Tag: Education

How to Make a Recruitment Video in 8 Easy Steps

Contributed by BTW Videography

Hiring is the process of selling your company to ideal candidates.

When these candidates come across your job posting, why should they want to learn more about your company, culture, and benefits? What should they know about your history, and why should they want to be part of your future?

You’ll be hooking the right people if you can confidently answer these questions. Telling a visually interesting story is the best way to capture attention and allow you to make the case that you’re the best company to work for.

That’s why we recommend a recruitment video as part of any hiring campaign.

Many recruiters shy away from video because they think it will take too much technical knowledge or expensive equipment. However, the entire process can be completed with technology you already have access to.

From planning to production, we’ve collected eight easy steps you can follow to create your own engaging recruitment video.

FAQs About Producing a Recruitment Video

If you’d like to skip right to the details, scroll down to find the 8 steps.

How Do I Write a Recruitment Video for a Job?

To create effective company recruitment videos, start by laying out a basic story structure, including:

  • Your origins
  • The principles you believe in
  • Challenges on your road to growth
  • The role that your ideal candidate will play in the future of your business

From there, it’s best to flesh out the story with human interest by letting your employees speak on behalf of your business.

What Should You Include in a Recruiting Video?

You’ll want all the following elements in your recruitment video:

  • Interviews with current employees.
  • A cohesive, visually interesting narrative that tells your company’s story.
  • The culture of your company and why it’s a great place to work.
  • A relatable and optimistic plan for the future.

What Is a Recruitment Video?

Job recruitment videos, also known as video job postings, or work recruitment videos, are videos produced by companies looking to hire candidates for an open position.

How Long Should a Recruiting Video Be?

A recruitment video should be fairly short, about 2-3 minutes long. It should be long enough to communicate key details about your company’s culture and vision without getting too bogged down in minutiae or technical details about the open position.

Without further ado, here are eight simple steps you can take to make your own recruiting video.

Phase One: Planning

As with anything worth doing, it’s better to prepare in advance. Here are four steps you should follow during the planning phase of your recruitment video:

1. Determine Your Audience (Create Personas)

“In order to tell a great story that places your ideal candidate at the heart of the narrative, start with candidate personas.”

A persona is an idealized but fictional candidate representing the perfect employee you’d like to hire.

To design your ideal candidate, ask yourself questions like:

  • Who is my ideal employee on a personal level?
  • What are their career and life goals?
  • What do they need and want in a workplace?
  • How is your company better positioned to fulfill their desires compared to others?

2. Articulate Your Company’s Vision and Culture

After coming up with the ideal candidate persona, you should consider designing the image of the company you’d like to project.

Important factors to consider when developing an identity for your business include your ideal company culture, steps to achieve it, and how your business operations reinforce and feed off that image.

Your culture should feel cohesive with your ideal candidate. They are designed to be a perfect match for one another, so if something about this step feels off, it’s important to take a close look and smooth out any rough edges.

3. Come Up with a Rough Script

You should have a good idea of your final product before you begin video production.

Rather than trying to plan out every detail, focus on creating general guidelines that will shape the video you want.

Start by brainstorming simple ideas like music choices, office settings you can use, and visuals you want to include, such as office amenities or even a shot of your building and surrounding area.

Determine what you’d like to say in your recruitment video.

  • What’s the story of your company? Where have you come from, and where are you going?
  • How does your ideal candidate fit into this narrative? They should have an active role in the future of the company.
  • Don’t be afraid to talk about your challenges. Any good narrative involves a character overcoming problems. Your company has challenges and obstacles on the way to growth. Be open about those challenges and how you plan to overcome them with the right candidate.
  • Keep your video focused on the narrative. Don’t be tempted to include too many details about the position, job responsibilities, or other technical information. This will sap momentum from the video and detract from its ultimate purpose: telling an engaging story.

“Your company has challenges and obstacles on the way to growth. Be open about those challenges and how you plan to overcome them with the right candidate.”

4. Decide Whom to Put in Front of the Camera

No recruitment video can be complete without including the human element. Your current employees are the best resource you have when it comes to selling your company to potential candidates.

  • Ask for volunteers. This part is pretty important. You don’t want anyone in the video who may feel uncomfortable in front of the camera.
  • When asking for volunteers, make sure you keep the tone light. Let your employees know it’s a simple process that won’t take long and will involve them speaking honestly about their experiences at the company.
  • If possible, get someone outside the organization to ask recruitment video questions. This will reduce the pressure on them to feel like they have to answer questions a certain way. Keep in mind that a low-pressure, open-ended interview is the best way to get your employees to relax and relate to the interviewer on a human level.
  • Don’t forget to include some leaders in your video. Highly visible senior leadership gives the impression of a more dynamic organization that appeals to candidates.

“Don’t forget to include some leaders in your video. Highly visible senior leadership gives the impression of a more dynamic organization that appeals to candidates.”

Phase Two: Production

Now that you have a plan for your recruitment video, you’ll need to turn your vision into reality. This is the production phase of how to make a recruitment video.

5. Get Comfortable with Your Equipment

Despite what you may believe, having professional equipment is optional when creating a recruitment video. You can make do with just a couple modern smartphones—one for video and one for audio.

The only way to master the art of creating videos is to practice often. If you’re brand new to the process, here are a few tips for filming your recruitment video:

  • Avoid bad audio at all costs. Sound that is choppy, too loud, or incomprehensible will immediately degrade the quality of your final product and make it feel unprofessional. Record audio and video separately, then synchronize the two in the editing process.
  • Film in landscape, not portrait. Unless you create a recruitment video for social media where a portrait frame is appropriate, you want to avoid it. A wide-screen landscape picture is more visually appealing and will look better and more professional on bigger screens.
  • Keep the camera steady. Try resting your camera on a steady surface or invest in a tripod.
  • Get plenty of b–roll. In video production, a b-roll is the footage that is interspersed with your main shot. B-roll is important because it infuses the video with momentum and visual interest that a static, unedited shot can’t achieve.
  • Stay organized. Label all your video and audio files consistently, making them easy to reference in the editing process.

6. Be a Hands-off Director

Employee recruitment videos should feel natural and free-flowing while still having defined structures.

  • Keep interviews open-ended. Let employees talk as much as possible. The more freedom they have to search their thoughts and feelings for truthful answers, the more quickly you’ll get them to open up.
  • Be open to changes. You may learn that an idea or shot you wanted to include doesn’t make sense anymore. Be open to changing directions early and often at the suggestion of your employees or collaborators.
  • Minimize cliches and buzzwords. Compared to other methods, the best aspect of a recruitment video is the ease with which you can generate a compelling and engaging narrative. The quickest way to detract from this narrative is to bring the candidate out of it with too many buzzwords or cliches that will make it difficult to focus on what’s truly unique about your company.

7. Show, Don’t Tell

Remember that video is a visual medium, first and foremost. Keep your job recruiting video interesting by showing rather than telling.

For example, imagine an employee you’re interviewing bringing up how much they love the cafeteria. You should overlay that audio with a shot of the cafeteria, removing the need for the candidate to imagine what the cafeteria must look like and making it easy for them to imagine enjoying lunch there instead.

“Remember that video is a visual medium first and foremost. Keep your recruitment video interesting by showing rather than telling.”

8. Include a Specific Call to Action

By specific, we mean direct instruction, so the candidate knows exactly where to go to complete the application process. The less friction here, the more candidates you’ll have access to. Provide a link that is immediately accessible near the video, as well as instructions in the video for how to apply.

For Best Results, Go to the Experts

No matter your level of expertise or what technology you have access to, it’s possible to make a narrative-driven, personalized recruitment video that highlights the culture of your business to potential candidates.

However, if you really want to maximize your results, it might be best to let a professional recruiting video maker handle it for you.

Behind The Work is an inbound agency with a San Diego Videography team specializing in full-service creative campaigns, including professional recruitment videos for companies. We pride ourselves on our ability to collaborate with our clients and seek to fit ourselves into your production or marketing process as a partner first and foremost.

We’ll work alongside you to conceptualize and produce an effective recruitment video that tells the story of your business and relates it in a way that will maximize your recruiting efforts.

For an example of what we can do, take a look at what we created for the University of California. Of the candidates we helped them recruit, 100% were high-quality and still with them two years after the campaign.

To learn more about the services Behind the Work offers and how we can begin creating the perfect recruitment video for you, contact us to talk with one of our team members.

UCPath | 100% Retention

Contributed by BTW Content Team
Attracting Top Talent Requires a Thorough Marketing Plan, Executed Perfectly

“[They] developed a strategic recruitment campaign that exceeded our hiring goals and dramatically increased our online visibility. They were fantastic; their communication efforts were above par…always went above and beyond.” – Jennifer Mushinskie, Communications Director for the UCPath

Overview

Schools such as UCLA, UC San Diego, Berkeley, and others, are members of one of the most prestigious university systems in the U.S. — the University of California system. The University’s fundamental missions are teaching, research, and public service.

In 2016, however, the UC system was in need of a major overhaul of its forty-year-old financial and HR systems to fully support the people who carry out the UC mission every day. Sweeping changes needed to be made to secure business-critical information in one central location.

In 2016, it began work on one of the most ambitious transformations the education world had ever seen. Already one of the leading job creators in the state, the University of California broke ground on a radically reimagined business services and employee administration center that required hiring more than 400 qualified employees across 11 unique job categories.

The idea for this new transformation centered around the notion that the new UCPath would handle payroll, benefits, and human resources transactions for all UC employees across every one of the systems’ nine campuses. It was a task of staggering complexity, and attracting all of the necessary talent in the time frame required would need a herculean marketing effort.

Challenge

Some of the challenges the marketing team ran into before working with us were that they needed a bigger team.

So after they decided on us, we were excited to be part of such a great group of marketers.

The UCPath’s ambitious hiring plan called for an equally ambitious marketing plan. In order to reach the sort of talent needed to realize the Center’s vision, a comprehensive brand awareness campaign was required, along with a multi-platform marketing approach that leveraged email, social media, content marketing, video production, and more.

Collateral across a range of media needed to be created rapidly. It included:

  • 62 blog articles
  • 80 videos
  • 2,000+ social media posts
  • 100+ email campaigns

While speed was important, it couldn’t come at the expense of quality. The UC system’s previous marketing efforts set a high bar. The tenor for the talent attracted would in many ways be set by the quality of the marketing messages, and so it was critical they spoke to the right audience and communicated properly.

Solution

Before hiring could begin in earnest, the UCPath needed a brand image that would resonate with potential candidates. We rolled out its Blueprint strategy and set to work establishing brand standards that felt entirely appropriate and cohesive with the UC system’s existing branding, while still elevating it to occupy a unique position among the system’s various campuses.

We then built a custom campaign website using the newly designed logo and brand identity. With this basic collateral in place, our team felt it was necessary to establish precise characteristics for the sorts of people needed to fill the 400+ open jobs in the newly established department. To properly hone UC’s marketing messages, we formulated six buyer personas that sufficiently captured the breadth of the required talent.

With UCPath’s hiring audience established, work began on formulating targeted marketing assets that included strategic content development, email marketing and lead nurturing, and a tiered digital marketing strategy.

We felt video would be a crucial component to a campaign designed to attract human capital, and so we built a library of video content that highlighted the unique stories of UCPath employees, highlighting UC’s culture, and the benefits of working for the system.

The team also focused heavily on social media, developing a massive arsenal of social posts that engaged prospects on multiple platforms. This included blog content, social posts, and lead magnet content for job seekers. Throughout the process, we established exacting milestones and consistently measured their progress against them, with appropriate reporting and goal checking in place.

8M

Over 8 million impressions

120K

Over 120K website sessions

55%

55% average email open rate

Results

The campaign ran for more than two years, starting in September of 2017. In that time, our recruitment marketing program accounted for 23% of all UCPath applications, and 24% of all the employees hired during that period. This was the second-largest source of hires.

Data demonstrates that the marketing program was three times more effective at producing quality employees than the top application source, Indeed.com. 100% of the employees hired as a result of the two-year program were deemed “quality” by the UCPath and still work there today. This was a major boon to the organization, in the form of reduced turnover and training costs.

SFCS | 77% in 90 Days

Contributed by BTW Content Team
Fostering Growth for San Diego’s Leading Private School

“[They] had great ideas for different content pieces to target each group, and I think more than anything, it permitted us to just target a group instead of trying to be everything to everybody. It focused us and was a change from the blanket approach we had taken in the past.” – Dawn Saunders, Dir. of Marketing at Santa Fe Christian School

Overview

Santa Fe Christian Schools (SFC), a private Christian school in San Diego, CA, thrives on its mission to prepare global leaders while making a difference in the world for Christ. 

Believing that teaching is their calling, each faculty member is committed to guiding individual students to discover new interests, develop and utilize their talents, and deepen their faith in the process. 

A small school with significant opportunities allows for countless choices–as an Upper School student is digging into a college-level math class, they may also be performing in the school musical while playing a varsity sport. 

SFC stands apart as a pillar in the Christian community in San Diego through their commitment to providing every opportunity for students to grow their Christian faith through Bible study, chapel, small groups, spiritual retreats, community service, and mission trips.

Challenge

SFC knew they needed to invest in content to attract prospective families to the advantages of private Christian education, nurture them with the school’s mission and values, and evangelize their current families. 

With tuition ranging from close to $14,000 to over $21,000 annually, families need to be sure their children will have the absolute best access to a quality faith-based education experience possible. 

SFC has a small team of dedicated marketing professionals who, like most businesses, wear many hats in their day-to-day. Said Dawn Saunders, SFC Director of Marketing Communications, “I tried to do inbound myself and realized that I was so short-handed. There’s no way that I could do what my brain wanted to do with the resources we had. No matter what I did, even if I hired another inbound professional, we weren’t going to be able to keep up with the content that I wanted to produce.”

Goals and Objectives

We focused on the school’s two most lucrative personas, kindergarten and middle school families. Santa Fe Christian Schools wanted to achieve the following through inbound content marketing efforts: 

  • Increase in tours booked for kindergarten parents 
  • Increase in tours booked for families of children entering middle school
  • A mechanism to engage and retain current parents

Solution

Our strategy team set out to conduct extensive persona research through interviews with current and prospective SFC families to learn about their challenges before SFC, goals for their children’s education, preferred media consumption methods, and research habits. 

We created a comprehensive, ungated pillar page to convince curious parents that there is an alternative to public schooling that, through smaller class sizes, increased personalized learning opportunities, etc., would set their children apart. 

For families to learn more about the school and vice versa, we constructed a “Kickoff Questionnaire” that further educates a lead on what specifically SFC can offer, and allows SFC to gain valuable insights into the leads that they can later use to grow the relationship with a family. 

With the key content, lead generation and automation processes in place, the only goal left to address was family retention. 

We developed a weekly podcast to keep current SFC parents engaged. These 20-30 minute episodes dive into what makes SFC a special place, reaffirming their investment with each episode download.

40%

40% average MoM increase in traffic

98%

Acquired 98% of the original MQL goal

77%

Converted 77% of MQLs to SQLs

Results

Initial Goals

Our team surveyed past website data to project campaign performance over a 3-6 month time span as follows:

  • Goal #1 – Website Visits – Increase average month-over-month website traffic by 30%.
  • Goal #2 – Marketing-Qualified Leads – Convert 2.5% of visitors into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), equaling a total of 156 MQLs.
  • Goal #3 – Sales-Qualified Leads Conversion Rate – Nurture 30% of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
  • Goal #4 – Sales-Qualified Leads – Connect approximately 47 sales-qualified parents (SQLs) with an admissions officer for an appointment.

118

118 meetings booked with sales

140%

140% increase over original SQL goal