Get More Out of Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy with Video

As the competition for great talent continues to heat up, savvy organizations are firing up their recruitment marketing strategies with a secret weapon: video. Here’s what you need to know.

“You’ve been promoting our new job listing on our website, right?”

“Absolutely! The ad went up a few days ago and we’ve been sharing it all over our social media channels. Surely you’ve received some applications by now?”

“We’ve had a couple of candidates reach out, but they’re simply not qualified for the role. I’m beginning to get a little concerned, to be honest. I thought we’d be inundated – this is a really great position!” 

We’re sure every manager has had a conversation like this at some stage in their working life. Attracting the right candidates is a constant challenge for talent acquisition professionals. Get it wrong, and you are forced to pick the best option from a small pool of unsuitable candidates. But do it well, and your organization can be spoilt for choice, ultimately helping you achieve an excellent hiring outcome. 

Right now, the talent situation is getting more competitive. Candidates hold the power as businesses around the globe experience an unprecedented talent shortage and scramble to find suitable staff to fill urgent vacancies. In its investigation into the “great resignation”, McKinsey found that an alarming 40% of employees are “at least somewhat likely” to leave their current job in the next three to six months.

It’s clear talent acquisition professionals need to step up their game to build robust pipelines of qualified candidates. Rather than a “post and pray” approach, companies need to employ sophisticated recruitment marketing strategies to provide the necessary talent to meet their goals. 

In this article, we unpack the elements of recruitment marketing and show you how to make video an integral part of your strategy with some recruitment marketing examples. 

What is a recruitment marketing strategy?

Recruitment marketing refers to the tactics organizations use to attract, engage and interest a candidate before they apply for a job. 

Anyone who has seen a recruitment funnel knows that recruitment marketing involves all the activities to guide a candidate to the application stage. Generally, this includes three steps:

1. Awareness: Getting on future candidates’ radars as a potential employer. 
2. Consideration: Nurturing candidates and educating them on the benefits of working for your organization. 
3. Interest: Funnelling the candidates’ interest toward a particular job opportunity. 

Success in recruitment marketing is measured through conversion rates or by converting leads to applicants. But it’s not just about filling your talent pipeline with random talent: as every recruiter knows, quality is much more important than quantity. 

To find those quality candidates, recruitment marketing strategies use a variety of tactics, including: 

• Posting job ads on job boards
• Employer branding
• Broadcasting the Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
• Digital content marketing (videos and blog articles, for example)
• Social media marketing (LinkedIn, for example)
• Career pages
• Employee advocacy
• Online review management (Glassdoor, for example)
• Talent communities

Sure, you could take a text-based approach to all of these activities, writing thousands of words about how great it is to work at your organization. But the thing is: millions of other employers are doing the exact same thing. Sadly, even the best copy frequently gets lost in the noise.

Bringing video into the content mix

Video content typically achieves much greater cut-through in recruitment marketing. It’s more engaging, builds brand authenticity and tells your organization’s story in a way the written word cannot. It’s the old “show, not tell” approach to storytelling – but the story is your company. 

Here’s how to effectively leverage video content at each stage of the recruitment marketing process.

Awareness

The first stage of any good recruitment marketing strategy is ensuring your organization is on your candidates’ radars. Top candidates will be more inclined to apply for an open position at your organization if they’re already familiar with your brand and, most crucially, like what they see. It’s also a great way to attract passive candidates. (Side note: See episode 15 of Talent Blazers, where we interview Experian’s Doug Kelsall for a great example of how the organization is using video to attract passive candidates.)

To build awareness of your organization, focus on developing EVP videos that showcase the good work your company is doing in areas such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, and diversity and inclusion (D&I).  Good people want to work for good companies, and they’re more likely to absorb information about your brand when it’s presented via bite-sized, engaging video content. 

It’s also important to make sure you’re sharing those videos on the channels where your candidates are already active. As many as 90% of respondents in VideoMyJob’s State of Video in Talent (SOVT) 2021  survey said that a key benefit of using video content was social media engagement and reach – so, when it comes to getting your name out there, be sure to use these platforms to your advantage.

Consideration

At this stage of the recruitment marketing funnel, it’s time to give prospective candidates a little more insight into what it might be like to work for your company.

Employee stories and day-in-the-life videos will be most effective here, providing much-longed-for insights into the experiences of your existing employees.  

Employee stories are a particularly good way to build your brand’s reputation because they are perceived by candidates as authentic and engaging. Indeed, the SOVT 2021 report found that employee stories were the top video type created globally. Ultimately, if you can showcase a truly happy and motivated workforce, you’ll have top talent queuing up to work for you.

Interest

During the third and final stage of the recruitment marketing process, it’s time to focus on amplifying information about specific job opportunities. Your prospective candidates are now familiar with your brand and they’ve heard from your employees, so it’s time to start promoting your company’s open positions. Use video content here to provide details about open positions, your recruitment process, and the compensation and benefits packages you can offer.

Three tips for using video in recruitment marketing

Not sure where to start? Here are some tips and recruitment marketing examples for putting video at the heart of your recruitment marketing strategy.

1. Deploy video content every step of the way

According to the Video Maturity Model in our SOVT 2021 report, organizations at the start of their video journey tend to use video for only one or two parts of the candidate journey. Advanced users, however, take an end-to-end video-first approach. 

This means reaching for the camera, rather than the keyboard, for all recruitment marketing activities. 

Google’s four-minute video explanation of its hiring process is a great recruitment marketing example. It’s friendly, informative, and much more engaging than a text-based description. 

> How we hire at Google

2. Leverage the star quality of your workforce

Always use real employees instead of paid actors in your recruitment marketing videos, as research reveals that they’re your biggest marketing asset. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer: “Brand messages distributed by employees are re-shared 24 times more often than if your brand distributes the message.” Additionally, consumers consider employee shares to be more authentic than corporate shares.

Check out IBM’s “This is our life at IBM” video, featuring real employees from all over the world – it’s a great example of employer branding. The picture and sound quality isn’t as slick as a professional production, but this is more than made up for by the authenticity the employees bring to the video. 

> This is our life at IBM

3. Prioritize diversity and inclusion

Want to bring more diverse talent into your recruitment pipeline? Make sure your videos feature diverse employees. This means showing people of different genders, sexualities ages, ethnicity, disability and more. Through the power of representation, diverse candidates will think “Hey, that looks a bit like me … maybe I could do this job, too.” 

Apple does a masterful job with its “Humanity is plural” video campaign:

> Apple — Inclusion & Diversity — Open

We all know that attracting the right candidates in the first place is the key to great employees. A recruitment marketing strategy – with video at its core – can help you target the right prospects for your organization throughout the recruitment journey. It’s why some of the biggest organizations in the world, like Apple, IBM and Google decide to use video to promote their employer brand. And you can too.

Let’s talk

Book a time with one of our video experts to discuss your recruitment marketing strategy.