Recent Findings Show the Benefit of Video Recruiting
The recruitment game is always changing, with every aspect of recruiting becoming inundated with new technology, the most recent trend being video recruiting. Now, both recruiters and applicants alike need to keep up, lest their job-seeking or candidate-recruiting efforts be in vain.
For recruiters, a huge part of their job isn’t just finding the right people for the job, or even being found by them, it’s also ensuring that those people actually want the job that’s staring them right in the face. This is why an enticing job advert is so crucial in making sure recruiters get the candidates they’re looking for actually applying to their jobs, not just passing them by. As appealing as an ‘attractive benefits package’ sounds, this alone isn’t going to sell a candidate on a recruiter’s vacancy. And although I’m sure ‘liquidity account forecasting’ is both an interesting and vital part of the job, it doesn’t look all that enticing in 12pt single-spaced Times New Roman, isolated on a page next to a single bullet point.
The Stats
This is where technology comes in. Before we’re having job postings delivered to our door by robots or receiving vacancy notifications directly to our ocular nerves, the current next step in recruitment technology is simply augmenting a traditional job posting with a video. Now, this may not be for everyone and many recruiters would be wary – newer isn’t always better, however this case is backed up by evidence. After surveying a whole bunch of candidates, CV-Library recently found that 78% of them would be more likely to apply for a job if the job description came with some video content.
We all know that a picture is worth 1,000 words, so even just a minute-long video at 30 frames per second is worth 1,800,000 words, which is pretty darned impressive given that War and Peace is only 587,287 words (or 561,093 words depending on whether you’re using the New American Library or Oxford World’s Classics version, though this feels like we’re getting lost in specifics now).
The Benefits
The message I’m trying to get across is that a video, even a fairly bland one, can do a lot that words simply can’t because it can communicate more than just what’s being said. At the most basic level they can directly show a candidate exactly what they’re applying for; the environment they’ll be working in, the people they’ll be working with, it could even the exact spot where they’ll sat or stood working. Taking it one step further, a video can show a ‘day-in-the-life’ of an employee, or convey the subtleties and complexities of a company’s culture that would be much more difficult to achieve with written word.
This is something that Stacy Van Meter, Deluxe Corp’s Executive Director of Talent and Recruitment, understands and was doing over 3 years ago.
“The real value in what we are doing is in the humanization of the business” Stacy explains, “We look at all of our processes from the candidate/customer perspective.”
Of course, the video approach is not for everyone, not every company could necessarily produce an enticing video and the choice to use one isn’t a recruitment silver bullet that will see all your vacancies filled in seconds by reams of enthusiastic job-seekers. It is however a great way to market your company to certain audiences; Generation Y (and soon Z, then after that I’m not sure what happens), graduates, the tech and media sectors, as it gives an indication your company is ready to embrace innovation, actively encouraging the use of new technology.
How to add a video to your My Job Hub posting
If you want to put up a vacancy advert on My Job Hub with a video attached, the best way to go about that is:
1. Head over to YouTube
2. Upload your cinematic masterpiece
3. Copy the link to the video
4. Come back here and login to your My Job Hub account (or sign up for one if you haven’t already)
5. Create a new vacancy
6. Paste the link into the text wherever it fits best
7. Submit your vacancy
8. Watch the applications fly in!
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Jolly good.
Header Image: ‘Close-Up‘ by Luke Roberts is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Title Added
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