From hello to hire fast!
By Maury Hanigan
The last several years in Talent Acquisition has brought us tremendous innovation. We are thinking more strategically than ever before on how we can create experiences that bring in the best talent to our organizations by showing them what it means to work at our companies. Companies of all sizes are getting laser focused on how we can best show our stories to candidates that will drive them to apply. We’re focusing on mapping candidate journeys so that we are sure that we share the right information at the right time. To do that, we must understand this journey.
When you look at the candidate journey, you must understand that each candidate passes through a series of steps as they look for, research, apply for, and start a new job. Those steps are typically expressed in the journey as:
|
Stage |
Definition | Sources |
| Awareness | Learning about viable options for their next job | Google, Indeed, friends |
| Education | Learning about specific companies and their culture | Career site, Review sites, friends |
| Nurture | Getting deeper education about a company | Email, text, social |
| Apply | The transaction! | ATS |
| Interview | The dance of determining their fit | Video, in person |
| Offer | Closing the transaction | Email, phone, in person |
| Pre-start | Closing out their last job before they join you | Email, text, hidden pages |
| Onboard | That first day, series of days to get started | Email, text, in person, intranet |
Within each step, a candidate chooses to progress (or not) to the next step. Now, it would be brilliant if these steps were linear, but they are not. For example, a candidate may be having a bad day at work and do a Google search about jobs in their area. They may do a little research and decide that there is nothing for them today. They may do this again and again until they find the right company and the right job at the right moment that feels like a fit. They may apply (or not). They come back again and again through the journey when motivation is right.
If we are doing this well, we are focused on the candidate’s needs from an informational and emotional standpoint. We are crafting information, content, (and yes, VIDEO) to persuade the right candidates to progress to the next step by providing them real insight into what it’s like to inhabit your culture, doing a specific job.
As we do this, we should take a step back and think about our own consumer habits. When we need a product, we ask friends, and do a Google search. We research our desired product before we buy it. We read online reviews to make sure it’s the right product for us right now. Our journey as a consumer is not different than the journey our candidates make. It’s why we are spending more time in Talent Acquisition applying consumer marketing principles to our discipline.
Look at how much video you watch as a consumer. According to HubSpot, 78% of us watch videos online every week and 55% view online videos daily. We spent 86 minutes a day watching videos in 2019, according to eMarketer. Think about how many videos you watch when you are buying a product. A product we can return, or simply dispose of. The candidate experience is far more critical than the consumer experience because:
- Your new job doesn’t have a return policy.
- Changing jobs is not as easy as changing products.
- There are repercussions for changing jobs too frequently.
- Choosing the wrong job, or the wrong company can derail our careers.
The net, consumer marketing statistics should be mentally amplified because being a candidate is far more serious than being a consumer. So, if video is important in your product purchase, imagine how important it is to candidates as they decide to take the next step in their candidate journey.
The good news: Video cameras are in every single hand that is working in your organization today. And our candidates want to see videos. They want to see their potential, future teammates. They want to see hiring managers. In fact, our own research indicates that a hiring manager introductory video would make them 46% more likely to consider a job, and 30% more likely to respond to a recruiter or apply. This is an important distinction if you think about this data in the context of the journey. They are saying plainly that seeing their potential manager will make them more likely to move from awareness to education as well as from nurture to apply. In case you weren’t scoring at home, this is two uses you can get from one video. This is re-usable content. Re-usable content is what we need right now.
While we are talking about things we need right now, it’s important to note that our candidate audience (and our companies and teams) are in a very dicey position. Candidate confidence is low. Candidates are anxious. Candidates weren’t applying before COVID-19, and they had jobs. Fewer people have jobs today, and it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle. In April, Indeed noted a drop in their traffic, and it has rebounded a bit, but take a look at your own career site data. Are you like most companies and traffic is down?
The reality is: people are worried. Worried about taking a new job. So, look at that list above of reasons that candidate experience is more critical than the consumer experience, and layer on a global pandemic with epic amounts of uncertainty. They are afraid, they need to know, and see that your company is stable. They need more. They need connection. Give it to them. Show them their team. Show them the hiring manager. Make it more human and connected. Don’t stress if a dog pops in the video, or a kid. We are all there. It’s going to reduce the anxiety. We could all use a little bit of that.
While we have this tiny pause in time, when we may be hiring fewer people, we can start building. Building doesn’t have to be expensive. Building will enable you to be prepared when things shift. Building now will help you closely examine how you will get the best talent through their journey easily.
Take the time to explore how you can use video of your employees telling your candidates what they need both informationally and emotionally to convert into the next stage of the journey. To build a video content strategy that will get the right content in front of the right candidate at the right time, and to do it with content you may already have. It’s not about building something elaborate, it’s about understanding the audience, their journey with you, and what they need to see. It’s about being strategic with your video assets today, planning for the future, and identifying ways to do more with less.
We’re thrilled to be sharing this series with you. Expect in the coming days an exploration of each stage with actionable ideas on what candidates need to know and see in that stage. Plus, you can always download our Video Strategy Framework to build your own candidate video strategic framework. Put in a little time with the framework and before you know it, you have a viable strategy to take to your manager to execute video that will ignite the right talent to convert.
