Candidate Attraction in the Age of Remote Work

Love it or loathe it, remote working is here to stay, with the COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracking the work-from-home revolution. But how can talent acquisition teams recruit high-quality candidates when they often can’t physically meet them?

The adoption of remote working increased rapidly and dramatically in the decade prior to COVID-19. From greater flexibility and better work-life balance to the reduced impact on the environment and the ability to cut costs, the benefits of allowing staff to work from home were many – and many forward-thinking organizations jumped on board.

But the worldwide pandemic accelerated the uptake of remote working practices, particularly among businesses that usually operated in close-proximity spaces such as offices – whether they had previously been open to the idea or not.

The move to remote working has meant significant changes for many organizations. Businesses are not only rethinking the way they manage and engage existing staff, but also revisiting their approach to prospective employees – and, specifically, how they attract and hire new talent.

Navigating the ''new normal'' to attract candidates

The world’s highest-profile companies have overwhelmingly embraced working from home since COVID-19 flipped the traditional office-based business model on its head. 

Almost all of Facebook’s 48,000 employees have been working remotely since March 2020 – and will do so until July 2021. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge he estimated up to half of Facebook’s employees could be permanently working from home within five to 10 years. 

Dropbox announced in October 2020 it was becoming a “virtual-first” company, prioritizing remote work as the primary way of working for all its employees and introducing initiatives such as non-linear work days. Meanwhile, Spotify confirmed its commitment to a flexible workplace in February 2021, giving employees far greater choice about working from home, the office, or a combination of both. 

These trends and transitions are not only the domain of global juggernauts, however – small and big businesses alike have adopted work-from-home models, and these seem likely to stick around. Indeed, a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute has found that the office workspace – of the partitioned-off-desks, water-cooler and communal-kitchen variety – has the potential to go nearly all remote.

So as we navigate this “new normal” of remote working, it takes us back to a question posed by so many businesses when the pandemic first hit: how do we recruit high-quality talent when we can’t physically meet the people we want to hire?

During lockdown, we saw numerous organizations integrate video communication into everyday work practices, from video conferencing to virtual training. But there was also a massive shift in recruitment strategies as savvy companies began revising their candidate communications, moving from traditional tactics to embrace a virtual and personalized approach.

The rise and rise of recruitment video

At VideoMyJob, we’re seeing the move towards video firsthand, with organizations increasingly adopting video technology across all aspects of the recruitment process. It’s why we’re running the State of Video in Recruitment Marketing survey – as the world has changed, your recruitment marketing and talent acquisition goals and strategies probably have too, and we want to hear directly from the people at the coalface.

As more talent acquisition teams recognize that employee-generated video content has a key role to play in a remote recruitment process, there’s been a striking increase in several video categories over the past 12 months.

Our usage data shows this growth has primarily been in video job ads, with use of the format growing by almost 20 percent between September 2020 and February 2021 as organizations feel the limitations of the traditional text-based job ad. 

After all, would you rather read an ad that laboriously lists the minutiae of the position, or would you prefer to see the company culture and its employees firsthand? The data is telling us that, in this post-COVID world, option two is fast becoming the more popular scenario as candidates welcome the more personal touch that video affords.

We’re also seeing significant growth in the use of video to attract and engage candidates across the whole recruitment process. In March 2021, for example, our clients created a record-breaking number of videos. While the majority of those continued to be job ads (48 percent), recruitment process (10.5 percent), new-hire welcome (9 percent) and employee story (6 percent) videos were also extremely popular. 

Using personalized video to engage candidates

Just as the growth in video job ads shows us that companies are moving from static job descriptions to engaging, story-led ads, the increase in recruitment process, new-hire welcome and employee story videos suggest a shift to more personalized, virtual candidate communications. 

With video, talent teams can nurture suitable candidates through recruitment with personalized information about the company, its employees and culture – without the candidate even setting foot in the organization’s front door. They can outline the next steps in the recruitment process, provide interview tips and tricks, or even personalized feedback to unsuccessful candidates. It’s an approach that’s highly effective in a face-to-face recruitment context but has become even more relevant in a remote environment.

It’s undeniable that the world is changing at a rapid pace, accelerated by a global pandemic that left a lot of us scrambling to implement new systems. But with remote working here to stay, harnessing the power of video to attract new staff makes sense on so many levels.

Take our State of Video in Recruitment Marketing survey for the chance to win a VideoMyJob prize pack. But, more importantly, you’ll be among the first to receive exclusive access to the report findings once they’re released, helping you benchmark your company and approach with other talent teams and recruiters around the world.