Recruitment Videos, has the UK been left behind?
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?
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5 Responses to “Recruitment Videos, has the UK been left behind?”
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Stephen - Thank you for linking over and making mention of Standout Jobs.
Just a quick note - the referral reward offered by Edvisors was $10,000 not $100,000. Both numbers are big, but $100,000 would really be something!
I’m glad you like the MyBlogLog video and I’d love to get additional feedback from you and your peers in the HR/recruiting industry.
Stephen - You are right not enough companies / organisations are taking advantage of the UK’s high broadband penetration by posting videos online. This is changing though and more are starting to appear but mainly on their own sites at the moment.
The key issue here though is ironically rather an old fashion one…distribution. Online promotion via video needs careful planning if you want to make the most of the huge potential audience and have people actually watch it. If all you do is post it on Youtube the chances of it only getting tens of views rather than thousands are very high. Sometimes orginal / amusing / strange content cuts through and goes viral, but it is very difficult to second guess what is going to do that…..Star Wars Kid, piano playing cats etc!
So it not just producing videos that corporate recruiters have to get to grips with, it’s also how they get people to watch them. If done and promoted properly I do agree that they are a powerful tool.
Hi Stephen - thanks for the ‘invitation’ to comment on videos. I agree that online videos have got massive potential for employers in terms of how they engage with candidates. We’re so excited about the potential that we’ve partnered with RecruiTV in the States to provide videos to UK employers (sorry for the blatent plug) - we’ve also done our own video, just to see how easy the process was, that you can see on the Enhance Media site.
I’m not sure that distribution via You Tube etc is the way to go, but an online video hosted on the corporate careers site as part of a strategy to educate and communicate with potential candidates should play a significant role on behalf of an employer. The issue then is to drive traffic to the site - using the usual channels such as job boards, search engines etc.
Distribution is definitely an issue, but you don’t need a video to go hugely viral for it to be worthwhile. Part of the video’s purpose is to promote the company overall, but a recruitment video needs to bring applicants in the door. And you can do that with some smart distribution in key places. You won’t get 1,000,000 views necessarily; but you can get the views you need, in the right audiences.
Tim - I know the RecruiTV people. They’re doing some very good video work. Standout Jobs isn’t focused exclusively on video production like RecruiTV, although what we’re showing to-date is focused on video. We’re launching in the Fall with a bigger product offering.
Watch this space! We’re about to launch a video recruitment site in the UK.