In a recent episode of HR Works: The Podcast for Human Resources, Lindsay Stanton, Chief Client Officer for Digi-Me, discusses trends and best practices for using video, social media, and mobile technology in the recruiting process.
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Note: This episode was recorded live at BLR’s RecruitCon conference in Nashville, where Stanton presented on the topic of visual job postings. RecruitCon 2019 will take place in Austin, Texas, next May. Learn more at http://live.blr.com/event/recruitcon.
HR Works: Hi, everyone. Welcome to HR Works, brought to you by BLR®. I’m your host, Steve Bruce. HR Works provides clear, relevant, actuable information on topics that matter to HR professionals. When you’re armed with best practices and strategies to attract, retain, and engage top talent, you’ll deliver exceptional value to your organization.
So suddenly, it’s slim pickings for top candidates. Nobody’s having an easy time recruiting. And for hard-to-fill roles—and who doesn’t have a few of them—it borders on impossible; but there’s hope. Today’s guest, Lindsay Stanton, is an expert in recruiting technology. We’ll talk about new trends and use of video, social media, and mobile for recruiting.
Lindsay is Chief Client Officer for Digi-Me, a video technology company for talent acquisition that helps organizations add new dimensions to their jobs and employment brand messaging. In her time with the company, she has facilitated relationships with many partners, including the largest recruitment advertising agencies, global recruitment process ad sourcers, and staffing firms.
These partnerships magnify the organization’s reach into the Global Fortune 1000, providing an effective and innovative solution to the largest global employers, including KellyOCG, TrueBlue, Orion Staffing, Advanced RPO, USG Corporation, Prudential, and LG Electronics.
The subject matter expert on the use of video technology as a recruitment tool, Stanton works closely with industry leaders, creating new and better ways to connect jobs and jobseekers. She’s here with us today as part of our series of podcasts, broadcasting from the floor of BLR’s RecruitCon Conference in Nashville, where she’s presenting on new social media and mobile recruiting trends.
Lindsay, welcome to HR Works.
Stanton: Thank you for having me.
HR Works: Why are you such a strong proponent of video for recruiting?
Stanton: Mostly because it works.
Just looking at the data, especially from a volume perspective, that we’re seeing with our clients both on the direct side, as well as with our staffing partners, the success that they’re seeing is just phenomenal, especially as there’s such a tight connection, as we all know from our social lives, between social and video. So to be able to see the success that they’re having leveraging tools like video jobs through social media is just phenomenal.
HR Works: If somebody wanted to start getting into video production, how hard is it? Do you need professional videographers and studios and voice-over specialists?
Stanton: That’s probably one of the questions that we get asked the most.
Organizations get a little bit overwhelmed by the idea of video, especially with their marketing teams. They might have seen a long process to create videos internally, for instance, but it can be super turnkey. So for our clients, they’re typically up and live in less than a week, and literally, all they have to do is turn over to us their written job descriptions, and our team does the rest of the work. So, we do the scripting, we do the building, and they don’t have to worry about anything besides “Check yes for approval.”
HR Works: Wow. Can you give us a sum estimate of how costly it is to get involved in this?
Stanton: Yeah. It’s very inexpensive. So our clients can do a package with us, for instance, for a couple thousand dollars a month, where they’ve got 10 jobs rotating, they’ve got a cultural branding video, and they’ve got post-application messaging, which is becoming almost just as important as converting your jobs into video because, as we all know as HR professionals, the number one complaint we see on the candidate side is that they apply for a job and they don’t hear back.
And with unemployment today, that’s not working. So it’s really important to be able to have them understand the process, too—so not just the job but the process.
HR Works: Well that sounds very reasonable. Let’s say you produced a video. What’s the process or the best practice for getting that video in front of the people you want to hire? Maybe also, we’ve got active candidates and passive candidates to consider.
Stanton: Yeah. Great question. I mean, the number one launch point for our customers is embedding the video into their ATS. So, we’ve got integrations with all the big ATSs, and we’ve yet to find one we can’t integrate with, for that matter.
But having the videos embedded right into the job descriptions gets them instantly viral because the video job ads will actually search engine optimize 53 times higher on Google; so it’s helping get instant exposure, and then it builds from there.
HR Works: I was interested that one of the advantages of video is that people tend to watch it all the way through, whereas with a written statement, they might just skip to the end and throw a résumé at you, even if they weren’t qualified or hadn’t read about the job.
Stanton: Exactly. Well, and what we see is, we’re tracking length of view, and a lot of our clients are hitting up until the point where their logo plays, which is literally the end of the job—so 58 seconds. And we typically will create videos that are around 60 seconds in length, so they’re basically keeping them the entire duration. But it’s really important: Not only are they staying and watching the video and understanding it, but it’s also changing the whole job search process.
Instead of trying to force a candidate to go to a job board with a written job ad that he or she may or may not read, it’s really enabling the candidate to view the job where he or she is already going, which tends to be social.
HR Works: So what about social media? What trends or best practices can you share there?
Stanton: This is something that we have a really good pulse on, and it’s really exciting to see, especially that volume data that I was mentioning earlier. Social is definitely the name of the game.
We’re seeing over 70% of our clients’ jobs getting viewed through social sharing, so the candidates are owning the video, sharing it out to their network, and we’re tracking it and over 60% of the applicant flow, with pretty similar high conversion to hire. So most of our clients have us tracking all the way to hire through an ATS integration, and we’re seeing social play just a tremendous role.
One trend that we see pretty consistently now is that Facebook is working really well across the board. So I think intuitively, you think volume roles; Facebook probably would be good, but we’re seeing it work for engineering roles, senior actuary roles, all the way down to if we’re hiring for a labor or a CDL driver role.
The HR Works conversation will continue with Lindsay Stanton in part two of this article series. Stay tuned!