Article Originally Posted on RecruitingReach.com

A Blog that Caters to the Marketing Aspect of Recruiting

As an industry that is constantly evolving with new tools that are being created and developed by fellow recruiters, there gives marketers a wealth of choices to choose from as far as how to expose their company to candidates and hiring managers.

As I’ve said before, recruiting isn’t the first industry I’ve worked in. I started in politics, where one may argue can be both a marketers dream and nightmare. There are so any different ways you can utilize your marketing brain in politics, and now with social media the campaign lives primarily online where candidates can post podcasts, photos, thoughts and videos to help reach out to their constituent s, it’s great!

Coming into my job here in the recruiting industry, I took a lot of the ideals from my political days and have tried to apply them to what our company does. I thought this may be effective especially after researching the industry and seeing a large number of complaints about recruiters in general of how they’re hard to get a hold off, often times don’t work out, and can even be downright rude in certain instances.

Upon starting my job as Marketing Manager for my new company, on the first day I sat down in my chair and thought…”what did I get myself into?”

A week later I went to a company outing where upper level recruiters from across the country attended, and I was able to meet almost everyone and talk to them about their experiences and what they loved about what they do. Meeting everyone at the event put everything into perspective for me. I realized that I had a negative take on recruiters because I read nothing but negative reviews, so why not find new avenues to get POSITIVE stuff out there to balance the naysayers?

I’m truly convinced that we employ some of the most talented recruiters in the business, their dedication and knowledge of the industry impresses me still to this day and I know I sure as hell could never pull off the numbers they do.

How can we embrace and celebrate that?

As everything moves online, including television, and cell phones one of the biggest trends is video. Viral videos get millions of hits a year and the biggest video sharing site on the planet, Youtube, has well over a BILLION members.

Studies show that people are more apt to clicking on links if they lead to videos. I think that speaks to idea that people don't want to have to think while being sold, but rather see how creative a company can get to achieve their services. With that said, the most famous instance of video marketing to me is the Blendtec series of videos which essentially just have a guy blending random stuff to subconsciously show how tough and effective their blenders are. Sounds dumb right? Blendtech reported a 700% rise in sales after the videos which have tallied to almost a billion views...

Billion with a B.

So it seemed obvious that we need to have a video based presence to what we do.

We started having candidates we have worked with to talk about their experience with us on video. I think we gained the trust of a lot of hiring managers and candidates who research us and see people like them who aren’t paid actors emphatically praising our services, in fact I know we did. One of our recruiters from San Francisco called me the other day to tell me someone recognized him from a recruiter profile he did, that someone was a candidate we eventually started to work with and I believe placed.

It’s true, recruiters can’t help everyone they work with which will sully people to the point where they feel like they were promised a job just by coming in and interviewing; so there will always be negative comments. What video can do is put your positive aspects front and center, let people connect with the human aspect of what we do and make your recruiters be their own brand. Videos can be sent around easily and effectively which in turn acts as an interactive business card or testimonial which lets the person on film do the selling so you don’t have to.

I’m curious to know what recruiters have done with video, whether you have found it to be successful, and anything else you want to add on the topic

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