Employers today know video is a critical component of any successful employer brand or recruitment marketing campaign, heck it can even improve employee engagement and help you deliver a differentiated and personalized candidate experience.
Everyone loves video! 83% of senior executives prefer video to text ... 90% of consumers watch videos before making a purchase ... Millennials watch more than 4 hours of video a day ... if you’re not making videos in 2019 you’re missing out!
Sound familiar? A cursory glance at trending blogs (and videos) by sales and marketing experts such as Neil Patel, Gary Vaynerchuk and HubSpot’s Brian Halligan would have you believe that video is the only channel worth investing in in 2019.
BUT, on closer inspection, you realise that nearly all of the available data is about businesss-to-consumer (B2C) video consumption and the preference for video in leisure and e-commerce.
It’s not a huge leap of logic to assume that trends such as ...
88% of video marketers say they plan to increase their video spend in 2019
... could apply to recruitment—but where is the industry-specific data? How are professionals across employer branding, recruitment marketing and HR using video and what sort of results are they getting?
While there’s oodles of data from B2C marketing that proves video marketing works, when it comes to our own industry—let’s call it ‘the People Experience’—it’s a struggle to find compelling data about the impact of video. In fact, it’s a struggle to find any data at all!
Which is why we decided to team up with our Irish friends (and video evangelists) at SocialTalent. Together, we reached out to our combined global community of recruitment experts and enthusiasts to get the low-down on the state of video in 2019.
What we did
To attempt a 47-question survey of professionals in the 'people' trenches, people we know are run off their feet with job reqs, reporting and stakeholder management, was an ambitious endeavor. But we attempted it anyway—and the results were pretty encouraging!
Here’s a summary by the numbers:
- Number of survey questions: 47
- Total responses: 604
- Countries represented: 50
- Survey completion rate: 66%
- Average completion time: 7 minutes
- Amount we spent: $0
A 66% completion rate for a survey of this length is good—but considering how little time these respondents have in the day for non-essential tasks like this one, it felt especially victorious.
Even more rewarding was the group of individuals we ended up with: 604 People Experience professionals, 57% of whom specialize in recruiting and most of whom are measured by the quality of their shortlist and the experience they provide to candidates, business partners and clients. Contributors from staffing, RPO and in-house talent teams were equally well represented.
Note: Looking for candidate feedback on your video job ads? Why not create a short survey and add it to your email/video template thanking job seekers for their application.
How we did it
By sticking to a simple guiding principle: always be helping (yeah, we stole that from HubSpot, but it's a good one).
People working in recruitment and HR get asked for things every day, non-stop. If some outsider is going to try and steal precious minutes that could otherwise be spent planning, assessing, learning or catching up on emails, it had better give a good reason for doing so.
We know that our industry is rapidly evolving and professionals struggle to stay abreast of best practice in a landscape overflowing with HR technology solutions. So before we even started, we talked to our customers, consultants and industry pundits and asked them what they wanted to know about video—the overwhelming theme was one of FOMO.
"Have we missed the video boat?" "Is everyone else doing a better job than us with video?" "Where are our peers getting the best video results?"
That’s what guided our approach from start to finish: before launching into a 47-question survey, we gave people a reason to want to answer. In other words, our focus was: user first, survey second.
Note: If you are asking for feedback from candidates, don't forget to ask them what they want to see more (and less) of in your job ads.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
We teamed up with a mature business
We’re an Australian start-up, with less than 3 years in the market. We wanted the results of our survey to be a global snapshot of the state of video in our industry. So we approached a mature business with a video-first attitude and an active international community of recruitment professionals to help us spread the word.
We offered a prize draw incentive
Given our budget of $0 and a completely unforecastable number of responses, a $10 gift card seemed like a bit of a gamble. Even if we could afford such an incentive, who’s to say respondents wouldn’t whiz through the questions, accuracy be damned, just to get to the freebie?
Instead of offering a financial incentive for every response, we put together two high-value prizes (thanks again to our partners at SocialTalent) for two lucky-draw winners. We provided context and relevance, and we got genuine, thoughtful responses.
We were persistent
We’re all busy people, the day a survey request lands in your inbox might also be the day your top candidate ghosts you, 10 new job reqs land on your desk and your team launches a brand new career site.
We experimented with a combination of emails, videos, social media posts, push notifications and shameless requests to influential friends to share the survey in order to maximise our chances of getting in front of the right people, at the right time.
We provided context
At VideoMyJob, we believe in the power of video to make better connections.
Video job ads, culture videos, video testimonials, event videos, recruitment process videos, learning videos, video updates … you get the picture! As far as we’re concerned, there’s no limit to the creative ways video can be used to power-up your communication.
We explained that we were gathering industry-specific data to help video adopters benchmark their activity, and assist future video innovators to build a case for video investment—no matter what platform, agency or blend of solution being considered.
There’s no right or wrong way to create videos, the more videos the merrier as far as we’re concerned! Our survey was designed to be platform agnostic, with results as relevant to our customers as any other member of our industry.
And finally, we promised to actively share our findings with all survey respondents (sit tight, we’re analyzing the data now).
Note: If you're struggling to understand the impact of your own employee-generated videos, follow our step-by-step guide to measuring the metrics that actually matter.
While we were confident in the return on video investment based on our own experiences, we were delighted when the results tallied up and 85% of respondents (both customers and non-customers) confirmed that video delivers good ROI.
Video is no longer a 'nice to have': 85% of People Experience professionals believe video provides a good return on investment.
We’re crunching the numbers now and we can’t wait to share more detail on:
- The use of video across the People Experience
- Return on video investment
- The impact of video on experience and engagement
- The impact of video on candidate attraction
- Video trends in investment and platforms
A huge thank you to everyone who participated, our partners at SocialTalent and congratulations to the lucky prize winners AIG and Pontoon Solutions!
Want to get your hands on the State of Video in Talent 2019 report before the rest of the world?
