can translate that into an ad for your next open role. Err no, I heard that, you don’t need Ryan Gosling to sell your opportunity (although he might increase your click rate). You also don’t need to open with a laundry list of skills, experience and benefits. You need to create curiosity and desire in your ideal candidate. Just like any consumer advert.

Open by painting a picture. What is the challenge this job gets to solve, how does it feel at the end of a great day, why do employees stay with your company? The benefit of using video in your job promotion is you—or one of your colleagues, or the hiring manager—get to share your enthusiasm for this job live, in all your umming, blinking glory. Credible, authentic and human.

At Siemens, the recruitment marketing team has found that job seekers who arrive on their job posts from a sponsored video job ad spend twice as much time on a job post. That’s twice the engagement rate of candidates arriving via job boards or Siemens own career site search engine. Why? Because these candidates have ‘met’ a future colleague, they’ve caught a glimpse of what it’s like to actually work at Siemens and this human touch has resulted in them becoming significantly more invested in learning about the opportunity.

The ‘job’ of your video job ad is to entice candidates to click to learn more. Your written job posting will do the rest.

But how do you transition from a read-aloud shopping list of tasks to a vibrant, evocative video advert? Here are our top 3 strategies for creating better video job ads:

• Better video job ads start with better intelligence
• Creative ways to involve your hiring manager
• Video titles and job titles are *really* important

Better video job ads start with better intelligence

As Katrina Kibben of Three Ears Media tells us in her fantastic ​'Job Post Writing Workbook' (download it now if you haven’t already.) You can’t create a compelling job advert (video or text) if you can’t answer the question, “what does the best person for this job care about?” 

The best way to find out about a role is by talking to the hiring manager or someone in the role already. The trick to uncovering the gold is asking the right questions.

You need to ask the type of questions that help hiring managers translate the skills they need into experiences you can talk about.

• What happens on a good day?
• How do you explain what you do?
• Tell me about a problem you’ve solved, or a challenge you’ve overcome?

Remind your interviewee to drop the pitch, share real challenges and provide specific examples.  Effective video job ads let the real people do the talking.

Creative ways to involve your hiring manager

A great way to market your opportunity is to capture your hiring manager on film answering those questions. I’m not going to lie, convincing your hiring manager to star in your next video job ad is a blog in itself!

Here are our top tips for involving your hiring manager in the development of an effective video job advertisement, broken down by the most common obstacles.

Problem: presentation skills (lack of)

Awkward videos come in many forms, they might manifest in a wooden-face, a robot-like delivery or weird facial expressions. Never fear, between us we’ve made 7000 videos (not all with willing participants), we have some ideas to help.

If your hiring manager is not very animated physically, but speaks in a compelling way, use image and video overlays to illustrate their main points, while masking the worst of their facial expressions.

If your hiring manager is super animated but talks too fast or struggles to stay on message, use video overlays to introduce your hiring manager or show them in action, without the audio.

Watch the example below created by the Talent Acquisition team at RMIT University, an excellent use of video overlays using corporate b-roll and text captions which emphasize key points.

Tool tip: With VideoMyJob’s overlays it’s easy to add supporting images or video and position them ‘over’ your main video. You can time it to the second and text overlays can even be added to emphasize important points.

Problem: nerves

For some, being on video is not natural at all. If you can prep your hiring manager with the questions above and invite them to share their response in a Q&A style 2-person video, this can be a very effective way of helping them to overcome their nerves.

You can also deliver the questions from off-screen, so that your hiring manager can focus on having a conversation with you, and worry less about how they look or reading a teleprompter.

In the video below Experian's Employer Branding Manager does a great job of drawing out interesting information about the role in a relaxed conversational style.

Tool tip: VideoMyJob’s project planning tool makes it easier to create teleprompter scripts (in this case questions) and assign them to your hiring managers, complete with calendar invitations.

Problem: lack of time (or flat out refusal)

If you can’t overcome your hiring manager's objections to video within the time constraints of your job req, there are still a few options available to you.

Capturing your hiring manager’s responses in a recorded Zoom meeting, a google form or an email are all acceptable fall-back options and will provide you with better insights and more colourful language with which to explain the role in a video.

Davidson Executive Recruitment's Principal Consultant has done an exceptional job of researching the role and the impact this new role will have on the business in this short video job ad.

Tool tip: If you have a Business, Education, or Enterprise Zoom license with cloud recording enabled you can automatically transcribe the audio of any meeting that you record to the cloud.

Video titles and job titles are *really* important

I kid you not. This oft-overlooked but simple bit of advice is probably one of the Job Post Lady (AKA Katrina Kibben's) top recommendations. Your video title, and by extension your job title, is one of the most critical elements of your video job ad, if not THE most important. Your video title, combined with your video thumbnail, is what makes someone decide if they’re going to click play or not. It’s also the ultimate factor in determining if a job seeker even finds your job in the first place.

According to Katrina, most of the time we’re not even using the same title that job seekers are searching!

But how do you know? How do you work out the difference between an Administrative Assistant and Office Manager, then figure out which one gets more traffic in your area?

You use the Three Ears Media ‘Job Title Testing System’ 

Step 1

Google the job title you’re using for your video title + image search resumes i.e. ‘human resources business partner resume’

Step 2

Look for qualified resumes and review the most common job titles. Pick four. Using the example above you would expect something along the lines of: HR Business Partner, Human Resources Business Partner. Director, Human Resources and Strategic Thinker, Business Partner.

Step 3

Use Google Trends to compare traffic. Guess which one is the red line? HR Business Partner.

Did I hear someone whisper, “But, I don’t have influence over job titles.” You are not alone. We all know that job titles are supposed to clearly communicate what you do and your seniority, but sometimes—due to bureaucracy or quirkiness—that is not at all what a job title communicates!

Our advice here is to opt for the most commonly searched relevant job title to increase your reach and entice candidates, ensuring that the call to action leads job seekers to a page where the full (correct) title and position description are clearly outlined. In most cases this will keep your legal and marketing teams happy, but do check before you hit 'submit' on that!

Good luck creating your next recruiting video, for more advice on creating better job posts, watch our recent webinar with Katrina Kibben.