3/7/2018 HR Case Study: Recruitment video

HR Case Study: Recruitment Video

By Maciej Budkowski  Posted July 19, 2017  In Explainer video, Recruitment

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It was the end of May of 2016 when we realized that we could not postpone it
anymore. Everybody sat down in his place and the meeting began.

–  We have got to recruit new drawing artists! I cannot handle it myself anymore!
We will not be able to make it through if new projects will appear…! – said Klaudia
nervously.

Michał and I have nodded our heads. The discussion started.

How about a job o er on the internet? How about a video? And how long will it
take? Do we even know how to do it? I remember that I have some recruitment
materials from the time during my studies… but where will we get these people
from? And when will Klaudia be able to do that if she is so overloaded with work?
Remember that we have the holidays soon. And the conference is next week!

Nobody was up to begin the recruitment process. We understood how tiresome

and composed of many stages this process was, especially when you are looking
for people from the creative industry. We doubted that we would even be able to
nd enough candidates. But we had no choice.

I sat down in front of the computer and prepared a standard job o er containing
‘Company description/ Responsibilities / Required skills / We o er’. It was not bad,
but it did not convince anyone of us either. If we are targeting people from the
creative industry, we should do it in a creative manner.

We had some general ideas, but no speci c solution. We nished the meeting by
promising ourselves that every one of us would consider what we may prepare.

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In the evening, Klaudia had been enlightened. She went to the o ce, turned the
camera on, and spontaneously described the kind of people we need in our
company. When I came to the o ce the following day, I found out that the
recruitment video was almost ready. Klaudia just had to add a few scenes to the
project.

– Oh. I remember that there was idea for a video, but I did not realize we would be
able to complete it so fast!

– You will see… it is really cool.

I had waited a few hours and found out that she was right. I felt that this was it. I
shared the video on our fanpage, and already, after a dozen minutes, the
feedback was incredible. After 48 hours, we were already sure that we would
reach our recruitment target without any problems.

If you want to learn more, please read our HR Case Study.

Problem
Klaudia needed a new drawing artists to help her with her work. Quickly. We
produce animated videos for business, and due to the constantly-increasing
number of projects, we needed back-up. It was di cult, because drawing work as
a part of ExplainVisually is di erent from the standard tasks presented to drawing
artists. Why?

A person has to draw in a ‘live mode’, and that reduces the number of possible
corrections. The deadlines are often tense, requiring from artists the ability to
work under a time constraint. The awareness about the limitations of our
handmade technique of videos is also important in order to keep our ideas
possible to complete. Brie y speaking – we needed very responsible and strongly-
rooted-in-the-business reality artists (what is an oxymoron in the eyes of some
people).

We also knew that our target group, where we were looking for our coworkers, is
also allergic to extremely o cial language. That is why directed movies, traditional
o ers at job websites or a LinkedIn promotion were out of the question.

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Due to the fact that our company still has a quiet and private character, an
improperly selected person could have in uenced our business activity
signi cantly. As comes to an atmosphere in work as to operational activity.
Looking for a substitute means more lost days or even weeks. Therefore, the
stakes were high.

Goal
We needed at least 3 employees that we could prepare to work in 1 or 2 days. This
means almost immediately.

Besides practice in drawing, being professional, being open for new things and
experiences and also the ability to work under time constraints, we also
considered the creativity of candidates to be very important. We also thought
that being adjustable to our company atmosphere (meaning a ‘home-like’
atmosphere) was crucial, followed by a requirement for communicative skills
and whether a candidate had a sense of humor.

Solution
The recruitment process was separated into stages of collecting applications, the
recruitment task (requiring a few or even about a dozen hours of work and a large
dose of creativity) and a phone interview.

We created a recruitment video that sends a message to all future employees in

relation to:

Area of our company activity,

Atmosphere within the company,
Pro le of the future boss,
Visual explanation of the job position and the process of the production of our movies.

The video was concluded by providing an e-mail address that would be used by
candidates to apply for the job. We wanted the applying candidates to watch the
recruitment video to the end, because this way we felt con dent that they
understood the nature of this quite unusual job position.

And the recruitment video looked like this:

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REKRUTUJEMY! Storyboardziści i aktorzy rysującej ręki poszukiwani!

We already had a video. Now, we had to decide the distribution channels.

The rst channel was Facebook. The selection resulted from our description of a
target group. We rather did not associate drawing artists with people who have
LinkedIn accounts and look for interesting o ers in the website’s newsfeed.
Similarly, we evaluated the odds that they regularly visit job sites like Indeed or
Glassdoor.

We used the following Facebook channels:

Company pro le (about 800 likes at that time),

Private pro les of 3 of our team members committed to work with future employees,
Academy of Fine Arts student group and drawing artist group.

The recruitment video was shared as a Facebook Video. We knew that one of
Facebook’s strategies is promoting its video content. The portal had cut the reach
of YouTube links and was promoting videos uploaded to their own social network.
The end of the post contained a clear ‘Call to Action’ eld (applying for the job
through e-mail) with encouragement to share the movie.

We also shared the recruitment video on a company pro le at LinkedIn (in that
time, the incredible number of 30 followers) and our private pro les. The link also
appeared in our mail footers.

Results

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After posting the movie on the internet, we went to a marketing conference held
in Cracow, Poland. During the break, I logged into Facebook and was
overwhelmed by the number of noti cations, likes, shares and comments.

In the rst 48 hours, we had:

10,000 views,
100 shares,
25,000 through organic reach (about 80 times more than a typical post on a fanpage)
Increase in the number of fanpage likes – 15%.

In the end, we spent about PLN 80 (ca. 20$)  to promote the post and acquired
almost 16,000 views on Facebook and 570 on YouTube.

The recruitment movie also generated a lot of reactions from Facebook users.

Recruitment e ect:
We considered the quantity and quality of candidates who expressed a willingness
to cooperate, to be more important than Facebook popularity. Fortunately, the
success of the recruitment video was not limited only to the number of viewers.

Numbers in relation to the recruitment process:

In two weeks, we received 89 applications from people interested in the recruitment

process (Klaudia estimated this number to about 10-15 people!)
43 people (out of 89) completed the recruitment task, in which preparation took usually
from few to about a dozen hours of work (writing a storyboard for candidates applying for

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a storyboard artist position and lming the movies for people applying for the position of an
actor of a drawing hand)
Among those 43 people who completed the task, 29 passed to the following stage of
recruitment, meaning telephone interviews. After completing 29 telephone interviews,
usually lasting for 1 hour (all of the interviews were done by Klaudia, meaning the same
person who was seen in the recruitment video), we invited 8 people to cooperate with our
company. We planned to employ fewer people, but we were so enthralled by their output
that we slightly changed the employment model.

After closing the recruitment process (meaning the deadline for submitting
recruitment tasks), we also created a movie that closed the recruitment process.
 In the next video ‘future boss’ expressed her thanks to the candidates, which was
done in a very similar manner.

It looked like this:

Rekrutacja zamknięta - informacja dla kandydatów

What is important for the applicants – all of the candidates from the nal stage of
the recruitment process (this is 29 people) have received personalized feedback at
the end of the process. Despite that it meant many hours of work for Klaudia, as
people with experience in applying to various companies, we desired to inform
the people why they were accepted or why they were not.

In the end, our rst large recruitment process had been successful.

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The level of candidates was very high and we easily recruited as many employees
as we wanted. We still have a rich database of people with whom we may address
in case we need additional support. An unpredictable result of the whole process
was an increase in the recognition of our company in uenced by all those helpful
people who shared our recruitment video.

The results proved to be beyond our wildest imagination.

Comments and conclusions

More than a year has passed since the described recruitment process took place.
We cooperate with nearly all of the employed people. Meanwhile, we recruited
one more person. Due to the acquired time perspective, we may look at what we
learned with fresh eyes.

Conclusions:

1. You may familiarize candidates with a future boss.

There is a saying that an employee comes to the company and leaves the boss. If
he/she is so important in the process of job selection, it would be worthwhile to
use this element. Familiarizing candidates with a future supervisor already at the
rst stage of recruitment might be a bull’s-eye.

2. It may prove useful to use images or a video, not only from Stock.
We live in a time dominated by the image form of delivery (memes, comic books,
infographics). Usage of this kind of media may signi cantly improve attractiveness
and distinguish our job o er. Due to the usage of video, the applicant feels that
we made an e ort to present a speci c job position to a candidate. It may be done
by usage of a movie, infographics or a picture of a future team.

3, There are candidates on Facebook also.

There are few people who look for the job on Facebook. However, it is also a place
with a lot of interaction, where our candidates and their friends spent a great deal
of time. Some of them, when seeing a job o er that ts the pro le of their friend,
willingly tag it, raising the chance to reach a candidate for our company. We only
have to remember that our advertisement has to t the nature of the portal.

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Obviously, our described solution is not perfect in every case. It is not always
possible to make a recruitment video. The future boss sometimes does not want
to present himself/herself in front of the camera. And not every candidate will like
such a form of communication. Job o ers on Facebook may also become
tiresome.

However, we think that experiments may prove worthy. Making a movie. Adding
infographics or a picture to the advertisement. Asking a manager to write a short
letter for candidates, explaining who he really needs, in his own words.

There are many possibilities and we hope that our HR Case Study will encourage
you to initiate the search.

About the author:

Maciej Budkowski — a psychologist and marketer in

ExplainVisually, responsible for marketing and sales. During his
studies at the University of Warsaw, he studied the in uence of
large amount on information on the level of processing. Then, he
managed communications in IS-Wireless, a high-tech telecom
company. He gave a lecture entitled “The use of visual thinking in building
customer experience” at the Marketing Summit 2016. You can nd some of his
psychology-related articles on impri c.com.

About ExplainVisually:

One of the biggest producer of whiteboard animation videos in

Europe, it regularly works with the biggest brands in the world,
NGOs, SMEs and start-ups. ExplainVisually services are provided to
such organizations as: Carlsberg, UniCredit, Orange, Credit
Agricole, Millennium Bank, Remondis, AmRest, ING, PARP,
Pratt&Whitney, BZWBK (Santander Bank), Tesco and TEDx.

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