Top 5 Reasons why your candidates aren’t seeing your recruitment videos

So we're talking about the top five reasons why your candidates aren't watching your videos. Now. Maybe you're one of those who have gone through the trouble are going through the process of creating videos and kudos. If you if you created your videos for the purposes of recruiting, and I want to make sure that yeah, it says candidates, I want to make sure this is about recruiting guys, so I'm not talking about videos in general, I'm talking about videos that have to do with getting candidates. Because in the recruiting business, that's what it's all about. You want to try and get as many qualified candidates as you can for all of your open positions. So that's what I'm focusing on and talking about today is the top five reasons why your candidates aren't watching videos and how you can turn that around. Okay. So if you're if you're already signing in, let me know where you're signing in, from what city what state what country. But let's be interactive, I want to read your comments. as I go along throughout this discussion. Someone put the comments up front, I can see him really easy. And I'm gonna hit the little refresh button and make sure that I can see any comments that are coming in. Thank you for coming in today. And I'm going to get right into the meat of this in just a second.

Okay, let's get right into this. Okay, so I'm going to start off with number one. This is the top five reasons. And well, you know what, before I start off, let me let me get a little give you a little bit of groundwork. What I want to do with this presentation is I want to reveal common mistakes that organizations make when creating videos in order to attract talent to their organization. So with that in mind, I want you to think of the approach like an applicant. If you're an applicant, what things would you like to see in a video? What information are you looking for? Before you even see a job description? What would you like to know? So here's a couple of things that I've come up with. This is my list, this is my list of what I've heard candidates want to know about as quickly as possible to see if this is going to be relevant to them. They want to know what type of job is for. They want to know roughly where the job is, especially if it's not 100% remote. And what does the job offer, those are the three main things we're looking for, then they want to know what you know more about the company, who they're going to be working with. But knowing about the company he'll be working with to them as is really irrelevant until they know that this this job is something that they would be interested in and perhaps have a skill set for. And they're in the right location for that job. They have the right skill set, that sort of thing. Does that make sense? So we want to make sure we think of this like an applicant. Now, if you think about if you think about things through that lens, you will find that most videos recruitment videos that I've seen on career sites do not fit those top three things. They actually focus on the fourth point, which is not even important, until they actually know for sure that they're interested in that job. So let me go with number one. Number one mistake is they focus on perhaps creating one or two, maybe maybe three or four at the most videos that go on the career site. So what they do is they spend lots of time, effort, resources in making this Beautiful career site video that basically no one watches. Because if you actually look at the analytics, most of the times when I, when I look those videos, most of them have very few views. Some of them barely break 100 some or record maybe two or 300. Very few of them go over 1000 views. Why is that? That's because candidates are not looking at your career site before they apply for a job. Typically, they find your job on a job board. fact, we run the numbers, roughly somewhere between 80 to 90% of your candidates are going to come from job boards. So if you don't have the video out there, where they're looking at it, they're probably never got to see it. So then then you kind of get into why are we even making the video? Well, it, some people will see it, or they go on to the career site. But if you really want to step up your game with recruitment videos, don't focus on just making a couple of them really focus on building a library of videos. So that's the number one mistake we see. Number two, the video isn't relevant to what the job that they're looking for is. So if the if the if the video is not relevant to the job that they're looking for, that's the most key information that they're looking for when they're watching a video. So if they don't see that very quickly, they're just not going to watch it. Okay, so that's the one thing we found, these are mistakes we've actually made. So think about it, do you really care about how awesome a company is, if you don't know if they're hiring for your skill set, if you don't know if they have any open jobs. So what we would suggest is, instead of making one or two videos that may not necessarily be relevant to them, make a library of videos that are relevant to a wide variety of different positions. We call them recruitment videos, there are little short video vignettes that allow you to see kind of a brief snapshot of that job. And it will reveal different things about that job. And I'll go into that in just a few few moments. So the key is make lots of different types of videos. So don't just make a large library videos that all talk about the same thing. You have a larger video library that talks about different jobs, different positions, different subjects. Now, some of the relevant information about the job is actually missing from a lot of these videos. So you can address that, of course in the job description or on the job posting. But it really makes it more relevant and more watchable from the candidates point of view. If you're talking about things that they care about, here's some things that candidates have told us that they want to see in the video. They want to know like things like what department they'll be working in and about that department not about the whole organization. So they're gonna want to know about the type of work that they'll be doing, where they'll be doing that work. What is the job offer? And who will they be working for, as well as who they'd be working with on the team. So they're more concerned about who they're working with who working for, after they know that this is a job that fits more of what they're looking for, right? So they kind of it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? And then also, what we do on some of our videos is we focus on what just the job offer. So you want, you can only cover so many things in a short vignette. So we try and create a lot of different ones that cover those different areas. If any of you have a background in marketing marketing, you'll know that it does take several touches, before you can actually convert someone into a candidate. So they may have seen more than one ad. So that's what we typically have several videos that are referring to a similar job or a similar department that cover different aspects of that job. So that when they watch different videos about that they're going to be more engaged because they're going to want to watch more, and it piques their interest. So that's number three is having relevant information about the job itself, not just the company. Okay, here's Mistake number four that we see is the video is not accessible, and is not being promoted. What I mean by that, well, going back to what we talked about earlier, if the video is not on a div a platform that the candidate is actually using at the moment, they're probably not going to see it. And if it's not on the job board that they're on, they're probably not going to see it. Most job boards right now do not allow you to place a video inside the job description. Very few the major ones do not like your indeed Glassdoor. Simply Hired and those because what they're doing is they're actually doing job aggregation with a pulling the job from your site. And they're just not pulling that, that they're not pulling the videos right now. Maybe they will in the future, but they just aren't doing it right now. So if you don't have the video in front of them, they're probably not going to watch it. Here's some things we found that that will help them To watch it is make sure that that video shows up on the devices and the platforms that your candidates are using. So if you do the right research, which we own, we did that for our marketplace, don't know what marketplace, you're in fact, but then on the comments, what marketplace Are you in? What type of candidates are you looking for that may help in our discussion? Like, what type of recruiting do you do? I would be interested to find out but let me go and just the refresh button. I've talked so much, I haven't even taken a break. Let me do that. Okay. So going back to what I was saying, if if your video is not easily accessible for them to see, it's not on the platform they're using, they're not just simply not gonna get to watch it. They can't watch it, they just don't see it. So step number one is making it making sure that that video is as accessible as possible, not only on your career site, take it a step further, make sure that those videos are available right inside the job postings themselves. Now, some atss. If you're not in the business, that stands for applicant tracking systems, some of these systems where the recruiters are posted, the jobs do allow you to embed videos, if it does allow you to do that, go ahead and embed that video in there. Now another thing we're noticing with videos, is if you're using a platform like Facebook, or Instagram, or even LinkedIn, like the one we're using right now, you'll notice that when you're scrolling on your feed, you'll notice a lot of times videos will start automatically playing by themselves. So one time I was actually shadowing a nurse, and we were going through, you know going through the site, I just wanted to see how she was interacting with with her job search and interact with information that was on the site that we were working on. And there were several videos on the page. And she wasn't clicking any of the videos. And I'm just sitting there just waiting, waiting just as I'm watching it. You know, this is a this is an interactive virtual meeting room. So she knows I'm looking and I couldn't stand I find this had to ask was like, I'm curious, like, why aren't you clicking on any of those videos? She's like, Oh, you know, I didn't even notice it. I'm just so used to the videos playing. And then it clicked. I was like, Oh, wow. See, we've gotten conditioned where we're so used to the videos, just playing on their own, that we're not used to pressing play. So we actually learned from that experience. And now we have it for what not only are the videos embedded, but we make it where the video starts auto playing. Now another thing that we that we went through as she was looking at the video, after she watched several seconds of it, she still wanted to see more of the job posting itself what was what information was there. So she wanted to scroll. And I was like, oh man, so now she's able to see she's she goes back up and look at the video. But she was like, I really like it better when the video follows where I'm scrolling. So that was another Bell clicked off. Okay, so not only do we have to have the videos auto playing, but we often also have to have where the videos have a sticky, sticky scroll, they call it when you're scrolling with the with your device, the video stays on the page, it might go to the top right hand corner, the top left hand corner or bottom, wherever you want to put it, but it stays somewhere in the page, they can still view the video, they can still read the captions, or they can listen to the sound. But but it's as they're looking at the other parts of the job description of the job posting. So it makes it more interactive for them. So number one, and this is a big part number four is a big one. So number four is going to be as I mentioned, making it easily accessible, where they can see it on a platform that they're using, whether it's on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram would have you YouTube, it's a big one. Of course, Google, a Google has over over a million websites in the US where they have access to. So make sure it's there. And then you also want to make the situation where whenever they do find it on your website, that it autoplays. Now, a lot of times when you do purchase space on these different sites I mentioned it will autoplay they already know the games that they started. So they know how to make it autoplay. But in terms of your career site, you might have it where your video is just sitting there. So if your video is just sitting on your career site, or it's just sitting on your job descriptions, it still may not get watched. If you don't turn the autoplay on. So it's very important piece of this. Now, going back to my discussion about making it accessible is promotion. Just you putting it on Facebook or on Twitter, or even on LinkedIn and a lot of cases will not mean that people will watch it. A lot of times you will post a video and they won't watch it and you're like man, we spent all this time here. In this video, I cannot believe it. Nobody's watching this video. Why is that? Well, one of the things to think about is sites like, you know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, they make money off the ads. So unless your video has a viral type quality, if unless there's something that they're just innately interested in, it's probably not going to get viewed a lot. So what you're going to have to do is promote it as a paid sponsor. Now, one of the biggest mistakes, and I talked about this in another video, because that kind of gets in the ad ad campaigns is I do see a lot of folks that are running these ad campaigns, and they're hitting a lot of irrelevant, irrelevant candidate bases that has nothing to do with their job. So I give an example. I'm a nurse recruiter, LinkedIn has the availability to allow you to target nurses. So it's literally a waste of money for me to receive a ad for a recruiter jobs or a crna job or a nurse job. And I do get those. So it just lets me know that whoever is running that campaign, didn't didn't do the right filter. So you can actually waste a lot of money running ads, because I've done it. Anybody who's watching this has done paid ads, I'm sure you've probably wasted money on ads in front of folks that had just nothing to do with your job. There's no way I'm going to, I've never been trained to be a nurse. But I've been a nurse recruiter for several years, but that's not going to help someone's trying to fill a nurse job, right. So you want to make sure that the targeting is right. But again, number four, video making accessible, making sure it's promoted. So it's easily found. And once they do get to your career site, making sure that it automatically plays and it has a sticky scroll on it. Now, if you are going to go the organic route, let's say you're gonna go the organic option. One of the things you can you can do there, if you're going to, I say organic, I mean unpaid, if you're going to go that route, you're going to want to focus on educational base type videos, those are the ones that tend to do well from an organic standpoint. So you may not even necessarily have to spend money promoting it through getting it to the paid advertising. But you may have to put a little bit of extra work on the front end, to make it where people will inherently want to watch it from an organic, unpaid standpoint. So one of the things that has been really hot recently, over the past, so the past couple years, has been a day in the life. So if you're looking for a candidate, so there may be a little bit less experience, maybe they're more entry level jobs, maybe maybe it's a more experienced job like a nurse job, but maybe it's helps helps new grads to watch it, maybe those who are going to school to become a nurse will want to watch it. So you're going to get lots of organic ads a day in the life of let's say, an ICU nurse, or a day in the life of a nurse assistant, or the day in the life of a patient intake person. I'm just using these healthcare terms. So that's the that's the world that I'm familiar with. But you can fill in the blanks with whatever job you're talking about. However, that may not be as effective for an experienced person. So I'm going to use the example of I see your ICU nurse a day in the life of an ICU nurse. If I'm an ICU nurse, with five to 10 years of experience, am I going to spend 20 minutes watching a job about the day in the life of an ICU nurse? Probably not because I know what it's like to be an ICU nurse because I've been doing it for five to 10 years. So you're going to probably attract a candidate base that's going to be less experienced. Now possibly it could be an experienced nurse that has worked in the ER, or in our in some other department. And I want to learn about how what it's like to switch over to an ICU nurse, I may want to watch a day in the life of an ICU nurse in that case, but a lot of the folks are looking for for help, they're usually trying to look for folks that have experience within that area. So just keep that in mind when you do those kind of educational type videos, you can get some free views on that those can go for lack of a better term viral in some cases, not viral to the point of the bigger videos but viral in the in the sense that a day in the life video could get as many as 50,000 100,000. The most I've ever seen a day in a lifetime video is probably around a million views, which is a lot. You can imagine how much that will cost if you're paying for that. So when we're talking about educational videos, you can get quite a few views. But the only thing is just look at what type of candidates you're going to be attracting with that type of video. If you want to get more targeted, you want to go right after your marketplace, then you're going to want to go the paid route and just make sure that you're covering things in those videos that are very relevant to what they want to know. Now the fifth point this is my fifth and last point Is the video is too long now this is something we learned over time. This is not something we learned right at the beginning. But we did learn through time that having a video that's three or four minutes long, it's just way too long. I have seen some videos on hospital sites that are five to six minutes long. Nobody's watching the videos six minutes long, if it's about your company, they're just not the only people are gonna watch that are people who either work there, or maybe they're in the interview process. But most people just don't, they just don't have the time. fact most people what they'll do when they're scrolling through videos, and you've probably done this to go ahead and admit it. Let me affect you guys. Some of the comments, have you ever found yourself scrolling and before you watch the video, you look and see how long it is? Come on, let's tell the truth. Okay, so if you're doing it, trust me, your candidates are doing it too. And if it's like five minutes, they're just not going to watch it, they're not even going to hit play. They're not going to let it play. So what I would say is take that five minute video,break it into three parts, have three different videos, try and keep each video less than two minutes, we found a sweet spot is around around a minute, minute and a half is a really nice little sweet spot. Now, here's the cool thing about paid promotion. When you're talking about promoting videos. The cool thing about YouTube, as well as Google Ads platform, is when you pay for a video view, you're only paying for a video view, if they watch the video for more than 30 seconds. Now that's a lifetime. So you've got in this type of world, you've got 30 seconds to make some type of impression on that person, if that person doesn't watch the full 30 seconds, you don't have to pay for the view. So my best suggestion for a video that's not necessarily the best, maybe maybe you know, it needs some tweaking, you know, it needs some fixing. You haven't had time edited down yet. And you got that five minute video, go ahead and do a run a campaign on that thing. And on on YouTube and Facebook, I'm sorry, YouTube and, and Google to their platform, because you only have to pay for if it's 30 seconds or longer. Now if it's gonna be a LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, you're gonna pay for that video view, if it's going to be I think it's over three seconds, I think you're gonna automatically just pay for it. So if your videos not really good, you can have a five minute video and they can watch three seconds, and then you still pay for the view. So not trying to scare anybody away from some of those platforms, I think they're still really good. You can also change it up where you only pay for, if someone actually makes a convert, they convert, they actually click on something, you can also pay that. But that can get incredibly expensive. So hopefully, those are some thoughts to help you out. But yeah, look at the video, make sure it's not too long. There are some new things on social media that's coming up right now where when you're posting those videos, and you're doing the paid videos, you can do videos that are like 15 seconds, that that will fit like into the the for instance Instagram stories or Facebook stories. Those sometimes can be effective, we haven't really used those because we like to we like to give a little bit more time for them to learn a little bit more about the organization before. You know, before we move on to the next video, I would say if you're going to use that 15 second format, try have a few of them. That's like a continuation. So let's say you've got a minute long video a minute of content, you could break it up into 415 minute 15 second increments. So they can watch the first 15 seconds, try and hold their attention as best they can and make them want to watch the second one, and the third one and the fourth one and now you've got you've gotten them to watch four different 15 second videos that make up that minute slot. So that's just a kind of another strategy. But the key to all this is really tested measure, right, you run it, you run the campaigns, you go back and see how effective the campaign was. Don't get caught up in looking at Okay, well how many hours did we get off this this video campaign? It's going to be difficult to really track it down to the harvest point. But what you can track which should be incredibly effective is how many people actually watching the videos first, roughly how long are they watching the videos? How long are they interacting? How many of them watch the full video, which is very important. And then how many of those people end up clicking and converting on your site. Now whether they actually turn into an application, that's a different story. That doesn't mean the campaign wasn't good. It might be something else is not good. Because going back into ads, there's there's a there's a trifecta with ads. You have your AJ Wilcox. He's got a thing called ammo. I love it. It's your audience. It's your message and your offer. So if you're running a campaign Maybe the audience that you have that you're putting it out to, it may be the message, maybe that maybe the message is not on point, maybe the video is too long, it's not relevant, whatever the case is, you lose a candidate, or the third one is your offer. Your offer may not be strong enough. And that may be why they're not apply. It may be that you're in the marketplace, your signup, bonuses not up to snuff, or you don't have a retention bonus, or you don't have education, reimbursement or loan repayment. Maybe it's because your pay rates too low. It might be because you're asking for a lot of different things in the same job. So it could be a number of things, why your offers just not strong enough, where it makes the one apply. So it doesn't necessarily mean the campaign was good, doesn't mean the video wasn't good. But what does help you see how effective the video is, is by looking at the analytics of the videos themselves in the ad campaigns? How many people are watching it? How long? are they watching it? And are they clicking and converting to your site? Anyway, those are my five steps. Hey, thanks, Jared. I see Jared came in. Oh, you're the man today. I appreciate you. If you got any questions or comments, and you're watching the replay, still go ahead and put those in the comments. I will answer any questions that come along. I love these kind of interactive types of discussions. This was just kind of a spur of the moment they no one knew I was gonna go online. I just thought I'd try it. And part of it too Is it helped me with content to make sure we save this for a future time to help our our candidates or clients with what have you in building up our, our business, our recruiting practice, as many of you know, that's our specialty is we help build out these campaigns for hospitals and for healthcare organizations. They're they're looking to fill these hard to fill nursing positions. That's where we shine. Of course, we also do physician physicians, nurse practitioners, pa or what have you. Let me know what you're recruiting for. Put them in the comments what type of what type of positions Do you recruit for? Anyway, thanks for your time today. Really appreciate it. And I'm going to finish up with one of my one of my favorites. And I have a great rest of the day. I do have a question for you before you head out. What's your favorite memory from childhood? What's your favorite childhood memory? I'd like to know that. All right, so bye everyone. Have a good one.