Video Branding
Appearing as a guest blogger for the first time on www.mylonglunch.com is indeed a great honour and privilege, it struck me however as I sat down to scribble some notes, that being a guest at someone else’s gig has almost certainly been taken to a whole new level over the last week. But I wonder how much of that is actually down to the incident itself rather than they way in which we all now consume more and more information via video.
I’m certain just about everyone in the UK is now familiar with the timeline of the recent Brand / Ross event, unless of course you’ve been away in some exotic far flung country, but I guess even then you would have seen or heard about the prank, briefly the show was broadcast on Saturday 18th October with around 400,000 listeners and received two complaints immediately after the show. The Mail on Sundays reporting on 26th October and the inevitable inclusion onto YouTube
which so far has been watched almost an amazing 1 million times in just over 3 days and the complaints have now reached over 30,000 according to the latest reports.
So is there a connection between the video content being made available on the internet and the number of complaints? Or is it still just down to the sheer wait of column inches, TV news coverage and radio air time?
In the greatest tradition on BBC radio links, and for one that has a face perfect for radio, I feel reasonably safe, I’m going to attempt link number 36D and try and move the discussion onto video and recruitment, seamless eh?
A new idea?
No, not really. Video and its use for recruitment is nothing new, Susan Burns, http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanburns whilst at the American retail giant Macy’s in 1999 (almost 10 years ago!!) launched a college recruitment site with around 20 videos of executives being interviewed, (I couldn’t find these anywhere, if anyone knows if they are still available, would be great to watch them). Fast forward to 2008 and around 80% of internet users are consuming video content, according to emarketeer http://www.emarketer.com the split of users is equal in terms of gender, so I guess that whilst the boys are watching that excellent strike from David Bentley against Arsenal the other night.
The girls on the other hand may well be watching Daniel Craig in the latest 007 offering “Quantum of Solace”, maybe those viewers might well be the other way round, who knows? I for one think "James" and his fast cars are brilliant.
The answers yes, now whats the question?
The question is – is video right for recruitment? The answer is absolutely YES for companies to communicate to prospects and candidates.
There are many great examples of such communication out there at the moment not least of which are a couple we quite like, showing a different approach to communicating the corporate message, the “60 second” all about us leaves you with a clear understating of the employees view of the organisation whilst the second more elaborate video also formed part of an internal campaign to reinforce the employer branding message and drive internal referrals.
http://www.my-ijob.com/agencyprofile.asp?AG_ID=297
http://www.my-ijob.com/agencyprofile.asp?AG_ID=181
Value for Money
Susan Burns comments further on the potential cost effectiveness and the ROI that you can get, if you think about it any good corporate recruitment site almost certainly incorporates video to allow job seekers an opportunity to get to know the company through the community of people that come together to make their business happen every day. Yes, that also implies that good recruitment videos include “real” people and not hired actors. And, the really good ones aren’t scripted either. It’s more cost effective than ever to produce good recruitment videos. Once you have content created you can use snippets of video in many, many ways to make your recruitment site more engaging, layer content into social networks, and incorporate video links into candidate communications and job postings – yes, job postings! The story here is that you get a lot for what you produce if you think about how to leverage it.
Video for recruitment is most definitely on the radar for more and more clients and should absolutely form part of the strategy to engage with and communicate to potential employees. In a recent article by Dr Emma Parry, Senior Research Fellow, Human Resources Management at Cranfield School of Management wrote in an article entitled “The war for talent moves online” .. “They (the employer) must present themselves in a way that will attract the job seeker and build a relationship with them so that they want to apply for a job” “This can be done by creating a content-rich website that is interactive and interesting, by using functionality such as videos and pod casts”
Having created much excellent content the client then needs to find a channel to connect with job seekers and communicate via the video their employer brand proposition and to start to build that relationship with the job seeker. The obvious one given the very nature of the media must be www.youtube.com but that in itself presents some interesting topics for discussion, the audience is most definitely there but how will the feel about the glossy corporate videos being used to encourage them to join, a great example of this can be found at
Or would job seekers prefer to see more grainy, user generated content, given the very nature of the Gen Y job seeker ? (This is an excellent video and just about sums everything up in under 4 minutes).
With the continued advances in technlogy and the recent launch here in the UK of the Flip
http://www.theflip.com/ How long will it be before we see a social networking site such as www.whatitsreallyliketoworkhere.com with your chance to upload your very own version?
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