How (and why) to use video recruiting throughout the hiring journey

March 17, 2021

 

iCIMS Staff

5 min read

Imagine the perfect candidate is sitting in front of you. How would you sell them on taking a job with your company? Could you do it if you had an hour? What about two minutes?

There’s a lot of touchpoints throughout the hiring process, some big, others small. But communication is a lot more than just exchanging information. If that’s all it took, we’d rely on email and resumes and never need to meet face-to-face or screen-to-screen.

This is where video makes all the difference. It’s not a new technology by any means, but it remains one of the most personal ways we have to communicate besides sitting across the table from one another. Yet even in this age of virtual hiring, video recruiting technology remains woefully underutilized.

Together, let’s explore four areas you can incorporate employee testimonial videos into your recruitment marketing software to improve the hiring process dramatically across the talent lifecycle – and why it’s far easier to implement in yours than you might think.

Career sites

Very few candidates are going to end up on your career site by accident. Either you directed them to it, or they sought you out directly. In either case, it’s fair to say most candidates here fall somewhere between curious and seriously interested.

This makes your career site a natural host for video. Uncertainty is one of the biggest obstacles to taking a new job. Candidates want to know what it’s like working at your company. Will they like the people they work with? What will their day-to-day look like? What does it take to succeed?

Career sites are an opportunity to get specific and provide a tailored, inside look at both your company and teams. Video creates another point of interaction that’s similar to speaking directly. Done right, your career site reinforces who you are, who you’re looking for, and answers questions your job seekers may not have known they had.

Consider adding employee testimonials videos that answer questions like:

• Why is diversity important to you?
• What is your company culture like?
• How does your company support women in tech?

Video is also rich in SEO value and can help boost your career site in search rankings. This means more career site traffic, longer visits, more applications, and less money spent promoting your career site on Google and job boards.

Quick tip: don’t forget that your career site is there to capitalize on job seekers’ attention by collecting their contact information in a CRM or securing an application. Use video to tell your story and encourage viewers to take a specific action.

Job descriptions

Job descriptions are excellent at informing candidates about job requirements and expectations. They’re also really, really terrible at communicating what a job is actually like.

Job descriptions are so stuffy, so formal. They feel like you’re signing your life away. Instead of pushing a job seeker over the edge, they’re one last opportunity to stop and pause. Do I really want this job? That’s not the mood you want to create.

Be honest – how many candidates do you think quickly skim job descriptions before moving on to the next?  Video is one surefire way to ensure the information you want to get across is visible. It’s a reassuring reminder to candidates that they are a human applying to work at a company staffed by other humans.

Embedded directly on job pages, employee testimonial videos are also a final opportunity to communicate who your ideal candidate is and why they should want this role and not your competitor’s.

Recruitment marketing newsletters and social media posts

We get a lot of emails daily. Most are junk. But if I’m honest, there’s plenty of marketing emails I’m genuinely interested in getting and have every intention of reading. I even mark them as important. How many do I actually get to read? Well, that’s a different story.

It’s the same for recruitment marketing. The importance of standing out isn’t just about differentiating yourself from competitors – you’re fighting for finite time and attention, even from people who like you.

You’re fighting for attention and engagement on social media as well. Who do you think the algorithm will favor: your job posting, or another hilarious video of cats behaving poorly? I think we already know the answer to that one.

There’s a reason why employee-generated video content performs so well. It breaks the mold because it’s different and attention-grabbing. Embedding video also reinforces your message through another medium and is an easy way to make your recruitment marketing newsletters and social media posts feel more personal.

Offer letters and onboarding

Using video during the offer process provides a personal touch to an otherwise straightforward event. It’s a way to continue the excitement and welcome new hires. It’s also a final sales pitch, a last nudge in the right direction – and it may be all the difference when it comes to highly sought-after candidates.

Video plays a similar role during the employee onboarding process. Starting a new role can be overwhelming. Incorporating employee testimonial videoa in onboarding can help get new hires up to speed quicker and put a face to the names of the people they’ll be working with.

Recruiting software makes high-quality video production viable

Employee-generated video content does wonders for engagement and SEO. But one of the biggest obstacles to using video is that it’s time-consuming and expensive to hire a production team. Planning, hiring, and procurement can take months, and that’s before you ever hit the record button.

iCIMS Video Studio gets rid of all that. It works like this: you send your employees prompts to get them started. They hit record on their phone, laptop, or tablet. Clean templates and a smart interface make it intuitive to review, edit, and publish videos across your digital properties.

Check out our upcoming webinar Leveraging video across the talent acquisition lifecycle and see for yourself how easy it is to use video to boost recruiting performance throughout the hiring process.