One of your 2019 resolutions in the new year should be focusing on video in your recruitment marketing. Video has long been used by product marketers and in traditional marketing, and innovative companies have been using video for employer branding for years now. It’s a great add to your career site and highly effective in highlighting your employer brand. However, if you really want to turn up the reach on your job postings, video can be the best tool for your recruiting strategy.

How Video Drives Your Recruitment Marketing and Branding

Job postings with videos are viewed 12% more than postings without video. On average, employers receive a 34% greater candidate application rate when they add video to their job postings. They are a powerful way to relate and resonate with your candidate in a way the written word does not. And consider the following stats:

• 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week. (HubSpot, 2016)
• 55% of people consume video content thoroughly. (HubSpot, 2016)
• 75% of millennials watch video on social media daily. (Animoto, 2017)

What Type of Video Should We Use?

Short answer: All of them. But if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll want to be selective about your video investment and create what will get you the best return. If you’re already using video, there might be another way of looking at this medium you haven’t considered before. In this post, I’ll talk about five different types of recruitment videos—from social to branding to employee testimonials—and how they can help boost your job posting reach to optimize your recruitment marketing efforts.

Employee testimonials

These are powerful ways to tell a story. Candidates will respond to hearing what it’s like to work for your company better when it comes from employees than when it comes from your HR department. Job seekers trust what they hear from employees, and testimonials are a great way to get your employees involved in the recruiting process. Look for a range of employees that will help showcase your company’s variety and diversity. This includes the personal (a mix of ages and backgrounds) as well as the professional (job functions, titles, and tenure with the company). Your happy employees are the best people to sell your open positions to candidates.

Short career videos

You can get really creative with these no matter what your budget. Consider involving key members from marketing or creative teams to brainstorm ideas on themes or scenarios that won’t just showcase a position or your employer brand, but also really nail your culture. If your company is like most, your employees have a sense of humor. Candidates tend to appreciate a sense of humor. You can be informative and entertaining at the same time, and involve your employee crew in a fun project that will demonstrate what your culture is like even if you’re putting it together with a small budget.

Some ideas: Film a Q&A with senior management, but let the most recently hired employees ask any questions they’d like. Have a contest for employees to submit a “day at my job” video (from start of day to end of day in short narrated segments), and offer prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place (this could be gift cards or bonus time off hours). Film a company outing or event and ask for volunteers to create a final edit, prize goes to the most creative.

Video job postings

Videos with messages about the job or directly from the hiring manager. These videos focus on the responsibilities of a specific position. Think of them like a visual job ad. You can talk about your company culture, but these videos should have elements like a short tour of the workspace, an intro to some coworkers, and a narrative that focuses on what you’re looking for and what the role offers.

Live streaming video

Live streaming video, including Facebook and YouTube Live, plus Instagram Stories. Live video can help you not only connect with potential candidates in real time, it also feels personal and can reach candidates who aren’t even in the market for a new job (or weren’t before they saw a video about your company). You could show candidates what a few minutes on the job are like, introduce some co-workers, or do a question and answer session about a job opening. Live video has the added bonus of reaching candidates who would not have noticed or seen a standard job post.

Social sharing of videos

If you’re creating videos for your landing pages or career site, put them on social too. There is so much competition on social channels, it’s difficult to get traditional posts out there without putting a lot of budget behind them. However, if you look at Facebook as an example, video ranks higher in its algorithms than a text or photo post. And making it easier to share them can organically boost the reach and engagement.

Video has another benefit I haven’t mentioned yet: SEO. Search engines love video content. In fact, research firm Forrester estimates that the chances of getting a page one spot on Google increases by 53 times with video. In 2017, Moz and Jumpshot looked at (U.S. only) data which split up Google’s properties and included other leading sites (e.g. Amazon) in an effort to better understand search behaviors. Of 10 sites, YouTube ranked third for search share with 3.71% of searches. This is lower than Google.com and Google Images, but ahead of Yahoo!, Bing and Facebook.

Video Gives Career Sites and Your Recruitment Marketing a Competitive Advantage

While all of these numbers can have an amazing benefit for your recruiting funnel and candidate experience, don’t discount the competitive edge. You only have to beat your top five competitors in your market and because video is still emerging in the recruitment space, a stellar video strategy could give your company the advantage you need in this talent marketplace.