How to Create an Effective Recruitment Video

Here are some of the most effective practices when adding videos to your recruitment strategy.

1. Keep it short and shareable

Keeping your videos short ensures that you only cover the most valuable information and stay interesting. You can include enticing details such as the employee benefits and incentives, additional opportunities for their career, and workplace culture.

Short videos are also more likely to get shared and gain more traction on social media - the optimal length is between 1 and 2 minutes.

2. Prepare a compelling script

If you want your audience to watch the entire recruitment video, you have to make sure that the script is compelling enough.

To do this, begin with a hook that can capture your viewers’ attention. This could be a rhetorical question or an interesting trivia about your company. It can even be a unique scenario that teases your viewers into wanting to see or know more.

The next section should be where you share the main idea. You can include things that will highlight your company’s motto or short skits to showcase your workplace culture. If you want to focus on the positions you’re hiring for, you can also mention specific details of the job day-to-day.

Last but not least, don’t forget to include a call to action before the video ends - whether it’s checking out the available jobs on your company website or submitting their CV.

3. Maintain authenticity

More than anything, your videos have to be authentic. They have to be genuinely on-point with your company branding and should reflect its vision and core values.

Your video should focus on your employees, your office (if you have one), and your organisational culture – what your work environment truly looks and feels like.

Presenting an unrealistic version of your company can only be disadvantageous to your hiring process, no matter how amazing your content is.

4. Use high-quality equipment

You don’t necessarily need expensive equipment to create an amazing recruitment video. Even iPhones these days have cameras with a good enough quality. Drones or 4K cameras aren’t completely vital, although they can help a lot.

That said, it’s still advisable to invest in good-quality equipment, such as good lighting and a microphone. After all, your candidates need to clearly see and hear the message you’re trying to convey in your video.

If you don’t think you’ll be using the equipment extensively, or if you don’t have anyone at your company who can operate them, you can also hire an external video production company. Depending on which company you choose, this option may be the less expensive one, plus you get to save time on editing.

5. Consider creating different versions

Having a few different versions of your recruitment video can make your content more flexible - without extra costs. For example, you can keep the intro and prepare alternatives depending on the department. 

Also, you can create batches of videos and mix them up.

For example, the first video could show a general overview of your office space. The second one could highlight the experiences of your current employees, what the work environment is like, or what they do in the company. The third one could showcase all the career opportunities, benefits, and incentives that potential applicants can have if they get a position in your company.

6. Add it to your company website

Since your videos authentically represent your company from all aspects, your official company website is an effective channel to showcase your videos and engage the right candidates. You can feature it on multiple places like your About and Careers pages.

7. Include it in your job posts

You can also convey your company’s expectations on certain positions more efficiently by embedding relevant videos in your job posts. When using your recruitment video this way, it’s helpful to be more specific on the job responsibilities instead of a general overview.

Through the video, candidates can properly assess if they are a good fit for the role and your company. If the video’s message resonates with what they can do and offer, they will feel more compelled to apply.

Additionally, having a recruitment video embedded in your job ad actually increases your post’s “searchability” on the internet. The boost in SEO makes your job posts more likely to pop up in a job seeker’s search results than posts without videos.

8. Share it on social media

Posting the video on various social media accounts like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter can maximise your reach. Remember, different platforms have different target demographics. By sharing your video on all of them, you can diversify the backgrounds of your potential candidates.

Make sure to format it properly for social media, as well. Include in the description a sentence or two that teases the viewers on what the video is all about. Don’t forget to subtly encourage them to share the video on their profiles so that you can engage with a broader audience.

Using a Recruitment Video to Get More Candidates

Utilising recruitment videos may just be what your organisation needs to optimise your recruitment process and to raise the quality and quantity of your candidates. Take the time to properly use this helpful tool, and, who knows, it might just lead you to your best hire.