Using Video to Attract Talent with Abby Cheesman

Abby Cheesman from Skill Scout discusses tips and tactics for creating video that attracts the talent you seek. Transcript Chris Russell: Leveraging video to attract talent. That's next, on the RecTech Podcast. Speaker 2: Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Chris Russell: Hey everyone. Welcome to the only podcast at the intersection of recruiting and technology. I'm your host, Chris Russell. Our show of course is sponsored by our friends at emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. Head over to emissary.ai. Click on the Book a Demo and self schedule yourself a quick 30 minute demo with the team. Matt, Brendan, and Euan. And learn more about how text recruiting can really speed up and make your recruiting process much more efficient overall. So it's really great technology, overlays onto your ATS, and lets you do one-on-one campaigns. Lets you do group campaigns out there. Short codes for events. A lot of great stuff there around text recruiting. And if you're not texting and recruiting today, then you're not basically becoming a modern recruiter overall. Chris Russell: And of course we're sponsored also by workhere.com, the hyper-local [inaudible 00:01:20] delivery tool. WorkHere's geofencing ad platform will help you pinpoint your best to match talent. They attract passive [inaudible 00:01:29] with enticing targeted mobile ads where they live, work, and shop. So head over to workhere.com. Be sure to tell them you heard it on the podcast, and get a demo from them as well. Really good job advertising technology that you really probably haven't tried yet. So we'll give them a shot. People like FedEx use them, Uber, Great Clips. Carvana uses them. So check them out at workhere.com. Chris Russell: All right, quick shout out to one of my listeners, [Norm Fleming 00:01:59] messaged me on LinkedIn this week. He's an IT recruiter out there in Waukee, Iowa. So hello Norm, thanks for listening. And glad you're on board. Tell your friends to check out the show as well. Chris Russell: All right, so today you're going to hear Abby Cheesman from my friends over at Skill Scout, the video job company. They'll come to your place of work. They'll interview your employees and create great two minute videos out there for your employer rank purposes. Anyway, she's going to talk today about how to leverage video properly. And this was audio from I took out of the recent webinar they did or rectechlive.com if you want to go see that. I extracted the audio, cleaned it up a bit, and put it into the podcast here. So she's got a lot of great tips and tactics around how to make your video stand out overall. So really good stuff here, lot of good takeaways. So hope you enjoy the audio, and I'll see you next time. Chris Russell: All right, good afternoon everyone. How's everyone doing today? You got a last show of the year for RecTech Live, and I got my pal Abby Cheesman here from Skill Scout in Chicago. Say hello Abby. Abby Cheesman: Hey guys. Chris Russell: All right, we're going to talk about using video to attract talent today, and she's got some great slides to show us. I've seen this presentation earlier this year and thought it was great. So I wanted to have her on and talk about video. We haven't really done that yet much on the show overall. So you are the co-founder or CFO of Skill Scout, a company based in Chicago, which does employer videos. Give us a quick history of the company and a little bit more about what you guys do. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So maybe about six years ago, Elena, my co-founder and I, we were working at a consulting firm. And we got put on a project of how do we more meaningfully connect people to employment. So we talked to a bunch of job seekers, bunch of companies, and we heard something over and over. It's really hard to know what a job is all about until you've done it before. Abby Cheesman: So long story short, we started filming behind the scenes. What is it like to be a welder? What is it like to be a nurse? And from there, we really just got started with Skill Scout. Abby Cheesman: So we take a research approach to filming. So typically if you're going to film something, you come as a script. And this is what we're going to talk about. With Skill Scout, we treat it like discoveries. So I want to learn as I'm filming with you. I want to hear from the people in the position to know what it's all about filming. So we come in, we have a discussion guide. Film days are usually super fun. So we go in, we learn about a workplace from the people that are in the jobs. So we know what we might capture, but typically we open it up for discovery. Chris Russell: Let's get to the slides and tell everyone about what we're going to learn about today. Abby Cheesman: So today I'm going to walk you through some tips and tricks, with the idea being that you could go back to your workplace on Monday and/or tomorrow if you're a real go getter. And start filming your jobs. You don't need a huge budget. You don't need a film crew. You can start filming with your phone. So I'm going to share some examples. I'm going to share some real tactical ways that you can get started. Chris Russell: Fire up your slides and we'll get rolling here. If the [inaudible 00:05:31] has questions, just throw them in the chat there and I'll stop Abby and ask her. And Abby over to you. Abby Cheesman: Sassy title, your job post is as boring as this webinar. I'm only kidding. This webinar's not going to be boring. So Chris gave me a great introduction. My name is Abby. I'm a job nerd. I get to film jobs for a living, so I get to see what it's like to be a flight attendant, to work on planes, to be a nurse, to work at the department of corrections. Abby Cheesman: I have an awesome team based in Chicago. We have a real intentional strategy to provide opportunities for women in the filmmaking industry. Particularly women of color. And one of the things that Elena, my co-founder, she's the one on the end there. We've been really intentional about women of color because our industry is typically super male and super white. And we believe that if you change the story by changing the storyteller. So you're able to share a little bit more diversity in the stories that you tell if you have a diverse team that's working with it. Chris Russell: I love the job nerd title, by the way. Abby Cheesman: I wish I could put that in business cards. I love it. So we've been able to tell stories for some of the biggest brands. I never thought I'd be filming with Unilever, and Nike, and McDonald's. And one of the things that our clients have in common is that it's really hard to tell people what your jobs are all about, and give an authentic preview. Abby Cheesman: So I want to pause and give a moment of reflection for all of you guys who are watching. When was the moment that you knew you were in the right place for your job? Chris, you and I talked about this very briefly before we began about being an entrepreneur, working for yourself. But reflect on this question and we're going to come back to this. When was the moment that you knew you were in the right place? Chris Russell: Probably I got some kind of thank you from a client or a listener of my podcast maybe. And that feedback really meant a lot to me. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. Mine was when I was standing in that jet engine at American Airlines filming what it's like to maintain and keep those aircraft safe. Just the surreality of being able to show jobs that nobody else has access to. That was my moment. Abby Cheesman: But let's talk a little bit about the hiring process. So the hiring process is a little bit like packing one more bullet point on that job post. Fitting into skinny jeans, this candidate's a great fit. Or your Facebook profile. Job looks great. Here's what it is. But this is what it looks like for most people. Right? This is an astounding data point. This is 2019. Only 1% of job posts have visuals. This is still a true statistic. Chris Russell: Yeah. I've been after employers to at least add a picture in there of something, of a person doing the job or some kind of visual image. Because it's a visual web, and people want to see rather than read. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. And that's including pictures, which is the crazy part. Because pictures cost nearly nothing to produce. And along all of this, we have about the attention span of a goldfish. This is true for any adult with a fully developed cognitive brain. You have about eight seconds to capture our attention, the same as a goldfish. Abby Cheesman: So if we think about trying to attract talent to our brand, these are the people, the go getters, the activists that we want. Eight seconds is not very long. Abby Cheesman: I want to talk a little bit about the laws of attraction. So I have a psychology background. Brain science is fascinating to me. So this is a couple of studies that Elena and I have looked into. So just get an understanding of what the next generation of talent, Gen Z that's coming into the workforce now looks like. And I think if we design solutions that appeal to the modern job seeker, even if we're focusing on Gen Z, these are going to be human centered principles that any job seeker can appreciate. Abby Cheesman: So a couple of things that we know. 98% own smart phones. 85% report that they learn about new products and services on social media. This one is crazy, and I can attest to it just on an anecdotal level. 71% are watching more than three hours of video every day. So I have a seven year old and a four year old, and YouTube is life man. Just anything that you could explore is on YouTube. Abby Cheesman: But three hours a day, that's taking out of TV time. 50% are part of a minority ethnicity by 2020. So diversity stories and representation matter to the youngest job seekers. But everybody in the workforce. So just keep these laws of attraction in mind as we start talking about video. Abby Cheesman: Social platforms, we're spending a lot of time on our phone. We talked about three hours of video a day. 70% of that is happening on YouTube. So people report YouTube as the app of the generation. We're receiving about 3,000 text messages a month. Most people prefer prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So this stat is always super interesting as we think about marketing spends. I would say as a business owner, Facebook is one of the first places that I think about advertising. And when it comes to talent, LinkedIn is another that comes to mind. But when we talk to younger job seekers, Instagram and Snapchat is where it's at. Tick tock, keep your eye on that one. That one's up and coming. And I think while it might not have ties to recruiting right now, I think that's going to be a medium that's more and more popular where job seekers are. Abby Cheesman: So there are some rules to being a good participant on social media. Keep your content short and sweet. Spice it up with visuals. Video is even better than photos, but any kind of visual. Highlight global locales and background. So representation of the different people that make up your workforce. Showcase how you impact the world. So what are you doing as a company and what is your spot in the world, and who do you impact? That's a really important story. Abby Cheesman: And then leverage the right social media and communication platform for your business. So we work with companies that are hiring welders. That might not be on LinkedIn, but they certainly are on Snapchat, and Instagram, and Facebook. So knowing enough about your industry, you guys probably know the channels to reach your people. Abby Cheesman: So remember when I asked this question? We talked a little bit about remembering the moment. You guys have stories, each one of the stories that you would tell yourself in your head, that has heart. Those are the kinds of things that job seekers are interested in hearing. And, those stories translate very beautifully to recruiting on video. Abby Cheesman: So a little data about job videos. A job posting with a video is viewed three times longer than a posting without. We use about 85% of our brain power to process visuals. So that's not text on page. That is a visual that is lighting up different parts of your brain than when you're reading. And, you get about 46% more views with a posting that has a video. And as I mentioned, psychology background. So this data point always sticks with me. We recall about 65% of what we see in here and only 15% of what we read. So if the only way that a job is interacting with your post is by reading bullet points, no matter how well written, they're still only going to remember about 15%. Abby Cheesman: So video over streaming webinars is notoriously sketchy. So, I shared a couple of links in the chat. But I want to tell you a little story about SAC Wireless. So this is a company that came to us in partnership with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. They were working on a challenge. They're hiring tower climbers. So these are the people that are building the infrastructure of 5G in our country. And they can't build towers fast enough to launch 5G. So this is an in demand kind of position. SAC was spending millions of dollars on agency recruiters, and they weren't getting the talent that would stay. And they discovered as part of their exit interviews, is that people didn't understand until they got to a tower how high up it is. So a very simple and very low hanging fruit piece of content for them was a video that shows people climbing the towers. Abby Cheesman: So we produced this video, and you guys can go check it out after the webinar. But it's a one and a half minute piece of people who work on a tower climbing team, talking about what it was like looking up at that tower. The safety and training that's required. What it feels like to work with a crew and travel with them, and ride in the same truck. Abby Cheesman: So they launched this video on Facebook. So this was a native post, which is what I recommend doing with posts on Facebook. So instead of linking to Vimeo or YouTube, upload it directly to Facebook, which is what they did. And they got this incredible response that they never expected. People started sharing the crap out of this video. So they had over 100,000 views in the first couple of weeks, and what they noticed was that their team was sharing it out. Wives were sharing, "Hey, check out what my husband does." And it became this organic piece of content that people were excited to show others. And it was one of their best performing pieces of content to get people into the funnel, applying for the job, and hired. Abby Cheesman: So this one video translated to the savings of millions of dollars for SAC Wireless, and it was part of a larger campaign. But this piece of content really jump-started employee referrals, advertising. And, it solved the problem of people not knowing that towers were 1,200 feet tall until they got to the job. Chris Russell: 1,200 feet? Abby Cheesman: Yes. When I watched that video, I still get heart palpitations. I was there when we filmed it. I would make a terrible tower climber. But for the right person, they see that and they're like, "Yep, I can build that." Chris Russell: Yep. Was this [inaudible 00:16:32] the candidates coming in from the video? Talk a little about how they might've- Abby Cheesman: Yes, they had some infrastructure behind that Facebook post. So they did do some lightweight tracking, and the Facebook post was their best channel that led to actual hires. And I think there were a few reasons for this. One, the video is just great. It's shared by people in the industry. And tower climbers tend to all work in pods, and so a lot of them know each other. It's kind of a small world. So that was a place that got eyeballs on content, maybe better than on LinkedIn or other channels. So that was part of it. Abby Cheesman: And then they linked directly to the application. So there wasn't like a link to a careers page and then I have to go find the job, and this and that. You could go directly from seeing this video to going into the application. So I think that was a win. But there's certainly more data. And Crystal Stanfield, she's since moved on from SAC, but she speaks at a lot of events. I would encourage you to go see her. She breaks down exactly how much money they saved, and how they did it and the rest of the ecosystem. Which included things like micro sites and using content and other channels. Chris Russell: I looked, and the video's about two minutes, 20 seconds. Correct? Abby Cheesman: Two minutes, 20 seconds. Yeah. And that's a little long, and I think the content is interesting and so it lends itself to be a couple seconds longer than I'd recommend. But typically we're looking to one to two minutes. Chris Russell: Yep. Abby Cheesman: So how'd they do it? This is what it could like to film a job video, right? You got 12 people on set, you got a grip. It could also look like this. For SAC, we did film a cameras and flew a drone just to get to the height and safely capture the position. But this is also what it can look like to film a job video. A cell phone, a tripod, a microphone, and two people talking. Abby Cheesman: So every single one of us has a cell phone. Every single one of our cell phones, if purchased in the last five to seven years, has a powerful camera on it. There are a few things that you need to make your camera even more powerful. So we package this up, but I can also share a link after this session to exactly what you need. Abby Cheesman: One is a tripod to keep your phone stable while you're filming. The second is a microphone. So phones are set up to capture audio as you're holding it up to your head. So capturing across the room can be tricky. And with a microphone, you can capture beautiful audio. And it's less than $25. And then a handheld tripod so that you can take nice, smooth pans. And with these three core things, you can really take your footage from being amateur quality to pretty high quality. Abby Cheesman: But let's start at the beginning. So one of the things that we found as we've talked to companies is that you have to be in the right moment to be sharing video. You can't put lipstick on a pig. What you are is what is going to appear on video. So I think most companies probably are ready for video, but we put together a little quiz so that you could do a little self reflection of is this a place that you really feel passionate about recruiting people for? And what are some of the stories that compel people to want to work with you? So it's just a self-reflection to see if video is a tool that you're ready for in your toolkit. Abby Cheesman: So if you take that quiz, you feel good, you would recommend it as a place to work. Here's some of the ingredients for a great job video. Be specific. So for the tower climber, we picked a specific role. SAC was hiring many roles, but that role was specific enough that we needed to go film it separately. Keep it real. We talked about the fear of heights. We talked about how hard the position is, that you're working in weather conditions. Two minutes tops. As Chris pointed out, we broke that rule. But two minutes is typically the sweet spot of how long candidates are going to give you. And show, don't tell. So while we might conduct the interviews in a quiet spot with good audio and good lighting, we want to see more than we want to see a talking head. So we want to go and see the work environment. Abby Cheesman: A little bit more about being specific. One video that I recommend to people is creating a realistic job preview. There's all kinds of content that you can create about your company. If you've not done video before, realistic job preview's a great place to start. So you can start thinking about one job that might be high volume or high turnover, an area of concentration for you. Talk to one to two people who are in the job, who are actually working in that role. Abby Cheesman: And then keep it real. So as I mentioned at the beginning, we take an ethnographic research mindset. So come in as a researcher. You might think you know what the job is on paper, but be prepared to discover and be open to what you see. You want to capture productivity. Don't stop it. Don't use a script. Use an interview guide. And remember that employees are the expert of their experience. So again, there's always the job description and then there's the, "Okay hey, this is how it really works." Those are the things that you're looking for. Abby Cheesman: Most importantly, show the stuff that makes people quit. This view here is why I would quit on my first day as a tower climber. You want to show people that. If there are things about your work environment. We have one client that it's an armored car service that all of the employees are armed. And for some people, that would be a deal breaker. And you don't want them to discover that deal breaker in their training or their first 90 days. That should come this early in the process as possible so people can self select in or self select out. Abby Cheesman: Two minutes tops. I checked our data today. We have a whole bunch of job videos that are live through our accounts. And I think the stat today was one minute and 49 seconds on average that people will watch. But it's less than two minutes. So giving people the top two to three things that are most important to share about the job, and spending about 30 seconds on each one of those is a good framework. Chris Russell: Excellent. Abby Cheesman: Show, don't tell. So you want to minimize talking heads, you want to show the work environment. One question I get a lot is, "What if we're in a boring office?" That's a great question. You're in a boring office, show the boring office, but also show the impact of your work. So if you're working in banking, you should certainly show inside of the branch of what are your banks. But maybe also go out to the community and showcase some of the things that you're doing in the community. Whether that's financial literacy training or other impact that you have. Abby Cheesman: Another example of this is in manufacturing. So while we might capture footage inside of the plant, we also want to go see what those products do in people's lives because that's important to candidates. So if you're building a medical device that helps give people allergy medicine faster and saves lives, that's an important part of the story to tell visually. So there are ways that you can depict the boring office. You should be realistic about that. If they're going to work in a boring office, show it. But also show the impact and how people stay committed to the work. Chris Russell: I'll also say too, you can show your employees in action outside the office too. Maybe if you're having a dinner or happy hour or something like that. Abby Cheesman: Oh absolutely. Events, anything that the team members are getting together after work. Anything that you can show to give people a flavor of what the experience is like working with you. That's the stuff you want to film. Chris Russell: Yup. Abby Cheesman: Teamwork makes the dream work. So, I've got a couple of clips and they're of course not going to play nicely over the stream. But, using employee generated clips is one of the easiest ways that you can capture content. Giving people a quick direction of, "Hey, can you take some footage across your work environment this morning?" And give them some ideas of what they could shoot. You will quickly get tons of different perspectives of your workplace from the eyes of the people who work in the jobs. Abby Cheesman: So employee generated content. Opening filming up to anybody who is willing to contribute is a really easy, fast way to get video. So this is one that we did in that armored car company. Here's another one. This job is a raw video clip of transportation assistance. No, what it really is, is driving really expensive custom order cars off of the boat at the Port of Baltimore. And this is a really different kind of job than what you would think on paper. So just getting a couple of employee generated clips showing the car, hearing the sound of the engine rev. Gives people a much more tangible feel for the job. Abby Cheesman: So we didn't watch the videos, but I do like to pose the questions, what did you notice about any of the visuals that we showed about that work environment? It was real. Yeah. And you can see that working with that armored car service is very different than the transportation assistant, is very different than the tower climber. Just the quick visual. You will remember that better, 65% more. And you'll be able to relate back to it, to that visual experience of watching that video. When you go to get the recruiter phone call or apply for the position. Chris Russell: Abby, question. When you go to your clients and you first talk to them, do you kind of look and see if their employees are already sharing stuff on social media they might not know about? Abby Cheesman: That is a great question. Yes. A lot of our clients actually have hashtags or employee generated groups. So Nike for example, has swoosh life. And that's customers and employees sharing experience alike. So sourcing stuff that people are already sharing about your brand is a great way to just kind of do an analysis of what's out there about us. And oftentimes, it's a great way to identify people who are already filming stuff and would be more than happy to be an ambassador or contribute their footage to your project. But that's a wonderful question. Abby Cheesman: And if you don't have that yet, you will also notice the people who are super active on social media. Those are the people that are top of my list for the people that I want to enlist in filming. If somebody is super comfortable sharing cat videos or kid videos, those are the people that are going to be excited about filming their workplace. Abby Cheesman: So we talked a little bit about what you need. Tripod, microphone, handheld tripod, and a lens cleaner. Phones are filthy. Cleaning them off makes the video much crispier. Abby Cheesman: Capturing quality video, audio is unforgivable. So earlier when we first started the echo, I was speaking super slowly because I was listening to myself. Audio can be super distracting, right? So you can forgive bad video to some extent. You cannot forgive bad audio. It's extremely distracting to the brain if there's something crackly or something that you can't quite hear the person speaking. So audio first, always use a microphone. Abby Cheesman: Second is lighting. The sun is your friend. Camera phones are super sensitive to light, and they're trying and trying to get better. But the more that you can utilize natural outdoor lighting, so sitting by a window. Or generate your own lighting. Get a halo light that cost 40 bucks on Amazon. Lighting is going to take your quality from super amateur to much more professional lifting. And it'll actually capture the 1080 or 4K level of quality. Without good lighting, your phone can't capture that resolution. Abby Cheesman: Film horizontally. This is always controversial and I'm constantly reevaluating this. But for now, phones capture higher resolution if you hold them horizontally. We see more mediums come up like Instagram, Snapchat, where vertical is how people are capturing and sharing. So I think we need to keep an eye on this. But the most important thing is keeping it consistent. So if you're going to edit clips together, you want them either to all be horizontal or all be vertical. Abby Cheesman: And lastly, heart. So letting people show who they really are. Not being too corporatey or too prescriptive. And show the nerdiness. Like I'm a job nerd. I'm happy saying that. You have nerds at your company too, and you want to show that flare. So if you've got engineers that geek out about something, capture the heart and the spirit of why they're excited to work with you and that will be super attractive to other people who nerd out in that way. Abby Cheesman: We've got a ton of tutorials on our site that just show you how to set up your audio. Some of the technical mistakes we made early in the first couple of years filming on phones. We've made a tutorial for everything so that you can capture the best quality possible in your phone. Lighting. How to film B-roll. So let's talk a little B-roll. Chris Russell: Yeah, explain B-roll to the audience. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So when we think about the ingredients of a job video, the first is an interview. You want to talk to somebody on camera about their experience working. The second piece is all the visual footage. So we said minimize talking heads. The interview is a talking head. You want to go out and capture a visual B-roll of everything that they talked about. So if a nurse is talking about checking vitals. In your mind, you should be making a note of take some B-roll of checking vitals, take some B-roll of filling out patient paperwork. The B-roll is all of the beautiful video footage that goes on top of the interview so that we can see what the person is talking about. Abby Cheesman: I also shared in the chat an example of a recruiting video we did recently for Wendy's. And you can see how we used their values on top of what people were saying to really tie their story together. Abby Cheesman: So here's how we captured that video. We used this exact list of questions. "Tell me who you are, where we're at today. What do you do here? Walk me through a typical day." And when people walk you through a typical day, they gloss over and they move quickly because they assume you know what they're talking about. So sometimes I say, "Be detailed. Pretend I'm your 12 year old niece and I have no idea what you do." And usually when people speak with that filter, that brings them to a level that's tangible and shareable outside of your organization. But all of us do this when we're talking about our work. We might get super technical, jargony. So just encourage them to talk to you as if this is the first time you're hearing about this. Abby Cheesman: What surprised you when you started this job? What's challenging? Being real about that? What's the best part about working here? What's your favorite memory from working here? And what advice would you have for somebody that is just joining your team? Abby Cheesman: I would add that question from the beginning when we talked about< "When was the moment you knew you were in the right place?" The reason I like this question, Chris, you told a story. I told a story. I didn't just say the people are great. The culture is great. What you don't want is general speak. You want to hear people's stories. "Well, tell me a time where you really felt like your team was great." And then those stories are what tell beautiful recruiting stories. Abby Cheesman: This is some ideas for B-roll. So hands working, work in action, the work environment, conference rooms, common areas. Two to three main tasks of the position. Team interaction. And for those boring officey jobs, impact. What's happening outside of the office as a result of the work that you're doing inside of the office? All right, a moment to reflect. Anybody has any questions so far? Chris Russell: Nothing yet in the chat. But if you do, feel free to throw them in there. And I'll ask Abby. Abby, question for you is, what's been the in terms of your client base, what's been the most interesting piece of feedback you've gotten from after doing a video like this? What stands out to you? Abby Cheesman: That's a great question. So often we get this feedback, and I always love hearing it. Is that recruiters who've been recruiting for this role for years learn something new about the experience of working in that job. So you can recruit for a warehouse position in a refrigerated facility. But until you've put your coat on and gone 40 degrees below zero, it's really hard to have empathy in a tangible way for what that is like. And a lot of recruiters go back to their work with that experience. So filming is this discovery for them, and this opportunity to engage with the job in a way that they don't normally get. Abby Cheesman: So people often really enjoy filming. It might seem stressful for the first time that you do it. But the feedback overwhelmingly that I love getting that we get a lot. "I didn't know how much fun it was going to be. I didn't realize how much I was going to learn about this job. I've been recruiting for it for 20 years." Right? We went through burning questions. I'm going to share some questions I get a lot. Abby Cheesman: Oh no, our trade secrets. Right? We work in a proprietary industry, right? I work in space and engineering a product that's top secret. That's okay. It's not just about what you make. It's about why it matters. It's your passion, projects, celebrations and your team coming together, training. So you don't focus on proprietary processes. Obviously you don't want to sell out your secrets and tank the business. But you do want to show what the employee experience is based on that position. Abby Cheesman: So avoid things as you're filming, like specs on a drawing. Any kind of measurements. In manufacturing, any kind of specific code or processes. You don't want to capture that stuff. Abby Cheesman: Privacy. This might look familiar to you, Chris. What about privacy? So we filmed in one of the more challenging work environments that we've filmed in a couple of weeks ago. We were in Connecticut. We were filming with the department of corrections who they're working on recruiting physicians to work in facilities. So there's two challenges to work through. One is HIPAA, right? We can't share patients on camera. And the second is we can't show inmates on camera. So a really easy workaround that have worked with our corrections positions in other states and areas, and our healthcare. Has been using stand-ins. So if you have someone else on the team that will play the role of patient or play the role of customer. Or any other sensitive role in your video, that will allow you to capture it. You'll get them to sign a media release and you'll have permission to share their footage. But you're not releasing anything about your customers, or your patients, or people that are of a sensitive. Abby Cheesman: And stand-ins allow you to still show bits of the job that are important. So showing the exam, taking vitals. That's a huge part of this role. So to remove it from the video altogether wouldn't have done it justice. So stand-ins on a volunteer basis is something that we've had a ton of success with. Chris Russell: Okay, great. Abby Cheesman: Another question, compliance is life. We work in the aviation industry, so we have filmed a ton of compliant driven and union driven work environments. And my advice for that is to have somebody who is a union steward. If you're a union shop or a union environment. And, a safety and compliance person film with you. So you have them right alongside for the journey. They can tell you what is and is not shareable on camera. Abby Cheesman: So while you probably all have compliant workplaces, there are times when things are done that are maybe questionable and not exactly up to policy, but a workaround. And just having those people in field with you as you're capturing content gets them on your side. They're part of the process, they're an engaged stakeholder. And, it prevents you from capturing anything that's not showing you in your best light. So getting them involved early and planning, and come along for filming. That's been successful also. Abby Cheesman: I'm broke baby. I ain't got no money. This is another question I get. You don't need $100,000 or even $1,000 to make your first video. You can do this for free. Abby Cheesman: So to do this for free, let's talk a little bit about editing. This is one of the biggest questions people have. There are a few options. You can do it in one take. I filmed a video earlier this morning for an internal team thing. I did it in one take, no editing required. Abby Cheesman: iMovie, Windows Movie Maker. Those are both low cost or free depending on your computer. And easy editing programs that you can pull in the interview, the B-roll, and some music to go along with that. Abby Cheesman: FiLMiC pro is an app on, it's available for iPhone and I believe Android. It's about 20 bucks. And you can actually edit video on your phone. I'll mention that iMovie is also available on iPhone and- Chris Russell: I use that one. Abby Cheesman: You use that one? Yeah. What's your experience been? Chris Russell: It's okay. You can just trim the clip, you can add some overlays of text on there and stuff like that. Abby Cheesman: Yeah, I find my phone to be a little small to edit on. So I'm a huge fan of popping everything over to my laptop and throw it in iMovie. But my daughter will edit in iMovie on her iPad. So depending on how big your fingers are, I guess. Mine are too fat for the phone, but FiLMiC pro is an awesome app. Abby Cheesman: And then are editing services. So this is something full disclosure that Skill Scout does. But there are other options or interns you can come and get to come in and help film, and edit your video. We see a lot of our companies engaging interns in this process. Not just because of digital natives and awesome at it, but also they have a fresh perspective of your company. So having them film, you often get things that you might not, or things that you didn't think about filming that's been interesting. Abby Cheesman: This is how you put it together. It's like a cake. Layer one is the interview. Layer two is the music. Layer three is the B-roll. So I just took a screenshot of what it looks like in iMovie. So you can see the green thing at the bottom. That's my music track. There are lots of libraries. You have to be careful when you're adding a music track that you own license. So if it's creative commons, that's something that can be shared anywhere as long as you credit that person. There are other libraries where you can purchase a song. Don't use a song off the radio or off of a pop singer. Don't use a recognizable track, because that will quickly get flagged on social media. And you don't have permission to use it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars to whoever made it. Abby Cheesman: So find a royalty free or creative commons music track. And then this middle piece is my main content. So this would be my interview. And then the little piece on top is B-roll. So you can add clips at different moments in your interview to depict what the person is saying. Abby Cheesman: So once you've edited, how do you use this? One very easy place is on the job posting itself. So on our job post, we have a video about what it's like to be an editor at Skill Scout. And then we ask them what stands out in the video. So not only do we know that they've watched the video, but they can talk about things that are the same or different from their other work experience. And we get really rich data about the candidates in that question. On the job post is a really great way to use it. Chris Russell: That should be the top of the job post too, right? Abby Cheesman: It should be at the very top. Yeah. Or depending on how your micro site is laid out, if you have a specific page for a job, it could be one of a couple of pieces of content. But yes, prominently featured. So if they're going to watch one thing, it's that. Chris Russell: Right. Abby Cheesman: Employee referrals. This is way better than sending out an email saying, "Hey, we're hiring." Giving people a piece of content that they can send to their friends to get a much richer information about the job. That's a great way to use video. You saw this with SAC Wireless, putting it on Facebook. Abby Cheesman: We see a lot of companies using video to onboard people into their hiring process. So as you can imagine, getting hired as a flight attendant, it's a process. So we just did a series with American Airlines giving people an idea of what this process looks like. And it gives candidates more human centered experience as they're going through what can be a difficult to understand and kind of long process. So using videos at different moments in your hiring process to be more human, to connect with them on a more human level. We see a lot of companies doing this. Abby Cheesman: In your recruiting outreach. So maybe somebody's applied, and you want to send them a little video with a little bit more information. Or you want to send them a video of the person that's going to be interviewing them to prepare them for the interview. There are lots of ways that you can use video in your email communications. Abby Cheesman: One tool that I find super helpful is called Loom. Use loom.com. And it basically allows you to film, you have to use a Chrome browser. But it allows you to film and then embed that video into an email. And the video comes across as a gif. So as somebody opens the email, this picture starts moving and they can see immediately that it's a video. They click on it, and they can watch it right in the email. It doesn't pop them out to another site. It just is right inside the email. And that's a free tool that's super helpful. Chris Russell: It's free? Abby Cheesman: It's free. There might be a cap on how many you can send. But I send a whole lot of them and I haven't paid for yet. Don't tell them. They might start charging me now. It's called useloom.com. L-O-O-M. Chris Russell: Throw it in the chat there. Thanks Abby. Abby Cheesman: Yeah, thanks. A word about audio. Silent is the new black. Data coming back day to day. It's getting more and more dire that people are not listening to the videos. 70% of mobile traffic is video, and 85% of that is viewed with no sound. I am guilty, right? We watch video in places that we're on the train. We're commuting, we're at home, we're cooking dinner. And we don't necessarily want to listen to it, but we do want to watch. Abby Cheesman: So how can we design around a good user experience? The easiest way is captions. Captions aren't just great because it makes it better for the person watching, but also it generates text-based information about that video that's used in SEO. So if you have a caption file in with your video, that content will help you appear higher in the algorithm. So captions are great. You can auto-generate them in YouTube to mixed success. I've also used this service that I absolutely love called Rev. Rev is a paid service that you can share video, either upload or through YouTube or Vimeo. And it will generate captions. It's a real person typing it. So it's way more accurate than the YouTube captions. Abby Cheesman: You can also translate. So we do this with a lot of our clients that have international offices. Where we might film in English, but it's helpful to be able to share it in Chinese or in Spanish, or another language. Rev has translations available, which has been really helpful. Chris Russell: I have an app Abby called, it's called Clipomatic. You do your video, it records the audio, it transcribes the audio within the app. And then you can go back and you actually, it'll show you the transcript of it. You can go back, correct certain words that didn't quite pick up on. You can publish it as a single file out there with the subtitles. Abby Cheesman: That's awesome. And subtitles are not just important for posting on video sites, but also social media. So being able to generate that SRT. I have a whole blog post about much to do about captions, because it's gotten complicated. And it's much better from a user standpoint, but the infrastructure of how do you that has gotten a little bit trickier. But that's awesome. I'm going to have to check that out. Abby Cheesman: Texts call outs. I'm sure you guys have seen these videos before. Recipes where they label each piece. I actually didn't know until I started doing research that there was sound to these videos. There's actually a dude talking as this is going on. But you don't need it because they've labeled with text. This can be done in iMovie. It can be done in other editing programs that you just put labels on things. I could see you doing this with uniforms where there's pieces of a uniform for the flight attendants if they're getting new uniforms or something's happening with uniform, that's important to communicate. You can use a call out of just somebody standing there in uniform and talk about PPE, protective clothing, steel toe boots, different parts of the uniform that are important. Call outs are cool. We're going to see more of them. Abby Cheesman: And lastly, text narration. This is a beautiful video put out by the National Park Service. It's simple B-roll of a national park, and then they share messages just through text. And you can see a little green bar at the bottom of the screen. It also tells you how long the video is, which I thought was just a beautiful user experience. I'm super impatient, so knowing that I only have a little bit of that bar left, I watched the whole thing. So text on top of B-roll. That's a really easy thing to do in iMovie or other simple editing programs. And the footage that you have to capture for it is just B-roll. There's no audio, there's no people talking on camera. It's just footage of your workplace. All right, that wraps this up to final questions. Chris Russell: Yeah, we do have one more [inaudible 00:47:00] to get chance before. But Jasmine's asking, "How often should we update videos for the same position?" Abby Cheesman: That's a great question. So we see our companies updating them about every year, depending on the position. So it's going to be really dependent on how evergreen the tasks of the role are. So for example, nursing. That job is going to be relatively the same across a two to three years span. So that's a little bit more evergreen. Tech positions, their shelf life is just shorter if you go into the details of the actual tech stack that people are working with and that kind of thing. So if you want a video like that to last longer, talk a little bit less about the technology of today's moment. And talk a little bit more about the greater context of that job. Abby Cheesman: But I would say we encourage companies to put as much video out as possible. Even if that means Instagram stories, stuff that goes away really quickly. Just getting in the habit of sharing on video will make each video faster and easier to produce. So if your first video you keep for a year and then you update it and you get more and more comfortable with the filming process, we have some companies that weekly are putting out videos. Not all job videos, but certainly content that engages their job seeker audience. Abby Cheesman: And then of course if you're going through any kind of change in that role, video is a great opportunity to communicate that internally and externally. So we have a company that's going through a massive uniform change, and it impacts their employees. So they're making video pieces about the change, why the change is coming. Some of those are internal facing, and some of those are external facing. Chris Russell: You have a super fan in the chat there. Mary says after listening to your presentation at our HR meetings in Iowa, we bought the equipment and use it all the time. Appreciate the- Abby Cheesman: Yay. I remember you. That's awesome. That makes my day. Video does not have to be expensive. It does not have to be out of reach. I actually taught my college roommate how to make a video. She and her sister own a daycare, and I taught her how to film, how to do interviews, and she produced her own video too. So I think small and midsize businesses, this is perfect to get started. And as you grow and see more opportunity, you see a lot of companies getting the bug for video and then start to do onboarding, or training, or other ways to communicate through video. Yay Mary, good job. Chris Russell: Awesome. Well Abby, thank you very much for this very informative, and a lot of good stuff in this video. I'll have to go watch it again. Abby Cheesman: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Chris Russell: Tell them where to connect with you and then Skill Scout. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So as a participant in this webinar, I nerd out on this stuff. I'd be happy to do a free 20 minute video story boarding session. If you have any kind of questions about how video could work for you, I'm happy to chat with you. My email is [email protected]. You can get me on Twitter. I'm pretty easy to find. So get in contact. I love doing brainstorming sessions because there's probably not a challenge that we have not seen with one of our clients. So happy to chat through any questions you have. Speaker 2: Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on twitter @ChrisRussell, or visit rectechmedia.com. Where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars, and articles. So be sure to check out our other sites, Recruiting Headlines and HR Podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices