The “Tripod” of Recruitment Video Effectiveness
There are plenty of statistics on the power of video. It’s 5.33 times more effective than text for keeping people on your site. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, with over 3 billion views per day. If your site has video, it is 53 times more likely to appear on the front page of a Google search.
The use of video in recruitment communications has grown enormously for the same reasons it has elsewhere. It has an ability to engage an audience and bring an employer’s brand and culture to life that is unmatched by text and still images. Case studies that provide statistics to back these claims up do exist.
CERN’s new recruitment unit measured the effectiveness of video during their recruitment process. They found that a written job posting would receive on average 1,000 views and 20 applications. After producing video content for the posting, it received 5,000 views and 150 applications. These numbers add to the dearth of reliable information championing the effectiveness of video as a medium. However, they do little to help define the various parameters for success found in an individual piece of video.
Before we go into our breakdown of how to measure recruitment video effectiveness, it is useful to define what kind of video we’re talking about. The types of video used in recruitment fall typically into two camps: video that is used to replace CV’s or the initial stages of the interview process, and video that communicates and promotes an employer’s brand. The former most frequently relies on the employee for production and is the subject of a very different discussion. At Casual Films, we are engaged entirely in the latter.
This type of video has a variety of uses in the employee lifecycle, from attraction to onboarding, learning and development, and employee engagement. Video is commissioned for a wealth of different reasons. If you can connect with candidates emotionally and give them a real insight into what they can expect from a role at your organization, you are more likely to attract and retain them.
In order to measure effectiveness, you have to have a clearly defined objective. With video, more often that not, you need the co-operation of the client, the agency and the video production company to single this out. If a video is commissioned for the wrong reasons – “there’s a space on our website so we’d better make one” or “everyone else has done one so let’s do one too” – the only ways to quantify success would be that the video exists and that it looks pretty.
Without an objective to influence decisions throughout the video’s production – all the way from concept development to delivery strategies – its results will be left entirely to chance. Just having a video on your site will not achieve uplift in applications or quality of candidate. Only a highly targeted and tailor-made piece of video content can be considered intentionally effective.
Below we have defined the three main areas in which a video’s effectiveness at meeting an objective can usually be measured. By developing a better understanding of these measurements – what they entail, who they benefit, and how important they are – the process of determining a clear objective is made far simpler and more efficient.
1. Quality of Message
This can be defined by how a film looks, how it makes you feel, how original it is and how good the production values are. The production company has the most control over this and will therefore tend to champion these qualities as the thing that defines a video as effective.
This area can be hard to measure as certain elements are subjective or unquantifiable. The best approach for assessment would be to conduct focus groups or run questionnaires and interviews. By asking a series of questions before and after a subject watches a video we are able to monitor how their perceptions have been changed.
We trialled a messaging questionnaire for one of our own videos about the production process – ‘How to Make a Film Film’. After watching the video, our target group members reported a 15 percent increase in their understanding of video production.
2. Reach
This is, perhaps, most frequently used to assess effectiveness. Virals have shown that it is possible for a video to distribute itself across millions of viewers through sharing on social media sites. It is easy to measure the number of plays your video has had by using one of a plethora of tools that are available. Google Analytics and YouTube’s video statistics tool, for example, provide easily attainable audience and engagement data.
However, this area is also the most misleading when assessing the effectiveness of video in the recruitment space. We have spoken extensively in previous articles about when viral video is and is not appropriate. Put simply, what good comes of every man and his dog seeing your video if they do not react in a way that you want them to? Data gained in this area focuses more on the effectiveness of the distribution strategy rather than that of the video.
3. Impact & Action
Video is often at its best when it evokes emotions in people that inspire them to find out more or take another desired action. Provided that an objective and, by extension, a call to action are defined, you can usually measure a video’s impact quite easily. For example, the CERN study we referenced earlier used this area to measure effectiveness by monitoring application rates.
The more subtle and difficult parts of impact to measure are emotional changes or actions that do not require immediate interaction with a website. These are best monitored with methods similar to those used for the quality of message.
This area is typically the most important as it is directly linked to the video’s objectives. However, impact is often the most difficult area to measure accurately. With sufficient planning and resources this can be accounted for early on in the production process, which highlights the importance of the client, agency and production company collaborating to define objectives that are ambitious yet achievable.