“The Visual Recruiting Superiority Effect”: A Concept Most Employers Ignore

[From Ongig.com]

It is superior to use pictures rather than just words when communicating a message — this is an application of “The Picture Superiority Effect". In this article, I’m gonna co-opt it for us recruiters and call it “The Visual Recruiting Superiority Effect” or “Visual Recruiting” for short.

But first, some advertising/design/recruiting 101:

The power of an image is a basic rule of advertising (Ad guru David Oglivy famously said “The more you tell, the more you sell” — and we all know that pictures/video can tell a lot more than words.

Most employers are missing the boat when it comes to using visuals in marketing their jobs

 

Visuals are also an important principle in design: the book Universal Principles of Design recommends you “Use pictures and words together, and ensure that they reinforce the same information for optimal effect”

Note: You can also refer to the dual-coding theory whose research shows that using both images and verbal cues will increase the chance of someone remembering that item.

And the importance of Visual Recruiting should not surprise recruiters or HR pros.

Afterall, A-Player job candidates value culture immensely (culture is one of The 5 ‘C’s’ Of Why A-Players Switch Jobs) and culture is best communicated visually (ideally in person with the next best experience being video/pictures).

Unfortunately, many job marketers  ignore this vital recruiting concept and rely mostly on text to market (this is best exemplified by Monster.com, Craigslist and other job boards and the text-oriented job ad template they still rely on (see The 5 Reasons Why Job Postings Are Dead).

So, if you are interested in more effectively attracting and closing job candidates, we recommend you embrace Visual Recruiting.

Some visual recruiting tips:

  • Recruiting Video — Add a recruiting video to the /careers or /jobs section of your Web site. For inspiration, you might check out Kixeye (490,000 views), Twitter (950,000+ views) and others in our Recruiting Videos category.
  • Images On Your Careers Home Page — Check out Facebook’s new Careers section for some inspiration. Pictures of the culture add a ton.
  • Images & Video Into Job Descriptions — This is something Ongig has been working on — you can peruse any of our jobs for examples (I like this recent one from Tesla Motors).
  • Social Media & Your Employer Marketing — Social media is super-visual (nearly all social profiles include a person’s picture). Consider leveraging your own teams social media profiles (e.g. from LinkedIn or Facebook) on your careers/jobs-related pages (e.g. you can let candidates see how they’re connected to your team (LinkedIn and Facebook have widgets for this).
  • Skype/Video Chat Interviews — If you’re not already doing so, you might want to consider doing job interviews via Skype of another video chat service. The visuals of your team and office can be a powerful supplement to the words your hiring team are speaking/writing.
And get this bonus: if you leverage Visual Recruiting to market your employer brand and jobs, you get the added benefit of viral marketing. Our recent article on Exclusive Stats: Facebook Likes & Their Impact On Job Posting T... showed that jobs with pictures or videos in them are more sharable — and they often shared by employees who are your best hiring evangelists!

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Comment by Sylvester Simon Pascal on November 5, 2012 at 8:20am

Thanks for sharing this post Jason. Its interesting to understand that using pictures & words together would bring a whole new change in the hiring process. Do you think this will help Job seekers on Mobile also? Will it affect the loading time and make the job seekers impatient?

 

Comment by Jason Webster on November 5, 2012 at 10:13am

Hi Sylvester,

Thanks for the comment. I don't think load time is going to be an issue at all. Think about the impatience of having to read a job description, apply, and never hear anything back. That is all too common as it is. With pictures, at least someone can make a better assessment on if the environment is right for them or not. They may not apply to jobs they applied to when it was just a written JD.

Specific to technology, the majority of mobile devices handle load times very quickly. Even video is being optimized more quickly through the use of HTML5 players which allow a viewer to watch the video while it is still loading. This is compared to Flash players which require the entire video to load.

I hope this helps. Thanks.......Jason

Comment by Sylvester Simon Pascal on November 5, 2012 at 10:28am

Thanks for your reply Jason very useful indeed. We're basically a mobile recruitment software company which deals in making the recruitment process efficient. This is completely different from your thoughts but again the idea is the same i.e to make the life of both the job seeker and the recruiter simpler. Our product Enables jobseekers to search, share and apply directly from their phones and tablets. We recently released a white paper on Fortune 500 companies & to our surprise we found out that 94 % of them do not have mobile optimized career site. We have a downloadable version of it in the link below, have a look at it and let me know what you think about it.  Thanks again!

http://www.imomentous.com/download/

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