Well in all honestly I had no idea the video was Skype´s recruitment advert, but then again I suppose that is the idea to trap us into their space!

It has been a while since I posted a recruitment video and because I am such a Skype fan, I couldn’t help but not give them a mention on Recruitment Views, as without Skype I wouldn’t even exist, well not in the form that you all know me

And if you are following me on twitter, then you know I should be still writing my presentation, oh these damn distractions.

Their current vacancies can be found here

The video should be below:

When you think of all the recruitment companies out there in the UK, so few really seem to try to be different.

So when I saw FreshMinds post a video on Youtube promoting their company, I was keen to give them a mention as one of the few that are really making an effort. One thing I do do is subscribe to receive any video that is posted on the internet with the word recruitment in the text, you wouldn’t believe the rubbish I get and on top of this the only companies that seem to use video are the US fire and police service and Australian recruitment companies.

What is it with the Australians!

Still hats of to FreshMinds who are obviously using video and blogs to reach out. What I did personally like about the video was it did give a good feel of the work ethos within the company, without being over the top.

Follow this link for the video

Although this article is pushing my normal boundaries, I thought it was worth a mention partly because it was a little unusual in its approach, but mainly because I thought it was interesting from a marketing point of view.

Now like us all I get many emails, most of which is spam. This caught my eye as it was a recruitment pitch from an institution, rather than a company direct. What was strange was it was so unrelated I had to find out more.

The association was in fact the NSSGA the National Stone & Gravel Association and to boot it was for the States, so I thought I would find out more and contacted the Lorraine who sent the email in the first place.

This was her reply:

Hi Stephen -

I’m not spam! I carefully research blogs/websites that NSSGA has to approve to contact. It’s a new form of marketing; bloggers are great to get information out, and few try to get compensation for a public interest site.

Now I may not be the the ideal conduit for their industry, but a link from my site certainly will help their search rankings in Google. None the less she was on safe ground, as strangely enough it may have been the industry I would have gone into if I had completed my education.

So hats of to the NSSGA for realising the benefits of blogs to get their message out, when will the UK companies follow suit!

Now if you just happened to be looking for a job in America, why not try the Aggregates industry and follow this link to their promotional recruitment video.

I came across this relatively amusing graduate recruitment video for Nabarro a UK Legal company. Although one could get the wrong idea and you wouldn’t necessarily know they were looking, but if you ventured further to check out the company, you would find a number of opportunities.

When you follow on from the video and visit their website, you see a well put together career site, to such a high standard it would challenge the choices for the controversial “National Online Recruitment Awards”. They may not be as big as the chosen best National Employer´s websites but you can see they have taken it just as seriously. More importantly they didn’t stop at just building a great website, they have also tried to use some viral marketing on YouTube, the question is are they also using the likes of facebook too!

The Video is below

Well if not it has to be close, apart from the blatant disregard for heath and safety this poor lad has the shittiest job in the world I am sure.

Obviously this wouldn’t happen in the UK, well I hope not but how would you advertise this vacancy?

Undoubtably an essential job to ensure the cleanliness of the city.

I have to apologise in advance for the lack of posts since last Thursday, and if you popped by and found recruitment views had vanished, well my hosting company pulled all the database connections, with no warning or explanation to anyone.

I could have lost my temper but as they have always given such a good service in the past, I just chilled as shouting and raving wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference.

Well that was my excuse till Monday, since then I have been working flat out, which I suppose is the Xmas rush before it goes deadly quiet, except for the merriment and long lunches of course. Is that why we have not heard from Louise for a while or is she out shopping for the 10 best Recruitment Presents!

So know I am back into the swing I thought I would start posting with this humorous headhunting video I came across last week from a Dutch recruitment company the video is below, PS its not for the squeamish.

As nearly all of us use a recruitment job boards, I thought this would be of interest. It is a recruitment video for www.jobs.ac.uk ,which is a jobsite targeting careers in the academic, research, science and related professions.

Although very interesting, strangely they never mentioned which vacancy they are recruiting for!

Whatever the case you get the feeling they are better to work for than Monster, no underhand marketing going on here!!

Video is below

During my continual crawl of the web for news in the recruitment industry, I came across a video by Mybloglog, a recent start up who I am sure will go on and be a star for Yahoo. For me I just love seeing my picture on other peoples blogs, am I vain! By the way they are recruiting for a Army of Software Engineers at the moment.

To be honest I found their recruitment video via www.standoutjobs.com, another recruitment video job board, who are due to launch in Autumn. What did catch my attention was not so much the $10,000 referral fee for web developers they had advertised, but the lack of UK companies with Recruitment Video’s. OK this isn’t surprising as they are a Canadian company, but even so there are very few on Youtube.

Now our American counterparts have taken advantage of this medium, probably inspired by Google’s recruitment video followed by the Army, the Police, the Fire Brigade, the Libraries, Dominos Pizza and many other smaller American companies, many of whom I have show cased here.

So what’s going on in the UK, are they scared to to embrace using video on youtube, or nervous of what people will say on the social networking sites, or is it the Ad agencies not wanting to loose their cut on media sales. I just cannot believe the likes of Tesco’s cannot see the advantage of utilising this form of media to help promote an image to recruit candidates.

Still I am sure Peter Gold Don Sumners, Matt Alder or Tim Elkington have plenty to say on this subject, as experts in recruitment and media or should I just ask the Guru?

I have been writing here on Recruitment Views now for well over a year and part of that requires the need to read other blogs, RSS feeds and Google email alerts. One of the themes that comes up time and time again is the US Military recruitment campaign, but what was different this time it was a counter recruitment campaign counterrecruitment.net, a sign of the times.

I am sure my American readers are well aware of this growing group, but it certainly surprised me, still it is part of the freedom of speech, that ironically we are trying to protect amongst other things.

Now I am not going to go into wether I agree or disagree I will leave that to the politician’s, but on the recruitment front there is something to be said about the image we portray when we post a recruitment vacancy using video, as it can give a completely false image and as a result it isn’t surprising that after so much use of this medium, there is now a backlash.

Moving away from the military recruitment I also came across this video below, which incidentally they are still recruiting for IT people in New York (a lead for a few of you consultants). This certainly creates an image of a fun and wild company to work for, but I know wonder are they misrepresenting their company.

Still I suppose we can leave this all to the trading standards, but in the meantime the video is light entertainment with some good backing music perfect for a Friday afternoon.

Now with over  870,000 views, shouldn’t all their vacancies be filled and with so many candidates they could set up their own agency, hmm something to ponder I suppose.

I thought this was quite a novel video resume from a trucker in Australia.

When it comes to video resumes I am not convinced they will be the future, but used in the right context they can give you the edge I am sure.

What I did like about this video is it shows the driver at work, rather than someone talking through their cv. This could easily have been a welder or a bricklayer or any trade skill and in my opinion a better use of the format.

Now if I produced a video resume I am sure you would be bored within the first 30 secs.

Now whether this is a genuine video resume, I am not sure but I will be keen to see how he does.