Make the perfect company video to attract young talent

Why make a company video for HR?

Video is more efficient, more engaging and more impactful than all other types of media content, especially on a young audience. Students have grown up first with video on television, then with video on the web. The youngest of them are even younger than the first web video platforms! Making video content has become a staple of marketing in the last year, especially on social media, but it shouldn’t stop there: thus, this article on company video for HR.

On the Career Center by JobTeaser, we’ve found out that job offers with a company video in them are clicked 2.5 times more than when they are text-only. The reason for this is simple. Video makes jobs much more appealing than any form of content. It is more dynamic than pictures, and more engaging than text.

You can attract the best and brightest students and young graduates with a well-crafted video about your company culture. In this post, Pascale, a Video Project Manager at JobTeaser, will guide you in all the steps of video-making!

Choosing the right people to make the video

Some companies rely on price to decide whether they want to work with someone. Let’s start this paragraph with a clear reminder that high costs doesn’t necessarily mean high quality. In video, you don’t always get what you pay for. Here are the main ways you should appraise a team’s expertise.

Technical skill comes first, of course. Pascale advises to look for someone who is used to short and impactful videos, “ideally someone who has worked on advertising videos, who’s used to get the point across in a matter of seconds, which is what you need here.” On the more technical side, Paul, a camera operator and film editor at JobTeaser, says the most important factor is to make sure the team can adapt to filming conditions, for example the lighting in your meeting room or the time you have to shoot all the necessary content.

Then, focus on the people’s experience with this specific type of videos. The people you hire for your company video also need to know the corporate world and the younger audience. The most amazing filmmakers won’t be a right fit for you if they don’t understand what students and new graduates want, and what your company’s identity is. Always ask for examples of previous videos so you can get an idea of what to expect.

Last but not least, take the time to check the team’s soft skills. Do they know how to make the people they are interviewing feel at ease? For example, Paul advises to give feedback after each shot instead of drowning people in best practices before even starting with the filming. Even more crucial is this question: will they be able to get the right information from the right people when conducting the interviews?

Types of company presentation videos you can make

There are two main types of company presentation videos you can make.

The 2-minute exhaustive video

The first one is a classic format, with a company video where you talk about your identity, your activities, your culture and your recruitment needs. It is better suited for your company website and company pages on external websites when someone already wants to work for you and needs more information about your company.

The main effort to do here is to make sure that after 10 seconds, everyone is still there. Afterwards, you’ve got their attention, and abandonment rates start dropping. They rise again after 2 minutes, so your sweet spot is likely somewhere under 2 minutes of video length, although a small proportion of longer videos make it to the Company Culture Hall of Fame (and no, the Company Culture Hall of Fame is not a real thing).

This format is the industry standard and the most popular among companies. However, as it is rather long, students can easily disengage with it if it lacks energy: it may not be suited for people who don’t already want to know more about you. This is where the other format kicks in.

The 15-second topical video

The second main format for company videos is better suited for social media and is highly viral and engaging.

You can make one or several very short videos, close to an advertising format: 15 seconds at most, and just one message per video. In here, you should apply the great founding principle that is Show, don’t tell: talk about one thing and make sure the company video branding follows your employer branding. That way, while you talk about what’s not obvious (your recruitment needs, for example), you can show what makes your company special, and especially its identity and sense of purpose. Pascale adds: “the focus nowadays is starting to move towards videos that only last a few seconds, but not at the expense of information. You have to be really creative to get your message across in so little time, but if you manage to do it, you’ve hit the jackpot!”

One easy way to engage students and young graduates with these short videos is the flash interview format: ask very simple, relatable questions, and get someone from the company to answer. “When was the last time you been under pressure?” or, perhaps easier, “What was the last movie you saw?”, is the kind of question every person who watches the interview will ask themselves upon hearing. This is what you’re aiming for: dynamism and relatability, allowing people to identify with the interviewed employee.

These videos, on their own, aren’t enough to engage young talents and make them apply, and they are not meant to. Think of them as glorified calls to action and remember that your goal here is to get watchers to visit your career website. Both video types can work together for this. For example, you can post these 15-second spots and nudge people to watch the full-length video on your website immediately afterwards.

You can also make live videos to appeal to the new generation. We talk about this in more detail on other posts of this blog.

How to make the perfect company video

Before you begin: know your message

The main goal of a company presentation video is to build brand credibility and trust, by showing your company’s culture and people. In order to do this, your culture and your purpose need to be absolutely clear for you.

In smaller companies, it’s often harder to explain your purpose in a 15-second pitch. This is, however, what you need to do to make an impactful video. Get straight to the point with a maximum of 15 seconds of talking, and think of it like an elevator pitch.

Answer the following questions in a couple of sentences:

1. Who are you?

2. Why should people work for you? (Why would someone be proud to add your company to their resume?)

3. Why would people want to work with you? (What makes the people in your company worth spending eight hours a day with?)

You can use our advice on how to craft a great “About the company” paragraph in an online job offer to get started. Written text can get longer than spoken video content, but you will have a general outline of what really matters. Then, you can start thinking about the company video format or content best suited to your identity.

You only have 10 seconds to grab everyone’s attention

On YouTube, you have about 10 seconds to make a great first impression. As we said earlier, 20% of people have stopped watching by the tenth second of video. This means that your core message and values should all be clear before this mark is reached. Cut the title card and pretty introduction and get started directly to make the most of what little time you have to get your message across.

If you’ve worked on your 10-second pitch, as we suggested doing at the beginning of the article, then that pitch needs to be the opening lines of your company video. Afterwards, show everything else that matters, but this is really the most important part there is, so give it extra attention!

Get your point across

Once these ten seconds are over, don’t stop working on getting your point across! The easiest way to make a company video is having one or several employees talk about the subjects listed above, facing a camera.

Things you should say or show in your video are:

• Who you are
• What you do
• What your philosophy is
• How the company’s working atmosphere feels
• What kind of jobs you usually hire for

When making a company video specifically for young talents, there is one element that you should add to your video: career development opportunities. Someone with little experience will be encouraged to apply thinking that they can gain more responsibility fast. For some companies, they can even change departments after a couple of years: if this is the case for you, then by all means, say it in your video. Pauline, a Customer Success Manager at JobTeaser, says that what makes video appealing is seeing real people talking about their real job, and getting to see the office and the people. “In a good company video, you are at the heart of the action, and you can easily picture yourself working there”, she adds.

Show, don’t tell

B-roll video is what makes transitions easier and what saves you from saying what can easily be shown: for example, instead of saying “everyone’s very nice”, show employees talking and smiling, and instead of saying “the office is great”, give people an overview of what the office actually looks like.

This means that the place you choose for shooting the company video is crucial. Lighting, space, acoustics: everything is important. Try to book the nicest room you have, because talking in front of a white wall in a corridor won’t cut it.

Your filmmaker will leverage all the possibilities they can, using different angles and focuses. They will alternate close-ups and wide long shots, for example. Be patient! Don’t panic if the camera operator makes you walk around the room five times in a row, and it’s perfectly normal to give the answer to the same question twice. It doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. Your filmmaker knows there will be several shots of each scene, and has scheduled enough time for that. The more you worry, the more scenes you will have to re-do, because stress comes across really obviously on camera. Choose your filmmaker with care, and then trust them blindly.

Make your video engaging

Always be engaging, asking questions directly to the audience, for example. This is what Vinci does in this spot. They convey their message very efficiently, with minimal visual effort and without going through the whole employee interviewing process.

The best way to nail a company presentation video is to use humour. There’s nothing like a good joke to get young talents to relate to you! However, keep the end goal in mind. A funny video without a message can go viral, but won’t get you more applicants.

A video with 5 or 6 people playing in it is generally very dynamic. The best way to get everyone to come is to tell them that it won’t be hard. And it’s no lie either! A scripted company video with stressed-out or shy people acting without enthusiasm isn’t what you are going for: let people talk freely. Paul suggests giving them a card with key words and phrases that should be used in answers, without scripting the answer itself. “There’s nothing worse than someone reciting an answer that was written by someone in HR or a manager”, he adds.

If there is just one thing to remember, it is to be transparent. Students and new graduates don’t want corporate communication: they want concrete information. The more “behind the scenes” you show, the more you will engage people who watch: let go of the script, as said earlier, but more generally, try to include real-life work situations. Don’t be afraid to show the harder aspects of the work too: remember, this video is not there to make anyone want to work for you, but to show qualified prospective applicants what to expect in your company.

If you can do so, implicating C-level executives in the shooting of the video is always appreciated too. Picture them as approachable, especially in a larger-scale company, and you can guarantee that this will make your company likeable in students’ minds.

This engaging video by Michel et Augustin, made from a marketing campaign where they tried to “recruit a CEO” on the subway, is fun and engaging. That may be what you are going for too!

What to do once the company video is ready

Around the video

Get the most from everything you’ve done until now by optimising everything that comes with the video. On this subject, Pascale explains: “The companies shouldn’t try to fit everything in their video. They should use everything that comes around the video, from the title to the description text, to the call-to-action and the link at the end of the spot if it’s on YouTube…. The video can gives all informations of course, but must also appeal to search more info.”

Here’s a quick list the four elements you can focus on to create a great overall experience on your company video:

• Title
• Call to action linking to your Careers page
• Description for people who don’t want to (or can’t) watch the video but still want the key information, and to add all relevant information that’s not in the video at that time
• Thumbnail, to get people to click “Play” on the video

Subtitles

On an even more important note: put subtitles on your video.

A video without subtitles is a video that can’t be shared on social media, where people want to see your content and have the power to make it viral. Same thing goes for mobile browsers: if someone is watching your video during their commute and doesn’t have earphones handy, how can they still have all the information they need? You got it: subtitles.

It also helps your search engine results, because search engines will browse through the text in your subtitles instead of using vocal recognition, which can have a hard time with company and brand names.

Broadcasting

You can do much more to share your company video than embed it in your careers website and forget about it. Work together with your marketing department, if you aren’t used to creating communication plans, and design a good social media strategy.

If you do 15-second videos, which social media outlets will you post them on? At what frequency? For a longer video, will you post it on personal social media, or only on professional networks?

Will you add everything to your careers website? If so, will you put the videos in each job offer, or on the homepage?

Reporting on video performance

Using “vanity metrics”

What marketers call “vanity metrics” is what your instinct would tell you to measure when posting any kind of video. They are called this because in marketing, they are not enough to measure impact, since the goals is to have more sales.

Is your goal to increase your company’s notoriety? In this case, using vanity metrics is a great thing for you. Measure the reach of your company video by checking your number of views, but also of shares and likes. When numbers start stagnating, post a new 15-second video, if you can, or re-share your video with new accompanying text to give it another boost.

Using the number of applications

Now, your goal might be to increase your number of applications, and not to increase your general notoriety. In this case, vanity metrics are… vain, yes. Paul comments, “a video can have 50 views and still be more efficient than a video with a thousand views, if it’s impactful: a rise in the number of application is your ultimate goal, so make it the core of your reporting efforts!”

To make a brilliant company video, choose the video format and the filmmaking team very carefully. Then, get your point across by knowing what message you want to convey, but staying as natural as you can. Once the video is ready, create all the assets that will go around the video, like the title and the subtitles. Finally, create a sharing plan, especially for social media. Once the video is out, don’t forget to report on its outcomes.