Employer brand

5 Tips for Creating Highly-Engaging Recruiting Videos

Video is a must-have in a company’s recruiting toolkit. The trick is to create visual content that audiences will want to watch (and in particular, the audiences you care about the most).

After surveying the current landscape, we came up with five examples of techniques that generate recruiting videos that your prospects will love:

1. Surprise and delight.

An investment bank that dates its origins back to 1690 is probably not the first company you’d expect to surprise and delight with its recruiting video.

British institution Barclays does just that.

Their video, which manages to be both amusing and unexpected at the same time, shows how the company is “quietly snapping up some of the world’s top graduates”. Literally.

2. Play to your strengths.

From its product launch press conferences to packaging and the actual products themselves, Apple clearly places the highest of priorities on precision, and consistent high standards.

This reputation for perfectionism carries over to the company’s recruiting video. It’s everything you’d expect from the company – innovative, informative, intriguing, insightful…need we continue? – but also does an exceptional, detailed job of reinforcing the brand’s commitment to precision.

Hear employees speak to the demands placed on them to be experts, top of their field [“We look to say, what’s the best it possibly could be?”]. Note the carefully chosen visual elements, such as the close-up of conference room door signage, in the company’s identifiable font and colors, with the iconic Apple logo. Listen to employees talk about the magnitude of their work: “The best part of working at Apple is actually the feeling that what you’ve brought to the table has contributed to something greater than yourself. And in that way you’re changing the world.”

As one employee puts it, at Apple, “There is no thing such as good enough. It just has to be the best.” The brand’s unrelenting commitment to perfection is carried over perfectly into its recruiting video.

3. Turn the mike over to your best people.

Goldman Sachs has a robust career channel; what they do especially well is turn the camera onto individual employees. The 23 unique employees they feature in “Meet Our People” represent a cross-section of divisions, countries and job titles. This helps prospective candidates to envision themselves working for the company, in a similar role.

Here’s Bingbing, an associate in Operations in China, sharing her thoughts on how she started working for Goldman Sachs. We also love the cityscape shots, communicating the buzz and excitement of working in Beijing.

4. Personalize, personalize, personalize.

Instead of trying to be all things to all candidates in a single recruiting video, consider creating a series of clips, personalizing each to a different persona you’d like to attract.

From recent grads to accountant types to techies, reaching each persona requires a unique message, and compelling selling points.

For example, on the CapitalOne career channel, this informative video – one of the most-watched – is targeted specifically to candidates who are prepping for case interviews, as part of the hiring process.

5. Respect your audience’s time.

The viewers of YouTube have spoken: the shorter the video, the better.

The average length of the top 50 videos on YouTube was recently noted to be just 2:54 minutes.

While this brevity may not always be realistic, depending on the message you have to convey, appreciate that candidates are giving up time that they could be devoting to other tasks.

Tools such as YouTube Analytics’ Views report and Audience retention report can also help you analyze the estimated minutes a viewer has watched your clip, and monitor viewer drop-off.

And on that note, we’ll bow out gracefully now, in respect of your time.

What other engaging recruitment videos are out there? What makes them so compelling, in your opinion?

content marketing for talent acquisition

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