With the video marketing industry becoming more prosperous by the day, employers are looking at a promising, emerging recruitment option: the use of video to help find and maintain a happy and empowered staff.
The statistics for online video viewing are nothing short of impressive: in January 2014 alone, 190 million Americans watched an average of 397 online videos, according to research conducted by Shutterstock and comScore. Jobcast found that job posts get 36% more applications if accompanied by a recruiting video and 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text. With so much time and attention being dedicated to video, why not use the medium to reach potential employees?
5 Ways You Can Use Social Video to Recruit and Keep Great Employees
1. Use video to market your job openings
Any job seeker who has been on the job hunt for a while will tell you that it doesn’t take long for job listings to blend together. Using video to market specific job opportunities will not only help your position stand out from the thousands of other jobs your future employees are scouring, but can also allow your potential candidate to become familiar with the hiring manager or team they’d be working with.
2. Use video to impress candidates with your company and its culture
If creating a video for each job opening you have seems too cumbersome, how about creating a general recruitment video? While this video won’t get into specific job details, it can show off company culture, office space and people. This video can be shared on your career pages online or be included with each job posting.
3. Encourage video resumes from applicants
Much like a typical job seeker is worn down by the same job posting format, HR teams can easily become bored and exhausted looking at resume after resume. Encourage applicants to share a video resume on social media to help break up the monotony. A video resume will allow applicants to give you a better overview of their qualifications, while also giving them the opportunity to be creative. By sharing on social, their application will also serve as advertising for your company (hey – you must have a pretty great one if someone will make a video to try to snag a job!).
4. Use video to boost internal morale and retention rates by highlighting employees and projects
Once you have a great team in place, it’s important to keep them happy. Have you thought about using video to highlight staff, projects or activities within the company? Internal video can be used to recognize great employees, get staff excited and on board with new projects or get the team involved with company initiatives. These videos can be shared on social profiles, on your company intranet, via email or even at company meetings and events.
5. Make “boring” HR information more memorable with internal video marketing
Some HR information can be overwhelming and dry. While a video won’t make learning about your 401k program exciting, it can help employees pay closer attention and retain more information than they could through handouts or a group meeting. Although video likely won’t be able to completely replace handouts or meetings, they can be used as supplemental material to help employees stay educated on important information.
While there are many ways to strategically and creatively use video to recruit and maintain a talented employee pool, the most important thing to keep in mind – no matter what video strategy you choose to take – is that a professionally-made video will convey a professional image of your company to viewers. Commit to creating a high-quality video, or risk turning off applicants and employees with a poorly-produced video.