Does this need more PUNCH?
For HR, recruiters, hiring managers and marketers, applying recruitment marketing principles to employer branding makes video the perfect medium for communicating your company story, culture and brand to candidates. Not to mention the SEO benefits. When you break it down, what matters is that have an asset which you can use to drive awareness, engagement and action, on the part of the viewer.
Alternatively, it can just be a fun project which creates happiness in your team, and raises awareness of the importance of making engaging media to drive outcomes, so it happens more often.
Here’s what an employer branding video can do for you:
Show your people
Before they apply for your job openings, job candidates want to know if they’ll fit your culture, on a team or in a department.
Not only is your workforce your company’s most precious asset but it’s also an great recruiting resource. When potential candidates to see how your employees dress, how they talk and the positive energy they exude when talking about their jobs, they get the clues they need to decide if there’s a good match.
Candidates have dozens of questions about their potential colleagues as they consider a job and company. Your employer brand videos can provide the answers. In turn, armed with an inside look at your culture and workforce, job candidates will ask better, more insightful questions during interviews, rather than going in blind.
Show your workplace
Watching a camera pan around your work environment, conference rooms and break areas, candidates glean a real sense of what to expect when they come in for interviews.
Whether your office has basic or top-notch décor, or has a lift that looks like something from Fallout 4, potential candidates appreciate a realistic view.
The decision to spend eight to 10 hours a day within your walls is a big one, so the more you can show, the better.
Inspire people with your mission
Your mission to “change the world” might be the deciding factor for a candidate considering a similar position at another company. Research shows that “mission-driven” companies have 30 percent higher levels of innovation and 40 percent higher levels of retention, and they tend to be best in their market segment.
Mission is also important for the next generation of workers. A Deloitte study showed that more than 70 percent of Millennials expect their employers to focus on societal or mission-driven problems.
In this employer brand video, we at Grab employees explain how the company mission hint that our mission gives us a superpower, to improve millions of lives across South East Asia. Did you know that in markets we operate our service, our partners (that’s our drivers) earn 33% more than the average national wage across the region? Considering we have recruited more than 1m of them, it’s something to be proud of, a true superpower.
Ideally, you should be specific with your goals, and not try too hard (hint: people are exposed to so much insincere content, they are understandably sceptical of much of it, especially given the lack of trust in large corporations).
But it wasn’t perfect. And the point is, it doesn’t have to be, as long as it serves a specific purpose.
Our goals for this video were simple.
Showcase our great, diverse talent to the world (so people can relate and identify with them)
Hint at our mission enabling us to have super power (so people who don’t know Grab are intrigued and want to discover more)
Deliver views, likes and shares (because the content is entertaining enough to warrant that)
Drive conversions (attributable applications) which naturally, we track at point of application. More on this in another post.
Be a little bit awkward. Just a touch.
What we could have done better?
Subtitles
Having English Subtitles would have meant that the video would have been more effective on Facebook, where videos auto-play but without sound. Having language specific subtitles in Bahasa, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Tagalog and Burmese would have vastly improved engagement and been true to our hyperlocal roots.
Sharon Yeo, founder at Talent Tribe Asia, said: “To an outsider, I have no clue who these people are and just assume they are different employees at Grab. What would help to provide better context and understanding, as well as bring out their different work responsibilities is if each person’s name and job roles were shared on the screen as well”
Hit on a key pillar of the EVP
We have so many attributes to our EVP (Employee Value Proposition) and having super-powers isn’t one which is consistently described (just yet) in our other online collateral. Big brands know that being consistent is super important because we want to create recall. Creating recall matters because you want to be memorable, and if you have multiple messages, unless they harmonise really well, you can create confusion.
Make the punchline crystal clear
We didn’t focus enough on making the take-away easy to understand. Grace Teo from Scoot in Singapore told us “The msg is not strong enough, can’t feel the punch! Not sure if you are talking about employee’s empowerment or? Can be more quirky as the theme is superpowers” She definitely has a point.
Names matter
We should, in hindsight, have included the names and functions of the people in the video, to make them more relatable and drive more curiosity. It’s quite difficult to strike a balance between keeping the video focused and avoiding clutter when considering elements such as this, or animations / Gifs etc.