From Regional Pilot to Global Video Adoption with GSK

As part of our Talent Blazers series we spoke with Samantha Chong, Project Manager at GSK, to find out exactly how her team nailed video adoption in local recruitment marketing – and then turned it into a global rollout.

How did GSK’s Singapore-based talent team use video to supercharge recruitment marketing and the candidate experience, and how did this lead to global video adoption? It started, says Samantha Chong, GSK’s Project Manager, with a small pilot that allowed successes – and failures – to be shared and learnt from.

Swapping lengthy job ads for engaging videos

Before starting at global healthcare company GSK, Samantha had a background in advertising and marketing. This lens helped her take a consumer-first approach when reinventing GSK’s recruitment marketing. 

One of Samantha’s key steps to improve the candidate experience was to review the company’s traditional text-based job ads. 

“We used video to replace those really lengthy job ads,” says Samantha. “With video, you can engage someone very quickly, and get a lot of information across in a short space of time.” 

Other benefits of video job ads? A well-structured, compelling video ad is more likely to be shared socially, gives you the opportunity to show off company culture and values, and provides the ability to offer an authentic snapshot of your workplace and employees. 

But, at GSK, video was used for a lot more than advertising jobs. In a pilot program, GSK’s Singapore talent team also used video to:

• Share GSK career stories.
• Provide job interview tips.
• Replace email-based candidate communications. 

Driving a global video adoption strategy

You know that you’ve done something right when your local initiative gets picked up and rolled out to a global organization of 100,000 people. 

The use of video in recruitment marketing was adopted from a Singapore-based APAC pilot to the entire GSK global business. Samantha explains how this happened:

“We began with training sessions for the APAC talent team, and challenged them to create one video per month. In those first few months we ran bi-weekly sessions so the team could share their experiences, their successes, troubleshoot together, and share plans in the works.

 

“Once we started to publish those videos both internally at GSK and externally in the market, other regions caught wind of the pilot and began to ask us what we were doing. From that point, we launched a global rollout.”

Samantha’s team created a toolkit for their international colleagues that highlighted the purpose of video content in recruitment marketing, and included video and script examples to give the teams something to refer to. 

Creating video content was also embedded into new-joiner training (onboarding) around the world, so every new hire knew that video creation was an essential part of their role.

Getting hiring managers on board with video

Inevitably, one of the biggest challenges was to get hiring managers – many of whom were used to writing traditional job ads – on board with the adoption of video ads for roles in their teams.

Samantha explains that the best tool to show them the power of video… was a video.

“We created an introductory video that we sent to hiring managers along with a meeting invitation. This video was then used in the intake meetings to show hiring managers how we want to modernize the process.”

Other tools of persuasion included:

• Collating video engagement data to help build buy-in.
• Deliberately advertising some roles without video to create comparisons.
• Sharing successes across regions.
• Building mini case studies to share with hiring managers. 

GSK is the perfect example of an organization that harnessed the power of video by starting small, then building upon their success. 

Is your organization ready to take the leap like GSK? Discuss your unique talent goals with a Video Specialist in a free VideoMyJob demo today.