Talk surrounding the power of video in today’s visually stimulated world is often focused around its marketing potential. However, the benefits spread far beyond your marketing department. Human Resources teams are beginning to catch onto the effective use of video and are seeing amazing results from this form of creativity and engagement.
If your HR team isn’t already using video, it needs to be. Already, hundreds of HR teams across the country have started down this path. Your competitors are using video, and if you don’t catch up, you’ll quickly fall behind and fail to find the best employees. Video helps you stand out among other employers, helps you attract the right applicants, saves you time in the interview and onboarding processes, and engages your current employees.
There are different types of video that your HR team can use. Here we’ll go through the top videos your team should create:
Culture Video
A great tool to attract the best applicants possible is to create a video that shows your company culture. Take a tour through your office, show current employees interacting, capture every day life, and let applicants get to know your company beyond the text on your website. A recent Inc.com article report that 64% of Millennials would rather make $40K a year at a job they love than $100K a year at a job they think is boring. And nearly 80% of Millennials look at people and culture fit with prospective employers, followed by career potential. If you have a foosball table and amazing an amazing coffee maker, show them off. If you take company outings, capture those! These are the differentiators that are going to capture the attention of top candidates who watch the video, and they will want to apply.
Employee Interviews
In a Yelp-based society that puts a huge emphasis on reviews to make any major decision, it would be irresponsible to not let your current employees weigh in. It’s one thing to hear from your team, but it’s another thing to hear the opinions of people in other areas of the company. Anyone considering applying to your company could be swayed to submit an application if they hear a positive testimonial from a current employee.
Executive Interviews
On the same page as the employee interviews, executive team member interviews also go a long way. Leadership is a huge factor when deciding a company to work with, so it’s important to be transparent about who that team is. Let your CEO, President, or Founder give their vision for the company and inspire applicants in their own words.
Applicant Bio Videos
A great way to speed up the interview process and weed out applicants who aren’t the right fit up front is to use video as the first interview. Most of your applicants have some way to create a video, and there are plenty of tools out there to help this process. Asking everyone who applies to send a video to introduce themselves and answer a few questions will allow your team to pick out who to move forward in the process quickly and effectively.
Training/Informational Videos
Once you’ve hired the right employees, the onboarding process can be difficult thanks to the busy schedules of people who are meant to do their training. Creating videos for training purposes saves everyone time and speeds up the process. The faster new employees are on boarded, the faster they can grow into their roles and help grow the company.
Employee-Made
It’s important to keep your current employees engaged with the company in creative ways, and video is a great way to accomplish that. Run a video contest among your employees to see has the most innovative new ideas or best elevator pitch for the company. Let the team vote on their favorites and give out prizes to winners as a fun way to encourage interaction and boost culture. Increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase company profits by $2,400 per employee per year. (Source: Inc.com)
Now that you’ve made all the videos you need to support your HR efforts, where should you put them? At times this brings up the chicken vs. egg discussion, because it can be argued that you need to know where you are putting your videos before you create them. However, that is an internal discussion. Either way, there are a few important places to consider using your HR videos:
Careers Page
The careers page on your website is the best place to house your culture and employee/executive interview videos. It is the first place job seekers will go on your website. Those two videos will give any potential applicants a genuine feel for who your company is and if it would be a personal fit.
Nashville-based healthcare company, HealthStream, does a great job incorporating video into their recruitment efforts, and they’ve been extremely successful in hiring some of the best and brightest employees. On their careers page they have a video that shows company culture, profiles employees, and interviews the CEO, Robert Frist, all in one. “In 2015 we had over 5,000 applicants through our careers site, and we hired 122 of our employees through there,” reports Senior Director of HR, Donna Snyder.
Hiring Process
When you go about the normal routine of posting a new position to your site and other job listings, there is the potential you may get a flood of applications. Reviewing all of those applications can be very time consuming and it is often difficult to tell if a person is the right fit from their resume. This is where an applicant video comes in. Whatever tool you choose to manage this process, include instructions directly in the job description and save time for your entire team.
Internal Communications
Most companies today have an internal newsletter that circulates through the company. Any type of existing email or communication to current employees is a great place to integrate informational videos. The chances of your employees watching a video are higher than the chances of them reading a long email. And of course, it’s always a good idea to share out the employee-made videos with the whole staff!
External Communications
Along with your internal communications, you probably have a wide variety of external outlets as well. Whether this is an email newsletter to your subscribers or your company’s social media pages, your HR team has ways of working with the marketing team to engage the public. Using the interviews, the culture video, and employee-made videos shows who you are as a company and can be utilized for some amazing recruitment.
Onboarding
No matter what your on boarding process looks like, there are ways of working in training videos to make it more efficient and extend attention spans. Whether it is a few days or a few weeks, getting new employees trained can be difficult. Try creating all types of informational and educational videos and house them on any sort of intranet or even just put in a Dropbox link to give to new hires on their first day.
Creating video may seem like a daunting task that should be left to a marketing team, but it doesn’t have to be. The benefits of your HR team incorporating video in your recruitment and employee engagement efforts are endless and quantifiable. Lay out the video strategy that will work best for your HR team, find the right partner to create your videos, and watch as your team grows and becomes more effective.
