Video Strategies for Your Recruitment Agency
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to recruit the best talent using traditional recruitment methods – agencies today are using so many different types of evolving technology, that a traditional approach will have you quickly falling behind in the market. A recent trend that continues to grow and dominate the industry is video – and it’s being used in varying stages of the whole recruitment process.
We often talk about how video interviewing can drive more revenue for your recruitment business, but now we’re going to talk about how you can use video in varying stages of your recruitment process – from building brand awareness, attracting talent, and gaining new clients. The recruitment industry has reached a point where if you’re not using video, you’ve fell behind on the latest competitive advantage: Cisco has predicted that 82% of all global traffic will be video by 2021.
But, that doesn’t mean that it’s too late to start investing in video now – so to help get you started, or even help you build on a video strategy you’ve already put into place, we’ve outlined the different ways that you can use video to help your agency thrive:
Marketing
A lot of video usage comes down to one thing – marketing your agency. 51% of marketing professionals name video as the content type with the best ROI, with figures that show viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch a video in comparison to 10% when reading text.
The social media strategy in your recruitment agency should have a heavy video element involved. While this sounds expensive, you don’t need lots of costly equipment, or even an external agency to get started. Simple videos that showcase things like the culture and working life in your agency will help to bring your brand to life and get you more noticed on social. Video content on social media has shown to get 1200% more shares than text or images – particularly when the videos are fun or informative.
Not only that, but videos embedded onto your website helps to boost your visibility in search engines, increasing your traffic by up to 157% - SEO loves video! High quality videos help you to enhance your brand and position you as a leader in your niche. It can often be tough to get started creating videos when it’s something you haven’t done before, but the key is to just jump in and get practicing – there’s nothing wrong with a few trial runs and you’ll soon end up an expert!
Business Development
We all know that marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. So, once you’ve got the correct video marketing strategy in place, using video for business development should seem easy, especially if the whole team have been involved in making those videos.
A rising trend for recruitment agencies is using video tools to prospect potential new clients. This often consists of the consultant recording a short, snappy video of themselves talking about how they can help. Then, these will be sent out via platforms like email or LinkedIn InMail’s. This approach is becoming more popular because the proof is in the figures – an initial email that includes a video often sees an increased click-through rate up to 96%, as video boosts interactivity. Even simply including the word ‘video’ has proven to increase open rates by almost 20%, and click-through rates by 65%.
There are a number of platforms designed specifically for methods like these, such as the one we offer here at Shine.
Job listings
So you’ve used video to prospect new clients and have new roles to work on – time to get your job listings ready. Recent stats show that recruitment agencies have reported 800% more engagement on job postings that have a video embedded into them. Not only that, on average they also receive 34% more applications than job listings that don’t contain video.
In an agency setting, the video could simply be a video of yourself, a colleague, or your client sharing some information about the role. Adding personality to something that would otherwise just be plain text will make job listings a lot more appealing to candidates and therefore encourage more people to apply.
Lastly, back to our mention of SEO – your job listing will be more likely to appear top of search results if it contains a video!
Candidate Prospecting and Engagement
The same tool we discussed for business development can be leveraged for prospecting candidates, too. Using video introduction tools when trying to source and engage with candidates has proven to increase response rates by up to 450%.
Simply get your consultants to record short snappy videos, similar to those we outlined for business development, but this time giving a brief overview of the role and its benefits. Depending on whether you use a dedicated platform for this, you’ll also have the ability to include things like the full job description outlined next to your video (or other text of your choice), as well as other features like contact forms.
This approach is most effective for engaging with passive candidates when trying to find the right talent for those hard-to-fill roles. As video boosts overall engagement, you’re much more likely to get responses from candidates when there’s video involved, rather than sending the usual LinkedIn message or email.
Video Interviewing
The last stage we’re going to cover, which directly follows all stages we’ve outlined, is video interviewing. After prospecting your new candidates, it’s time for shortlisting and deciding who to put forward to your clients. At this stage, you can get successful candidates to complete video interviews so that you can submit video shortlists to your clients, rather than just standard CVs. You can even gather generic video interviews to build talent pools for when you find a great candidate, but don't have a role for them at the time.
This can either be a one-way video interview or a live video interview. One-way video interviews see your candidates recording themselves answering pre-set questions so you would not need to be present when they do this. However, live interviews will show real-time communication between you and your candidate. Think Skype, but with recording and sharing functionality so that you can present these to your clients.
Your clients are likely to be much more engaged watching videos and seeing a real representation of each candidate, as apposed to just reading through CVs and telephone interview notes. It’s also a service that, right now, more agencies don’t have on offer so it puts you ahead of a lot of your competition. In a recent project, a Shine client had a send out to placement ratio of 1:1 – it doesn’t get much more impressive than that! You can read more about the project here.
Other things to consider…
Video now sits at the core of all booming recruitment agencies. So when implementing a video strategy, there are a couple of other things you need to consider to ensure you get it right.
The first is ensuring that your content is mobile friendly – people are always scrolling on the go and one of the best ways to engage with them is through video. The second issue is that up to 85% of videos are watched without sound – so how do we optimise our videos when this happens? Captions. Simple apps and online tools will allow you to put captions onto your videos with ease – and it’s often best to keep this clean and simple - basic white captions across the bottom of your video will work best, so you don’t detract from anything happening in the video.
Moral of the story, video opens up your agency to a wide array of new opportunities that will help you succeed in an overly competitive market!