Ask just about anyone what they think is the best way to go about getting a job and they’ll tell you in a word – networking. While many companies will pay their employees handsomely for referrals, my own feeling is that if you’ve hired good people, and you’ve worked hard to make them feel good about their job, feel good about the company they work for, and feel good about the people they work with, then they’ll gladly promote your jobs because, well, it’s all good.
A couple quick statistics that I noticed from LinkedIn’s research1 bear this out. They noted that 35% of employees refer to help their friends, 32% do it to help their company, and 26% will help in referrals to be regarded as a valuable colleague. Only 6% do it for money and recognition. Good people naturally want to help others and, in fact, the willingness to refer a friend or colleague to work for their own company is one of the very questions often used by Human Resources to gauge levels of employee engagement.
Engaged employees are easily the most effective ambassadors of an employer brand, and a hugely untapped recruitment marketing asset. Harnessing people’s innate propensity to want to help others may just be a matter of encouragement and simplicity.
Video continues to be used with increased frequency to communicate the Employer Brand and Employer Value Proposition, and with good reason. Video content in a job description gets candidates who are visiting a web page to stay longer, and ultimately delivers more informed, higher quality candidates for jobs. Now we are seeing clients take it one step further with a Video Job Description (VJD), in which the video is the job description.
And it’s almost like these were conceived with networking in mind, because they are remarkably easy to share. The VJD itself is compact and concise – 30 seconds in all. It’s easy to consume and easy to share. Here is how long it took me to share one:
- Finding an old email explaining how to do it: 2 minutes
- Saving the Video Job Description from the Job Description on the TMP Career Site to my desktop: 1 minute
- Creating a LinkedIn post featuring the Video Job Description and a link to the Job Description on the TMP Career Site: 5 minutes
- Writing and sending an email to TMP colleagues and other colleagues in my LinkedIn Network, asking them to share my post on their LinkedIn feed: 5 minutes
Here’s what it looks like:
My original post went up on a Thursday afternoon. By the end of the day, there were 244 views of the video. By the end of following day, the number of views had grown to 615. I made one final check on Tuesday of the following week, and at 3:30 in the afternoon the LinkedIn Post had received 21 likes, 3 comments (all positive), and had received 1,272 views. It has now received 1500+ views.
To be clear, views of the Video Job Description do not equate to visits to the Job Page for the open Account Executive position, and certainly not to ‘applies’ either. In a way, I think this highlights the strength of the Video Job Description as it pertains to social media – and if you have Gen Z-aged kids like I do, you need only watch them for a few minutes using Snapchat or Instagram to know what I mean. Consuming short, engaging, and yes, ephemeral videos is rapidly becoming the “go to” form of engagement. Visiting text-heavy job pages that may require candidates to visit multiple other pages to build a fuller picture of a job opportunity is becoming harder to get folks to do.
Why not have your recruitment marketing strategy swim with the current of this behavioral trend?
1Global Talent Trends, 2015/Why & How People Change Jobs, 2015 – LinkedIn Talent Solutions
You must be logged in to post a comment.