It’s time to do something different with your recruitment technology if you really want candidates.
By Maury Hanigan
Are you frustrated and puzzled by the lack of applicants for your jobs? Are you asking your recruiting team to work harder, maybe increase spending and crank up the machine?
Your process has worked in the past, perhaps not as efficiently as you wished, but you’ve always been able to meet your goals before. Are you feeling pressure to generate more hires but feel like you are pushing on a string?
We are all focused on the pandemic and how that has impacted the labor force, but there were fundamental changes in candidate behavior before Covid disrupted the market. Not only have generational shifts in the labor force changed the norm on how candidates consume information, we all changed our behavior. You may not think of yourself as a big consumer of video because you don’t surf YouTube or spend hours on TikTok, but you probably view sports highlights, news clips and social media messages that are video, not to mention the video you watch of vendor demos, presentation recaps and professional development.
And yet, you promote your open positions with these:
You can rewrite your job descriptions, you can post them in more places, you can increase the budget to sponsor them, you can attach them to more nurturing campaigns, include them in more InMails, post them more often on social media, text them to more prospects, insert them in more chat bots, connect them to more AI, out bid competition for PPC and disperse printed copies from airplanes! But it won’t solve the core problem.
Candidates aren’t reading your job descriptions – it’s not 1990.
No one is engaged by text-based job advertising. Candidates want to see and hear about your opportunities. They want a sense of their potential co-workers, they want a preview of your culture, they want to know who their boss is going to be, they want to envision themselves in the job. And it doesn’t matter if they are a security-cleared cybersecurity expert, a warehouse worker, a recent campus graduate, a mid-level finance manager or a media specialist. We all respond to a human connection. We will all watch a video before we will read a paragraph of text.
But how do you do it at scale? Certainly not with a professional production crew, the cost is prohibitive, but every one of your hiring managers has a high-definition camera in their pocket. You can get authentic and credible video content without spending a fortune. There are excellent recruitment technology platforms that automate the capture and approval of video so you have consistent quality and branding.
And does it make a difference to candidates? In a recent study conducted by the independent analysts at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, candidates were asked what impact a hiring manager video would have on them. The results were amazing, 42% were more likely to apply to the job or respond to a recruiter; and an additional 27% said they would be more interested in the job. In an industry where moving the needle a few percentage points is a big accomplishment, a 69% increase is almost unheard of.
But do candidates actually behave that way? The case study data is compelling. ThermoFisher Scientific conducted an A/B study on the impact of hiring manager video on the job posting pages of their career site. They measured the conversion of visitors to applicants on the job posting pages and found when a hiring manager video is included, the conversion increases 60%. The results have been replicated by technology companies, healthcare providers, hospitality, financial institutions, retail and manufacturing.
What would a 60% increase do for you?
And yet, most organizations continue to push text-only recruitment technology for their open positions and reserve video for a company overview or an occasional employer branding video. Why not use your most effective tool for your biggest challenge? Your results won’t change until you change what you are doing. The technology is readily available and affordable. If you want to engage candidates, give them engaging content.
Maury Hanigan is CEO of SparcStart, the award-winning video platform that makes recruiting video simple, secure and scalable. Learn more at www.sparcstart.com.