VideoMyJob Blog | Video Marketing for Talent Teams

What is a Talent Acquisition Strategy? (And How to Supercharge Yours with Video)

Written by Jay Rusden | January 09, 2022

What’s video got to do with a talent acquisition strategy? Everything. Organizations are using a talent acquisition framework to drive amazing improvements in talent attraction, engagement, diversity and inclusion programs, and a whole lot more. 

Not far from the VideoMyJob offices, there’s a strip of Italian restaurants. Each one employs a “barker” – that person who stands out the front and tries to lure in passers-by with promises of the world’s best-tasting gnocchi or authentic marinara. 

The trouble is that there are about 20 barkers in a row, all of whom are trying to drown out their competitors by yelling at the top of their lungs. Confronted with so much noise and confusion, most people react by hurrying onwards and avoiding eye contact.

Sometimes the candidate experience is like traversing this restaurant strip. Businesses are currently in the midst of a global talent crunch, which has already risen to a shortfall of 40 million workers worldwide. The result? Employers are reacting by making more noise than ever. Candidates are forced to wade through a sea of content from countless employers clamoring for their attention. And with the “great resignation” gathering steam, things are about to get even more chaotic. 

How, then, can an employer cut through the noise when they’re attempting to attract top talent to their organization? And once they’ve successfully convinced candidates to apply for a job, how do they keep them engaged throughout the end-to-end hiring journey, all the way through to their first day at work? 

You guessed it: with video.

In this article, we explore:

What is a talent acquisition strategy?

A talent acquisition strategy consists of all the techniques used by a company to attract, screen, shortlist, interview, hire and onboard the best talent to meet their organizational goals. 

These techniques could involve anything from building an employer brand to improving the candidate experience.  

A talent acquisition strategy provides a proactive approach to hiring. It’s the opposite of “post and pray”, where companies simply post a job ad on a hiring board and hope that the right candidate comes along. Importantly, having a strategy will enable you to measure and improve the effectiveness of your end-to-end recruitment process.

 

The talent acquisition strategy framework

Knowing where to start – or where to improve – your talent acquisition strategy can be overwhelming, which is why many organizations use a framework that splits the candidate journey into distinct stages. This is often visualized as a hiring funnel and goes something like this:

 

The hiring funnel

  1. Awareness: Finding ways to make people aware of your organization as a potential employer. Do candidates even know you exist?
  2. Attraction: Attracting a candidate to consider a job opportunity and assisting them to find out more about the opportunity. 
  3. Application: A key moment where the candidate hits the “apply now” button and completes the application form. This is the first point that the candidate’s data is captured. 
  4. Screening: Reducing the number of candidates via résumé screening or skills assessments. 
  5. Interviewing: The face-to-face or online conversation between you and the shortlisted candidates. 
  6. Hiring: Offering the job to the candidate and informing them of next steps.
  7. Onboarding: Introducing the new hire into the company and setting them up for success.

 

Increasing the effectiveness of your talent acquisition strategy

Data-savvy talent acquisition professionals rely on a range of hiring metrics, including quality of hire, candidate experience and hiring diversity to track the effectiveness of their talent acquisition strategy. But how can you improve these metrics? It all comes down to have a rich mix of content at each stage of the candidate journey – and video is key.

 

Quality of hire

The quality of the person you hire can be improved by optimizing the awareness, attraction, screening and interviewing stages of the funnel. Techniques may include:

  • Targeted job ad posting. 
  • More engaging job ads.
  • The creation of employer branding material, such as careers pages and employee stories. 
  • Social media engagement. 
  • AI-powered résumé screening or skills assessments. 
  • Structured interview processes.

How video can help: According to VideoMyJob’s State of Video In Talent (SOVT) 2021 report, 85% of survey participants say that video improves the quality of candidate.

It also supports key techniques for awareness, attraction, screening and interviewing:

  • 92% say that the key benefit of video is employer brand authenticity.
  • 90% say video benefits social media engagement and reach.
  • 86% use video to improve job ad reach or views.
  • 40% use video to communicate their employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP).

Candidate experience

The candidate experience starts with the application process and continues all the way through the screening, interviewing, hiring and onboarding stages. Techniques to improve the candidate experience include:

  • Shortening and simplifying the online application process. 
  • Improving candidate relationship management (CRM) and candidate communication. 
  • Improving the skills assessment experience. 
  • Creating a positive and engaging onboarding process. 
  • Gathering and actioning candidate feedback. 

How video can help: Our research revealed that 90% of respondents nominated candidate experience and engagement as a key benefit of their video strategy. Another 45% have added videos to candidate communications during the recruitment process – for example, sending a video to candidates describing what to expect at the job interview stage.

 

Diversity, equity and inclusion

Improve your ability to attract a diverse and inclusive candidate by targeting any stage of the hiring process that is exposed to the risk of human bias. This includes:

  • Creating inclusive job ads.
  • Blind screening and structured interviewing. 

How video can help: About 40% of SOVT respondents indicated that improving diversity, equity and inclusion is a key business driver for video. The secret is to prioritize representation – ensuring your videos feature diverse employees at every level of the organization. If you’re successful, demonstrating your business’s diversity in video will help attract a wide range of candidate types and encourage them to apply.

 

Using video to create a rich content mix

One of the golden rules of investing is: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. It’s the same in talent acquisition. Having a variety of ways to reach potential candidates means you’ll be able to reach a wider and more diverse talent pool. It’s all about developing a rich content mix as part of your talent acquisition strategy framework, with video complementing and enhancing more traditional methods.

The SOVT report identifies three levels in its video maturity model:

  1. Beginner: Using video for one or two parts of the candidate journey to prove the concept. 
  2. Intermediate: Using video for several stages of the candidate journey and measuring results.
  3. Advanced: Deploying a video-led approach to the candidate journey, with supporting program management. 

Most organizations begin their video journey with the most obvious use cases, such as creating video employee stories (42%) and video job ads (39%) – which are an important part of the content mix.

As their video program grows in maturity, talent teams are likely to employ video for other uses, including explaining the recruitment process (34%), selling the EVP (31%), “day in the life” stories (29%) and general communications (25%). 

Advanced users with a video-led approach leverage video for everything from learning and development (24%), executive communications (22%), and video-based new hire offers (18%).

 

Why video is a key component of any talent acquisition strategy

In an increasingly noisy employment landscape, you have a choice. Continue to do the same thing and, like the Italian restaurants clamoring for attention, watch as your prospects choose to go elsewhere. 

Or take the future into your own hands and attract the right candidates to your organization by creating a talent acquisition strategy that shows them what you’re made of. Video can help you do just that.

Let’s talk

It’s a noisy and crowded talent marketplace out there. If your text-based approach to recruitment is getting lost in the clamor, help your organization stand out by adding video to your talent acquisition strategy framework.