Companies looking to stand out from the crowd and attract top talent are adding another element to their recruitment strategies: company culture videos.
Video is a compelling way to review a company’s culture in a short amount of time and distribute this information across digital and social channels. Besides reaching wider audiences, company culture videos dive beneath mission statements to highlight some of the individuals who help make a work environment unique.
Showcasing employees who share what they’re working on, what they enjoy about their coworkers or what employee benefits they appreciate gives a brand a human face while surrounding it with positive associations. These stories are much more likely to leave a lasting impression on potential employees than a static web page.
When done right, a company culture video does far more than improve recruiting results. It presents an accurate depiction of a company’s people, perks and work atmosphere, spreading a consistent and respected brand image among customers and prospective candidates. Businesses can then transform into recognizable brands that boast loyal audiences and increased value within their fields.
The guide below goes into more detail about why company culture videos are important and covers the key elements to include when making one. It also provides 16 examples of companies that have found success with company culture videos.
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Benefits of Company Culture and Recruitment Videos
Video is an effective medium for showcasing your company culture. Here are some stats proving just that:
- 58 percent of customers feel a deeper connection with a brand if it posts content to its Instagram story while Facebook accounts with over 100,000 followers post over 70 percent of the platform’s video content
- 54 percent of internet users want more video content from brands that they support. If you haven’t implemented a video content strategy for your recruitment efforts, you’re literally depriving potential candidates of what they’re looking for.
- Some recruitment agencies have reported 800 percent more engagement with job ads featuring embedded video.
Almost one-third of brands publish two to four videos per month. Now, you’re probably wondering how companies have the time, money and bandwidth to publish videos on a consistent basis.
Company culture videos don’t have to be elaborate or high-tech to be effective. Production length depends on the resources invested in a project, but 30 percent of marketers can complete a marketing video in roughly two weeks.
Whether shared on social media, embedded in your emails or on your website’s career page, company culture videos are worth the effort.
What Makes for a Great Company Culture Video?
We asked Tiffany Meyers, director of content and strategy at Built In, to share insight into what makes a recruitment video great.
Tips for Making a Good Company Culture Video
- Organize the setting ahead of time
- Ensure your brand appeals to qualified candidates
- Be open and honest with candidates
- Ask employees for their perspectives
- Develop a relationship with candidates
Organize the Setting for Your Company Culture Video Ahead of Time
You probably don’t want to film your company culture video on a gloomy day or catch an employee spilling coffee in the background. Inform everyone of when you’ll be filming in the office, pick a sunny day to maximize natural lighting and have cleaning staff tidy up the space the night before. These details can give your company culture video a more professional feel.
Put Your Best Foot Forward, Because Candidates Are Paying Attention
“Because qualified tech candidates are in such high demand, they’re in the position to be choosy, so they’re really taking time to learn about your employer brand before applying,” Meyers said. “From a recruitment perspective, it’s smart to tell your employer brand story across media — and video is one of the most powerful ways at it.”
Be Open and Honest With Candidates
When it comes to video, it pays to be authentic. “We know that candidates want to work for companies whose values sync with their own,” Meyers added. Be honest with your core values and you’ll attract like-minded candidates who will give their all.
Ask Your Employees for Their Perspectives
While it might be tempting to tell your employees what to say about your brand, this will only produce a stiff, insincere conversation. For employees who volunteer to participate in a video, let them decide what they want to talk about and ask for input on company culture videos. Giving employees control and creative freedom will get them excited about the process, as opposed to making them read off of a script.
Don’t Just Pitch Your Jobs, Develop a Real Relationship
So we know candidates want to know more about your company, but can’t they learn that from a career page or job post? “Video can do something a job post can’t do,” Meyers said. “It can tell an emotionally resonant story about your values as a company. That makes it easier for the candidates who fit your culture to find you.”
16 of the Best Company Culture Videos
Let’s check out some examples of companies creating successful company culture videos to get some ideas that can be applied to your recruitment video strategy.
1. Virgin Hyperloop Gets Motivational
Virgin Hyperloop is a hardware and software company building the world’s first full scale hyperloop test track for freight and people. This video provides a moving overview of the company’s mission, successes to date and plans for the future as told by employees through their individual experiences.
Together, they tell a compelling story of Virgin Hyperloop’s culture and the people who have come together united by a passion to build a new mode of high-tech transportation. When creating an evergreen video like this that can be repurposed over and over again for marketing and recruiting efforts, it’s worth investing the time and money necessary to make a high-quality video.
2. Thanx Does It The OLD-FASHIONED Way
Thanx is a SaaS company that helps merchants utilize data to build relationships with customers. Recruitment videos tend to be a little predictable, but Thanx bucks convention with a unique approach. The company created this video — a hyper-lapse stop motion animation — to help it recruit junior sales reps.
Simply put, it’s effective because it’s mesmerizing. The hand-drawn motif captures the viewer’s attention, increasing the amount of time they spend watching. The subject matter (an overview of the company’s training program) is also smart, as 70 percent of job seekers indicate that job-related training opportunities influence their employment choices. You don’t have to be an artist to create something like this, and given the choice, most candidates will prefer lo-fi authenticity to professionally produced vanilla content.
3. Tala Thrives On Passion
Tala is a data science and mobile technology company that created a mobile app that helps users evaluate their credit and provides them with customized loans. We partnered with Tala to produce this culture video that highlights the impact the company is making on customers around the world.
The video features employees passionate about the company’s mission and the power of their role in the company. Giving people the chance to share what they care most about work will attract candidates driven by a similar purpose. Solving big problems isn’t easy, but the best candidates are looking for work with purpose, so don’t shy away from discussing complex issues.
4. Yaro Flips The Script
Yaro (now part of Virgin Pulse) is a health tech company that partners with healthcare providers and practitioners to help consumers gain transparency into their healthcare. They found a fun way to showcase their core values with this simple Instagram video. The flipbook motif certainly stands out more than a few bullet points on a careers page.
This is an example of how you can create a culture video without breaking the bank or working overtime. With its highly visual format, Instagram is the perfect platform for short videos, so make sure you’re incorporating some company culture content throughout your feed.
5. Ellevation Education Leans on Its Experts
Ellevation Education is a software platform that supports English language learners and their educators. This culture video features an interview with their people operations manager and covers the company’s growth, diversity and culture. From Ellevation Education’s history and what they look for in candidates to some favorite perks and a few of the sub-groups that make their culture unique, she provides a comprehensive overview of the company in only 65 seconds.
People in HR naturally understand the ins and outs of a company’s culture, diversity and growth initiatives and they’re more likely to be comfortable talking about the subject in a compelling manner, so if you’re looking for someone to star in your culture video, consider starting with your HR team.
6. AlertMedia Keeps It Simple
AlertMedia is a cloud-based platform that provides emergency communications and monitoring. This recruitment video comes courtesy of AlertMedia’s Director of Talent, who is promoting a recruitment event they will be hosting.
They posted a promotional video one week before the event to get people hyped, and followed it with another the day of as a reminder and to provide important details to help attendees prepare. Videos are typically seen as a major investment, but this one serves as an example of how to affordably implement the channel into your mix.
7. Fuze Brings In The Top Dogs
Fuze (acquired by 8x8) has created a global cloud-based communications platform to help businesses unify their voices throughout communication efforts. They brought in some of their most senior leaders, including the Executive Chairman and CEO, to discuss company culture in this professionally produced video.
Members of the C-suite have a powerful voice, but finding time on their calendars to get them on camera can be challenging. This video makes excellent use of their limited time by covering a broad topic in an evergreen manner. It can be used time and time again, and it can be used across platforms for multiple purposes from recruitment to employer branding. Also, not a bad idea to have interviewees wear branded swag!
8. Bungie Goes Deep
Bungie is a game development studio that has helped in the creation of several major games, including Halo. Unlike the other examples on this list, this video is a long-form documentary released to celebrate Bungie’s 20th anniversary. They gathered clips of video throughout the company’s history and interviewed current employees about the evolution of this wildly successful video game developer.
While this may not be the first thing you think of when you hear “recruitment video,” this sort of in-depth content is a recruiter’s dream. Learning about a company’s history from the people who built it with their own blood, sweat and tears provides insight into where it came from and where it’s going in a way no job description or career page ever could.
9. Fiverr Gets The Last Laugh
Fiverr is an e-commerce digital marketplace that offers creative and digital services in hundreds of freelance categories. The company satirized all those generic recruitment videos out there with this piece, appropriately titled “Another Generic Recruitment Video.”
The video pokes fun at many of the cliches we’ve come to expect from recruitment videos with a monotone voice-over and over-the-top caricatures before getting to its real point — convincing people that Fiverr is the place to be. This strategic use of comedy stands out from the crowd and positions Fiverr as a legitimately fun place to work.
10. Microsoft Keeps It Real
Microsoft is the world-famous software company that we all know and love. This live Facebook video features a Q&A panel discussion with four employees answering questions and offering tips for prospective employees interested in starting a career with Microsoft.
Live video offers a sense of authenticity that pre-recorded videos just can’t match. There were a few hiccups at the very beginning of this video, but that’s OK — these are real employees answering real questions, not video producers. Taking the time to answer questions from real candidates is also a home run, as it lets you connect with passive candidates before they apply.
11. Rackspace Nails The First Impression
Rackspace is a managed cloud company that offers web, app and email hosting. This video features multiple interviews with employees who talk about memories from their first day at the company, their initial impression and why they continue to work at Rackspace.
First impressions can last a lifetime, and it’s interesting to hear from current employees what they remember from their first day, whether it be a few months ago or a few decades. Accepting a new job is a big decision, and hearing from people that have been in the same position can go a long way toward putting candidates’ nerves at ease.
12. HubSpot Keeps the Focus on Its People
HubSpot is a CRM platform that features a software suite for marketing, sales, operations and other areas. While HubSpot could try to dazzle prospects with a high-tech video about its capabilities, its company culture video opts to highlight the atmosphere at its offices and the things that people enjoy about working at the company. In fact, the second half of the video solely features individual spotlights.
Nourishing creativity, encouraging people to be themselves and offering flexible scheduling are a few benefits listed by employees. Letting workers tell their stories says a lot about the independence that HubSpot gives to its workforce and creates a more authentic feel around its brand. HubSpot provides concrete examples of its culture in the form of employee insights and shows that its people are its main priority.
13. Basecamp Goes Global
Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, is a popular project management tool. Even in its early days, the company boasted a distributed team of employees from all over the world, and it made sure prospective candidates understood its remote-work process with this culture video.
Remote employees are often some of the most valuable team members, but it can be easy for them to feel overlooked when it comes to company culture. Basecamp avoided this potential issue by ensuring prospective candidates understand how it operates and that it values its remote team members just as much as those that sit in HQ. As distributed teams become more common, this is something every company should consider.
14. Blackbaud Focuses On The Mission
Blackbaud is powered by people passionate about making an impact on organizations who “care about cause as much as they care about code.” With a tagline like that, it’s no surprise that the company leads with its mission in this exceptionally produced culture video.
Candidates care about purpose, and Blackbaud delivers by showing examples of the organizations and causes they’re working to support. The old saying “show, don’t tell” comes to mind here, as seeing the company’s impact in action provides real examples of how the product is improving lives.
15. Vivid Seats Gets Granular
Vivid Seats is an e-commerce platform for selling and purchasing tickets to local events. We worked with them to produce this video targeted to prospective software engineer candidates. It positions Vivid Seats as an employer of choice for engineers, helping them stand out from the crowded field of companies recruiting this skill set.
Highly competitive candidates like software engineers have plenty of options, so creating a recruitment video with content specific to their field allows you to tailor your messaging and significantly increase relevancy.
16. BambooHR Steps Out of the Office
BambooHR is an all-in-one human resources software for small and medium-sized businesses. The platform helps companies manage everything from employee records and mobile apps to approvals and reporting.
BambooHR all but abandons the typical in-the-office company culture video. Because the company values their employees’ personal lives and work/life balance highly, they take the opportunity to show their employees in and outside of the office, living their lives and talking about what they like to do. This is a great way to attract talent that also highly values work/life balance, any company can say it but BambooHR shows it.
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