Did you know that 1/3 of online activity today is spent watching videos?
This statistic emphasizes the growing popularity of video as a preferred media form. People want to consume video content, which is why our Talent Acquisition team is using video marketing to recruit talent from all across North America.
At Sonoco, our Recruitment Marketing content strategy includes two types of videos:
- High production-value videos created in partnership with Stories Inc., that have been great for sharing the overarching culture stories of Sonoco to help attract mid-level, senior-level and corporate hires, and
- In-house videos created by our team members to support our hiring plan of 2,000+ production workers for our manufacturing teams in the US, as well as supporting our college hiring needs.
Knowing that many of our production workers are young, early-career professionals who consume most of their videos through Instagram stories, Facebook and YouTube, we figured that casual recruitment videos shot by our employees would connect well with them.
If you’re interested in launching a similar DIY video campaign in 2020, here are 3 tips on how we pulled this off that might be helpful for you.
Rally note: Want to hear more from Kristi about videos that can help you achieve your Recruitment Marketing goals? Watch the Rally Webinar; 3 Must-Have Recruiting Videos That Candidates Love for more helpful tips of the trade.
Video has become essential to recruiting. Here are three key video statistics on how people use video to learn about brands, products and services. For example, 79% of people say a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a product.
3 Tips for Creating Recruitment Marketing Videos Yourself
1) Identify the right employees to highlight
Because we don’t have members of the HR team at every Sonoco location (we have regional support teams instead), we reached out to managers going through big hiring pushes at some of our different locations. We wanted their help to identify the right employees to spotlight – team members who might be willing to create and share videos about their experience with Sonoco.
We reached out to managers when they had candidates in mind, which was generally at seasonal times throughout the year or when we won new business – both of which tend to result in big hiring pushes. We asked managers specifically if there were particular members of their team who were great representations of the ideal hire and who had the personality type to enjoy filming a short video on their cell phone to help with talent attraction on social media.
While we prioritized people who represented the ideal hire and who’s authentic story played well on camera, we also encouraged managers to make sure they submitted names of a cross-section of individuals who represented the diversity of Sonoco’s team and who’s story would resonate well.
2) Understand what makes an “authentic” video
Once managers had identified appropriate employees, we wanted to make sure we provided participating employees with the right instructions so that our videos felt natural and connected with the people we wanted to hire.
As mentioned, the candidates we wanted to hire were typically young professionals who consumed most of their video content through social media. Therefore, we wanted to create videos that were similar in style to what they were already watching on these platforms.
That being said, even though we wanted these videos to appear less like they were shot by a professional film crew and more like a home-made video people might see on their Facebook feed, we still wanted to make sure they were shot well (good lighting, correct camera placement, no loud background noises, etc.).
To achieve this, before anyone started filming, we sent them the following video guidelines:
- Remember to film with the camera facing “landscape” so it fits screens correctly.
- When you film, be sure you’re in a place that isn’t too loud. Since you don’t have a back-up microphone, you need to make sure there isn’t a lot of background noise.
- Make sure you give yourself a good 5-second buffer before and after you start talking, so there is some time to edit if needed.
- If you film any part of the plant (machines, a wide shot of the office, etc.) be sure you get approval to use it as the machines and equipment in our plants could have proprietary information on them.
We also made ourselves available to hop on a 5-10 min call before shoots to answer any questions that participating employees might have.
Once you empower your employees to create and share videos about their office locations and teams, you’ll be amazed at what they can do. Here’s a recent example from our teammates in Poland.
As for editing the video content, I highly recommend that you watch this YouTube video for some simple video editing tips.
3) Ask the right questions
With our pool of employees eager to get behind the camera and our video best practice tips sent out, the final step was to make sure the questions we asked were questions that would resonate with the candidates we wanted to attract.
We developed our question list by putting ourselves in the candidate’s shoes and asking ourselves the types of questions we wanted answered when we joined Sonoco. We then provided the following questions to our employees ahead of time:
- Why did you apply for and accept a job with Sonoco?
- What motivates you to continue working here?
- What’s your favorite Sonoco memory?
- How has Sonoco supported you in the past?
- What do you enjoy most about the Sonoco company culture, and the specific culture at your facility?
- What three words would you use to describe Sonoco?
Here are some of the words that our teammates use to describe working at Sonoco.
Our employees’ answers to these questions have provided an accurate idea of what it’s like to work at Sonoco, and therefore give potential hires the information they need to decide whether or not working at Sonoco would be a good fit.
We have tried not to sway answers one way or another with guiding questions like “tell us why you LOVE working here” and instead prioritized authentic and relatable answers.
How we plan to execute and what outcomes we expect
We’re planning on rolling out these new videos in 2020 as part of our “New Year, New Career” Recruitment Marketing concept. By starting the campaign at the beginning of a new year, we’re aiming to take advantage of the fact that January and February is a time when people are receptive to career change. They’re setting goals for themselves for the new year, making it a good time to consider a move.
Here’s are few places that we’ll use these videos as part of our “New Year, New Career” campaign:
- At in-person job fairs
- In our job postings (our ATS, Workday, offers a media cloud that allows us to tie videos to our job postings)
- On social media platforms we use, including Instagram and Facebook
- Social ads when we can get the budget
- Email marketing campaigns
- The Sonoco Products YouTube channel
You can use video in pretty much any of your recruiting channels, including your careers site, reputation management sites and in your recruiter communications.
You can use video in any of your recruiting channels, including your careers site, social media, reputation management sites, email marketing campaigns and in your recruiter communications.
We’re also aware of the fact that hourly workers are a new audience for our Recruitment Marketing team. As a result, because this is new territory, our only goals for this campaign are to:
- increase the number of visits to our job postings and
- increase the volume of applications we receive.
We understand that ultimately, it’s about quality over quantity when it comes to applications. However, building general awareness and getting potential interested candidates to our website in a variety of different ways, is the most important first step in our process. If all goes well, we plan to scale these DIY Recruitment Marketing video campaigns in 2021.
With video marketing showing absolutely no signs of slowing down in the years to come, now is a better time than ever to start implementing videos into your own Recruitment Marketing strategies. Hopefully, this sneak peek into our approach has inspired you with some ideas on how to use videos for Recruitment Marketing in 2020 and beyond!
Rally note: Did you enjoy hearing about Kristi’s campaign? Check out the Rally Webinar: 3 Must-Have Recruiting Videos That Candidates Love for even more Recruitment Marketing tactics.
