There is no question that in many instances a video for job candidates can convey a message to potential employees. What I do question is how effective the message is conveyed. Is the right message in the right video? The answer to this question is often unclear when viewing a real job preview video. Unfortunately, quite often the real job preview video will miss the mark in delivering a real job or position preview and instead incorporate the goals of the recruiting video.

Two Videos Two Audiences

The best way to think about the differences in these videos is to consider the analysis most consumers process when they are looking for a new car. On any given night, there is no shortage of car and truck commercials on network television. These commercials focus on selling the most attractive features of their model and attributes related to their brand to reach a very wide demographic of potential consumers. The most striking aspects are highlighted to a target demographic. A typical commercial contains messages on saving energy, safety, reliability, GPS and satellite radio, and warranties. The viewer is provided several features with few details, given the focus and time constraints. A recruiting video is not all that different. The organizational brand is showcased along with values, community involvement, and the mission of the organization, to attract potential candidates who will have an affinity to the messages being presented.

When a consumer is interested in researching specific features of a car model, a manufacturer’s site will often provide several brief videos that address those options in more detail. You can find out how the components operate alone and as part of the vehicle. A real job preview video should follow the same format. An ideal preview video should break down several of the key aspects of the job that is being discussed. The discussion should present a candid discussion an idea of what the day in the life of the position is like. Focus on a specific aspect of the job; talk to someone in the field actually doing the job. There should also be some discussion on how the job fits into the mission of the organization.

Wrong Message, Wrong Audience

A real job preview video will lose its utility when it is diluted with too much branding. There are certainly elements of branding that can coexist within an real job preview video, but the focus must be on giving the viewer a clear understanding of the job being displayed. You should communicate what the employee will be accountable for in the job. This is often done in a “day in the life” format for the position being discussed.

A recruiting video also runs the risk of delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience. Some videos fail to take advantage of their brand, and assume that viewers will make the connection. Other videos fail to discuss their culture and mission and how employees play a vital role in their organization. Some videos communicate the culture and mission well but focus on just one business unit to the detriment of others.

Two Goals of Two Videos

Keep in mind the goals of each video. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the goal of a recruiting video is to recruit employees. This is usually achieved by selling the brand, communicating the culture and values of the organization, as well as the mission. The goal of the preview is to match the right people with the right jobs as well as increase retention and lower turnover. The preview should be performed in a style that generates interest while discussing the realities of the position being discussed. Genuine real job preview videos discuss both positive and some challenges of the position. Giving a realistic glimpse of the culture and the mission of the organization will go a long way in retaining talent.

Amazingly, that’s what Fellows and Associates has done. And just to make sure you get it, the firm issued a press release over the weekend discussing the video.

“The aim was to find an idea that was provocative in order to elicit a response and maximise the video’s potential for spreading virally whilst maintaining a balance of responsible advertising” says Fellows and Associates Managing Director, Pete Fellows.

I don’t know about the provocative part, but the viral part seems to have fallen flat. According to You Tube stats, the “Goose Attack At Wedding” video has not yet broken 1,000 views after 7 days online. Compare that to the branding video for Caterer.com that I wrote about in July. It got almost 38,000 views on its first day.

The press release notes that “Fellows and Associates are the first UK recruitment firm in the Intellectual Property sector to experiment with viral video advertising.” But issuing a formal press release isn’t quite what viral marketing is all about, even if it has gotten some online mileage.

On the other hand, when you’re launching a new business into a competitive market, any publicity is good publicity. We wrote about it, didn’t we?

According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013.

As of this past February, emarketer.com ranked YouTube as the fifth-most popular website in the United States, eclipsed only by the likes of Google (who owns YouTube), Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. They also enrich recruiters by giving them a much deeper perspective on a candidate, in less time, than has ever been possible.

Video is particularly attractive to Gen Y — those young people between 20 and 29 who total about 70 million people. They are avid users of video and expect to be marketed to, taught, entertained, and recruited by video. Go to an Apple store and watch what young folks are doing: watching videos or movies or looking at pictures using the Internet. I rarely see any of them reading an article or an online newspaper.

They have been raised on television and those in the 25 to 34 age group watch more than 140 hours of it each quarter. The percentage of people watching videos and movies on the Internet has nearly doubled since 2006 and is now over 60% of all Internet users.

Some organizations are already leveraging the Internet and video to give them a competitive edge in reaching the millions of people who regularly use such sites as YouTube and Hulu.

Here is how they are doing it:

To showcase their company
They are creating career sites that are heavy with short videos featuring tours of the company, interviews with executives, candid chats with employees, and day-in-the-life scenarios of what people in particular positions do all day. They may include videos about the local area or videos that have been made by news agencies about the company. Examples of excellent career sites that contain video include those of KPMG, Deloitte, and Whirlpool. These have all won awards for excellence based on the success they have had in recruiting the talent they need using their career site. Companies such as RecruitTV and Thinktalk provide the expertise and service to help you produce these kinds of videos.

An interactive, video-based website is the core requirement for employment branding and may be the single best thing you can do to improve your success in attracting and hiring the people you want.

To post or distribute jobs
It is now possible to make a short video specifically describing a particular position, and then use that video instead of the usual written description. In London, three career magazines now provide this as an alternative to the written word. A Twitter-like application called 12Seconds allows you to make, yep, you got it, a 12-second video about a job and distribute it to a group of followers.

Monster Canada allows you to insert a streaming video into any job posting. And climber.com posts your video job description focused on Gen Y candidates to 45 different video sharing sites.

To hold career fairs
Virtual career fairs have been around for a while, mostly focused on college recruiting. CollegeGrad.com offers this type of virtual careers fair. For a broader audience CareerBuilder, Unisfair, and InXpo. A virtual career fair has much greater reach than a physical one and allows candidates to learn more about the positions you have and your organization. They are cost-effective ways to reach out to a broad geographical slice of people, quickly.

To do targeted marketing
Advanced and emerging uses of video include, for example, having your job video display when a person goes to a particular website or webpage. All clicks on your job display are tracked so that you can see who and how many show interest. This information will allow you to narrow down the sites where you display the ads, improve the content of the videos, and control costs.

Product marketers have used similar technology for a while and are now making it available for recruiting. As this technology matures, it will be possible to greatly reduce the number of unqualified applicants by limiting who actually sees a job ad.

To interview candidates
Interviewing candidates by streaming video is becoming more popular now that more than 60% of Americans have broadband access from their homes. With a simple webcam and a decent Internet connection using Skype, a recruiter or hiring manager or both together can interview a candidate from anywhere. This lowers costs and time to offer and provides a candidate and the hiring authorities an experience that is often as good as if not better than a face-to-face appearance.

Many companies offer video interviewing including Greenjobinterview.com, Clooks.com, and Hirevue.com.

For assessment and screening
A final way that video is being used is in candidate assessment. By creating scenarios and games that stimulate real-world experiences, recruiters can gain insight into how people would potentially react to them. These job simulations have been used by the U.S. Army and by retail stores intent on seeing how potential sales associates might respond to different customer problems. The U.S. State Department has recently started using a game to assess potential Foreign Service officers. It is called American Diplomat and recreates many of the scenes and issues a diplomat may encounter.

Another aspect of assessment is the self-assessment that candidates make when they actually see what it is like to do a particular job. Shaker Consulting does a good job of creating validated job previews that help candidates self-assess, as well as help recruiters and hiring managers.

Video is rapidly becoming core to recruiting success. Organizations that do not start to build video into every aspect of talent acquisition will find that they are at a competitive disadvantage, especially with college students and younger experienced hires. This is the age of video and we all need to learn to use it better.

Recording “Live” Video Interviews Provide Several Additional Benefits
Not all firms choose to record and keep their live video interviews, primarily due to technology limitations, cost, or privacy concerns (no candidate wants to find an embarrassing interview posted on YouTube). However, if you do record your interviews, there are several benefits that can accrue to your firm, including:

1. Documentation — both the questions and the answers can be documented so that you can legally demonstrate what happened (and what didn’t) should a hiring decision be challenged.
2. Later viewing — recording your interviews allows you to show it to others who could not be present during the original interview. This also gives you the capability to take a second look at the interview to see if you missed anything or to compare it back to back with other recordings of interviews that might have occurred out of sequence.
3. Increased consistency — recording interviews encourages managers to follow the script and their prescribed list of questions because they know that the tape can later be reviewed by HR. HR can also review multiple interviews of the same candidate in order to see if they are giving consistent answers. The same process can be used to determine if different interviewers are inadvertently repeating the same questions and boring the candidates.
4. Niche skill searching — video content search tools now exist that allow users to search vast video libraries for words being spoken in the video. Such tools would enable organizations to quickly identify candidates interviewed in the past who mentioned a unique skill that might not appear on a resume.
5. Passing along candidates — individuals who were not selected because a “superstar” candidate was in the candidate slate can be forwarded on to other hiring managers without having to bring the candidate back in.
6. More honesty — you may get a higher rate of honesty because the candidate knows that the interview was being taped (making it easier for the firm to confront their answers after talking to their references).
7. Improving the hiring process — if the newly hired employee prematurely quits or must be terminated, HR or the hiring manager can go back and review the interview in order to see if they missed any indication of a problem. This information can be used to improve interview training or the hiring process.

Potential Problems That You May Encounter
With any process, there are weaknesses and potential problems that you might encounter. Most in-person interviews are fraught with problems as well, so don’t be surprised if the same problems occur in video interviews also occur in traditional in-person interviews.

1. Candidate resistance — some candidates may not like the idea because they are afraid of technology, privacy issues, or because they’re just more comfortable with traditional in-person interviews. Cultural and religious influences might make some individuals averse to having their picture captured. Taken together, these factors could influence candidate performance.
2. Manager resistance — managers have in the past resisted the use of video interviews because they couldn’t find the available time to actually view the video, they disliked having to go to a video conferencing center, or they disliked having to use special equipment like headsets. New remote interviewing technologies remove most of those concerns because they can be done in their office, using their standard computer and telephone. Some managers may still resist because they simply prefer an in-person exchange. Another possible resistance factor is the possibility of having to hold interviews before work, after work, or during lunch.
3. Equipment issues — although it’s rare, modern web cam cameras can malfunction and the loss of an Internet connection or mobile phone service can prematurely interrupt an interview. The facial expressions of individuals with darker complexions might not come through as sharply as others if the lighting is weak.
4. Interviewing from their company facility — for currently employed individuals, it’s probably not appropriate for them to interview while at their current job site. As a result the interviews should be scheduled at a time so that they can interview from another facility or from home.
5. Background noise — office noises and interruptions from the manager’s location may degrade the interview experience. Distractions or what appears in the video background on the candidate’s end (especially if they are at home) might distract from the interview results.
6. Supplying the candidate with video equipment — a process must be developed to quickly provide the interview candidate with a web cam and instructions in how to operate it. Some cameras might not be returned.
7. Possible performance differential — it might be a mistake to automatically assume that remote interviews and in-person interviews produce the same results without at least some preliminary side-by-side testing to ensure that candidates perform the same no matter which approach they are interviewed under.
8. Discrimination issues — when using telephone interviews, physical and diversity characteristics are not visible to the interviewer. However, during both in-person and video interviews, the race, sex, age etc. of the candidate is visible. There is a small possibility that individuals from different diverse groups will appear to perform less well on video than they do in person. As a result, track performance to see if there is a problem.

Improving Traditional Interviews by Changing the “Where and When”
If you can’t adopt remote live video interviewing, the next best thing might be to change the process so that scheduling in-person interviews is easier on the candidate. Remember, the people you’re interviewing might be current or future customers, so taking their needs into account can only help strengthen the relationship. Some new scheduling and location approaches to consider include:

1. Interview at night — Obviously, employed people have more time after work than during the work day, and at night they don’t need to fib to managers about where they are. Often at night, candidates have more childcare options. In addition, hiring managers have fewer meetings and business conflicts, which means that interviews can be scheduled more easily and quickly. Night sessions tend to be more informal and they are less likely to be interrupted by phone calls and urgent business-issue interruptions. Yes, some managers will find night interviews inconvenient, but that inconvenience needs to be weighed with the fact that they will get more currently employed people (the most desirable and the ones that are most likely to be top performers) to interview. You can alleviate some of the resistance by scheduling one or two “interview nights” a month well in advance, while also letting them take the next morning off.
2. Interview on weekends — In addition to night interviews, you should also consider holding them on weekends. This is especially beneficial when a large number of your candidates are coming in from out of town. Offering an “interview Saturday” once a month during heavy hiring periods will not only get you more and better quality candidates; it also sends a message that you really care about applicants and their needs. Incidentally, this demonstration of caring might be extrapolated by the candidate to mean that you will also really care about them after their hired.
3. Rendezvous at conferences — If a large number of your candidates are from out of state or the country, you can reduce the number of “not interested” responses by interviewing at places where a large number of target candidates are likely to be anyway. Some likely common rendezvous events include national association meetings, industry trade fairs, certification classes, alumni events, and seminars. Because these events are generally held in another city, attendees have fewer family activities that conflict, and thus have more free time to talk after the formal event sessions end. Not only do top performers tend to be the ones who attend these events, but the setting itself is more informal, so it lends itself to less stressful interviews. If you’re clever, remember you can develop a pool of names and interview them at conferences before you actually need to fill a position. Once you assess them, it’s unlikely that their skill sets or experience will degrade before you actually have an opening for them.
4. Hold the interview before or after local professional meetings — almost every large city has a number of monthly meetings held by local chapters of various professional associations. If you hold your interviews right before or right after these events, you are likely to improve the number of individuals who can easily make themselves available. Incidentally, you are also likely to improve the quality of the candidates because the very best practitioners periodically attend these monthly meetings. Incidentally, because these are professional events, you give the potential candidate an honest excuse for where they were. You also have to make sure that the people being interviewed before or after the event are not seen entering the interview area.
5. Hold the interview close to where they live and work — Moving the interview location to a more convenient spot in a big city can also be helpful. In reverse, if your business is located in a smaller city or rural area, holding “satellite interviews” in major cities can increase the number of willing interviewees. In cities where most professionals live in the suburbs, consider holding at least preliminary interviews at a suburban hotel or even at the mall. Yes, it’s a little inconvenient for managers (although they might live in the suburbs also), but you’ll get much better attendance from employed people. Hold interviews at hotels or conference centers right before or right after local professional association or network events, which top candidates will likely be attending anyway.
6. “Interview Friday” — Some firms have set aside a designated time each week or month for interviewing in order to help solve the rampant unavailability of managers. Everyone knows that hiring is frequently stretched out over long periods of time (which can mean a loss of top-quality candidates) because managers are “too busy” to interview. This problem can be partially alleviated by setting aside a designated time when no meetings can be scheduled and all managers and interviewers must be available for interviews. I recommend a Monday or a Friday once or twice a month. It might seem harsh at first, but once managers get used to it, it speeds up the hiring process tremendously.
7. Make interview scheduling easy — Hiring takes a long time, primarily because of the difficulty in scheduling interviews. You can eliminate the number of callbacks and the inevitable phone tag required to find compatible times for interviews if you develop a Web-based scheduling system. These systems allow candidates to select and schedule their own interview times online, based on the open slots that managers make available.
8. Limit them to one day — One of the aspects of interviewing that frustrates candidates the most is the multiple callbacks for second, third, and even fourth rounds of interviews. By stretching out the time involved, you not only increase the number of lies employee candidates must tell, but you also risk losing candidates to companies that make decisions faster. Several health-care facilities I work with have instituted a “one day rule” which allows managers to interview as many times as they want as long as all interviews are completed on the same day. Not only does it force managers to be more decisive, but it also demonstrates to the candidate that your organization has the ability to act quickly (something top performers expect after they accept the job).
9. Reduce unnecessary interviews — There are a variety of tools and techniques that can help reduce the number of unnecessary interviews. Some of them include:

• Educating your managers about the dollar costs in salary and lost productivity of having so many employees in multiple interviews.
• Educating your managers about the negative consequences of additional interviews on the quality of hire. Slow hiring means losing top candidates to other firms, so that the more time that you take to make a decision actually decreases the quality of the person hired.
• Setting a target number of interviews (say three) and suggesting additional interviews are appropriate only in rare cases. You might also show them data that increasing the number of interviews doesn’t automatically increase the quality of the hire.
• Track the time to hire, reward managers for fast hiring, and let managers know when they consistently exceed the time limits.
• Consider conducting team interviews, so that all of the managers and interviewers can ask their questions during a single session.

Final Thoughts
The time is right for radical change in recruiting. The easiest option is to rethink where and when you schedule your traditional in-person interviews. Next, you need to consider trying an interview-from-anywhere approach. If you do, the travel cost savings, the reduced environmental impact, the shorter time-to-fill, and the increased quality of hire impacts should be powerful enough to overcome any potential concerns related to webcam interviews. The time to act is now.

Video conferencing is not only a practical nice-to-have capability, it is a necessity for any modern recruiting organization charged with recruiting truly top talent around the world. Remote video interviews provide numerous benefits. One of the most difficult to ignore in these tough economic times is the fact that they are dramatically cheaper.

When it comes to video-conference interviews, organizations still have two options: high quality fixed facility interviews, and lower quality flexible location interviews. The latter requires only that the candidate have access to a decent broadband Internet connection and a low-cost webcam. When purchased in bulk, a number of webcams are available at prices less than $15 per unit. Based on my experience, I predict that within a few years the “interview from anywhere” approach will become the standard practice for all but final hiring interviews.

Literally hundreds of firms have already begun using video interviews, and usage patterns are climbing at a significant pace. While first-movers adopting the approach were predominantly in the high-tech and communications industries, today usage crosses nearly every industry. Organizations like HP, Microsoft, Google, Tyco, Whirlpool, Rio Tinto, E*Trade, PepsiCo, UCLA, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and Broadcom are marquee customers of leading solution providers.

If you doubt that this approach will truly grab hold, just look back at the uphill battle that phone screens had to fight before they became the de facto standard first step in the assessment process.

The Business Case for Adopting the “Interview from Anywhere” Approach
Increasing the number of candidates available to interview and cutting the cost per hire are two major benefits of adopting the “interview from anywhere” approach. In tough economic times, the travel costs that result from flying in multiple candidates for interviews is a highly visible expense, especially when you consider that a majority of the people brought in will not result in a hire. For companies that recruit nationally or internationally, travel-related expenses can easily account for 50% of all recruiting costs.

The second and perhaps the most significant business benefit of remote interviewing is that it dramatically increases your candidate pool. For many organizations, tough economic times limit the talent pool dramatically to local candidates. However, since there are no travel costs associated with the “interview from anywhere” approach, firms with limited budgets will be able to consider top-quality candidates from outside the region. Ease of scheduling is another significant reason why the quality and the size of the talent pool increases; no longer will attending an interview be a major time suck. Even the volume of local candidates will likely increase as remote interviews will not require them to lie to their boss and disappear for a day.

Additional Advantages of “Interviewing From Anywhere”
There are many additional advantages associated with the interview-from-anywhere approach, so if you’re having reservations about the concept, here are some additional points to consider:

1. Interviewee and interviewer performance — because candidates are not rushed to get back to work or fatigued from hours of driving or airline travel, they are more likely to be relaxed and excited about the opportunity to present themselves. The net result is that the candidates perform more like their normal selves. In cases where the interviewers need to travel in order to ask questions during the interview, they too will be refreshed and better able to sell and excite the candidate.
2. Almost-live view — with broadband and the latest generation of webcams, the quality of the video is quite high. Unlike telephone interviews, facial expressions and body language can be readily seen, something that hiring managers rate as a “must-have” feature. Your ability to sell candidates that are in high demand may also be improved because they can effectively see and feel the excitement of the interviewing team.
3. Lower dropout rate because of multiple interviews — if your organization requires multiple interviews on different days, that multiplies the amount of travel and the scheduling difficulty associated with hiring an individual. Allowing the candidate to “interview from anywhere” and after work hours reduces the amount of scheduling and travel stress that routinely builds up over multiple interviews. Taken together, they reduce the likelihood that a currently employed candidate will drop out halfway through the process due to fatigue or their unavailability.
4. Faster time-to-fill — a great deal of the delay that plagues many organizations in making a hire can be associated with the time required for travel and to find an opportunity for the candidate to get away from work without raising suspicion. Requiring all of the interviewers to be in the same room also can delay the scheduling of interviews. If managers are willing to hold interviews at night, on weekends, or on holidays, they may be able to do all the interviews back to back. Holding the interviews closer together or even back to back also makes it easier for comparisons to be made between candidates. Taken together these factors may significantly shorten the time it takes to fill open positions. This can mean less lost revenue (as a result of the extended vacancies). Reducing the delays in making a hiring decision (prominent in traditional interviewing) might also mean that many of the quality candidates that are in high demand will not drop out of the process before it is concluded, because they were not forced by the time delays to accept other offers.
5. An improved candidate experience — most people in recruiting routinely say that they want to improve “the candidate experience,” but forcing candidates to lie to their boss and travel multiple times is not a positive experience. It may impact their willingness to accept an offer and what they tell their colleagues about your firm.
6. Ethical issues — for currently employed candidates, asking them to come in for an interview during work hours (on company time) can cause ethical concerns among the best candidates. In other cases it may force them to use sick days, personal days, or vacation time. They may also feel that they are letting their team down by being absent from work during the time that they are traveling and interviewing. Conducting interviews from home outside of work hours can help alleviate these pressures. Also, because there’s no travel time involved, the candidate doesn’t have to add the travel time to their excuse for not being at work.
7. Green concerns — using technology to reduce travel certainly reduces much of the carbon footprint and the environmental impact related to a job search. For environmentally conscious candidates, this may be a major selling point and an illustration that your company is focused on sustainability.
8. Family impacts — having to travel and be away from their family (with no guarantee that they’ll actually get the job) may discourage even unemployed individuals from applying.
9. Administrative costs — candidates who must physically visit the facility generate an expense because they must be cleared through security. There may also be scheduling issues and a cost associated with using conference rooms for the interview. These costs, although small, escalate as more individuals are physically brought to the facility.
10. Employer brand image — offering this new approach may garner media attention and positive comments on the Internet. Together they may encourage more individuals to apply. By showing respect both for the candidate’s time and the needs of their current firm, you may also build goodwill in your image.
11. Manager scheduling availability — using this approach, hiring managers can also interview from almost anywhere without having to be in the office. As a result, they are more likely to be able to easily find time for interviewing, further reducing a major barrier to speeding up time to fill.
12. It uses available technology — it’s important to realize that the technology involved has improved since the last time you may have contemplated video conferencing. If you use a vendor, there is generally no need to purchase additional software or web-related technology. In addition, because laptops, wireless networks, and mobile phones can generally be used, manager resistance decreases because they don’t need to use new hardware or technology.
13. More are comfortable with remote interaction — because many managers and candidates are now frequent users of online social and business networks, they are now generally more comfortable and experienced than in the past with interacting with individuals who are not in the same room.
14. Global capability — relatively cheap long-distance communications and the Internet allow this process to have a global capability.
15. A recruiting advantage — by being the first to offer this approach, your firm will develop a competitive advantage over other firms struggling to “offer something different.”
16. You can maintain the “physical meeting” option — no matter how many remote interviews you hold, you can still reserve the option to interview the candidate in person for the final interview.
17. Minimal price — even if you use a vendor, the price per interview will most likely not exceed $200. There are also free options if you have your own technology function.
18. Facility tour — in lieu of a physical walk around, virtual tours and team member introductions can still be provided to the candidate via a web video.
19. Vendor availability — most early adopters of the interview-from-anywhere approach are using a vendor to facilitate the process. While most support video from anywhere, a few focus on higher quality video experience and require the candidate to visit a studio. Some of the vendors to consider include: GreenJobInterview, iViioo, HireVue, and Candidate Quality Management.
20. Additional uses — in addition to using the interview from anywhere process for external hiring, it can also be used for internal transfers and vendor selection.

Next week: Part 2 will cover more advantages of live video interviews, some potential problems, and ways to improve your in-person interviews by changing the “where and when.”

Your focus needs to reach beyond your main message to maximize your return on investment. An essential step to achieve this will be to strategize your central theme and refine it for your audience with secondary themes that end up in the final product. In order to achieve this you need to engage in planning and discussions that should involve these questions.

1. Did you really layer your message effectively? This is one of the basics, yet it is rarely done well. It is imperative to layer messages to make the most of the very brief yet expensive frame of time you have for getting your message across. Most recruiting videos communicate a main theme and one secondary theme such as a diverse workforce but fall short in effectively getting across multiple messages. A strategic recruiting video will revolve around a central theme, and while it is delivered, put forth appreciable examples of secondary themes. Your organization may be a leader in wellness or internal career development or another area that you want to include to distinguish your secondary messages from the competition. Remember you want to give your target audience a significant reason to watch the video.
2. What websites is your recruiting video appropriate for? In order to engage your audience, you must understand where they frequent when looking for information on organizations. Are they more likely to see your video on your career site, at a job fair, third-party career site, a Facebook page, or on a Second Life Island?
3. Does your recruiting video come across scripted? Recruiting videos are typically centered around a storyboard to keep the message on point. Just because there is a script is no reason for the video to sound scripted. Leave a little leeway for spontaneity and creativity where possible to give the video genuine presence.
4. Did you market your video in your organization? Some organizations focus so hard on marketing to an external audience that they forget the obvious. Your internal audience may be some of your best evangelists spreading the word to others.
5. Did you “Tweet” about your video? Use Twitter to publicize your video and the websites where your video can be found. It takes very little effort to Tweet and drive traffic to the sites where the video is found.

Below is a Federal Reserve of Cleveland recruiting video I worked on last year with thunder::tech, as well as a Cisco recruiting video.

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

Innovative Recruiting Lessons Loosely Interpreted from Fast Company

The order shown below is my ranking of the ideas themselves. The Fast Company ranking is also shown.

1. Amazon #9 on the Fast Company list. Innovative idea: developing the Kindle ebook based on the idea that you should focus first on your customers’ needs when delivering products and services, not some preconceived idea of the way it should be. Application to recruiting: if you want to hire top people, first figure out how they find career opportunities, why they engage with a company to evaluate a specific opportunity, and why they select one job over another. This seems so obvious, yet when I look at how most companies write ads, screen candidates, keep them interested, and make offers, it’s great advice. Maybe you should be reading this on a Kindle.
2. Intel #6. Innovative idea: created teensy chips for targeted market applications. Application to recruiting: stop posting big, boring job ads on career sites. Instead, use Twitter and micro blogs targeted to narrower audiences, or push your jobs using aggregators to specific functional sites.
3. Team Obama #1. Innovative idea: empower your customers to participate more actively using the latest online technology. Application to recruiting: create talent communities. This is a search engine optimized talent hub grouped by job class that’s easier to find than an individual posting, and certainly more inviting. This micro site funnels candidates to a prospect pool to be nurtured using some CRM tool. To capture their attention, prospects can interact with recruiters and hiring managers without applying, just to get more information. What an idea! Imagine allowing customers just to look around and easily compare products before buying one? Now that’s a recruiting idea worthy of consideration.
4. Google #2. Innovative idea: continuous innovation. Application to recruiting: always improve what you’re doing, use consumer marketing concepts to reach people before the competition to establish a competitive advantage, and try stuff out even if it doesn’t work. Application to recruiting: just about everything you do now should be reconsidered. It fact, maybe have the recruiting and sourcing department report to marketing or be run by someone who is customer-focused?
5. Hulu #4. This is the TV-on-the-Internet company. Innovative idea: make a site that’s easy to use and fun, and easy to create by getting rivals to work together. In this case, Fox and NBC Universal. Application to recruiting: make it easy as possible to have prospects find your site and get engaged. As part of this, maybe recruiting should have its own dedicated IT staff. There are just too many rivals for the corporate IT department’s attention, so this way you could try more new things faster.
6. Apple #5. Innovative idea: offer great design, charge premium prices, don’t stop innovating, and be green. Application to recruiting: Make your jobs different than the competition; offer something unique; sell on career growth, not compensation; and be green.
7. Hewlett-Packard #12. Innovative idea: partner with non-related companies in order to offer your customers a unique and custom product experience. Application for recruiting: Partner with non-traditional organizations outside your company to attract a different type of prospect. For example, you could partner with Trump Casinos and invite recent MBA grads to a poker championship (it’s been done by Harrah’s) or develop some type of online competitive interactive game for your sales reps.
8. Cisco #5. Innovative idea: continue to act like a start-up. Application to recruiting: don’t be bureaucratic. This means HR, comp, legal, and the OFCCP shouldn’t be driving the design of your hiring processes. This doesn’t mean you’ll be out of compliance, it just means you won’t be boring.
9. Pure Digital Technologies #7. This is the company that makes the Flip video recorder. Innovative idea: make the product easy to use and offer customers a chance to interact with it by customizing it. Application to recruiting: rather than have prospects find a specific job, drive them to a talent hub of all comparable jobs. At this warm-up page let them interact with recruiters, find related jobs or have them design an “ideal job” by describing the work they enjoy the most and are great at. Then let your ATS bring forth what “best fits” for them. At the extreme, maybe let candidate’s create their “ideal job” and then repackage the jobs you have open to fit this.
10. Ideo #10. This is the top design company on the planet. Innovative idea: the company has grown from just designing products to transforming systems to designing for behavioral change. This means adapting the product or service to incorporate a benefit, like saving the planet or at least getting better gas mileage. Application for recruiting: stop thinking about just hiring people to fill jobs, instead, think about offering careers. You’ll need to understand the behavior criteria your prospects use when looking and comparing positions to start this process. To implement it, you’ll need to apply every one of the ideas mentioned above.

We’ll be discussing these and other innovative recruiting ideas on my Recruiter’s Wall blog. So join and participate. There’s only one criteria — be innovative!

As I review the other innovative ideas on the Fast Company list, there seems to be a number of common themes or principles that stand out as guidance. For one thing, all of these ideas are innovative. As obvious as that sounds, being innovative is hard, because you’re fighting the status quo.

So if you want to be innovative, expect lots of naysayers, a bit of ridicule, and some grief.

Start small. Being innovative doesn’t mean copying someone, it means being first, but copying can help to prove your point and establish your bona fides. Trying out lots of different ideas until one sticks also seems to be part of being innovative.

Continuous change and constant renewal seems to be another aspect of this.

What’s also interesting is that these companies have always been innovative; it’s part of their corporate DNA. So it’s not a surprise to see any of them on the list. This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem for recruiting, then. Can a corporate recruiting department housed in HR ever become risk-taking and innovative?

Perhaps not, but since all of these companies are doing fairly well from a competitive standpoint, being innovative certainly has a significant ROI that can be demonstrated. Maybe it will take some gutsy person to make an innovative pitch to the CEO to get the process started. This alone is pretty innovative, so show some guts and get going.

Claire Prager of the Cheesecake Factory describes the making of this $30,000, four-minute video developed and produced in two months last year as “pretty painless” — which is not how I’d describe trying to finish off its entire dinner-size Thai Chicken Pasta.

Job seekers are viewing the video at a rate of about 40,000 per year. Their eyes are peeled for an average of 3:48 minutes. (The average for similar videos is 2:33.)

Prager, senior manager, talent selection, was responsible for the overall execution of the video, a task she says MadDash’s good work made easier. The video, aimed particularly at the passive job seeker, was posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, AHRE.org, and HCareers. The Cheesecake Factory shows it again during new-hire orientation (which, we report with jealousy, involves a meal at the Cheesecake Factory), as well as at college career fairs and other job fairs, and on the company’s careers site.

The Cheesecake Factory selected an Area Director, Senior Vice President of Kitchen Operations, Executive Kitchen Manager, and General Manager to play key roles in telling the story. While developing the video, it selected the following elements to include:

1. Who is The Cheesecake Factory?
2. Quality
3. Our People and Our Culture
4. Technology and Innovation.

The uber-consistent restaurant chain also owns the Grand Lux Cafe and now RockSugar.

Our friends at Fistful of Talent just launched the pilot of their new FOTv show this morning.

There’s a ton of noise in the recruiting blogosphere these days, and Fistful is on a very short list of the blogs that have become my daily must-reads. Like everything they do, the pilot is fun and opinionated, and the production values set the bar high for everyone else in our industry who works with video.

I spoke with FOT Editor Kris Dunn today to learn more about the thinking behind the project and what we should expect in the future, and here’s what he told me:

• Kris is a big sports fan, and the format for the show was inspired by ESPN’s PTI.
• Moving forward, the plan is to produce the show weekly, and future shows will be much shorter — closer to five minutes in length than 20.
• While the pilot was shot with Kris, Jessica Lee, and Josh Letourneau, future shows will feature a revolving cast of FOT contributors.

FOTv – Show #1 from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

As I have previously written, video has become king. A recent report by Gartner predicts that 25% of all content will be delivered by audio or video by 2013. Those who want to gain mindshare and generate interest in their career opportunities or organization need to use some kind of interactive media — video, instant messaging, polls — anything that attracts and engages Gen Y. The most useful and powerful interactive tools include social networks — particularly Facebook if you are targeting college students — and even LinkedIn and Twitter — as well as video sites such as Youtube, Hulu, and AOLvideo.

Laura Short at Stout University of Wisconsin has created an interesting slideshow for college students giving them reasons to use LinkedIn and encouraging them to — because it is where you are. In this presentation she encourages students to develop a personal video and post it as a LinkedIn video. She also talks about the importance of a video presence.

As video is becoming the dominant form of communication, recruiters who stick with text-based career sites and even text-oriented social networks will find themselves in trouble if they are looking for younger candidates.

There are many services that produce videos and I have listed a cross-section of them in previous articles. But it is very hard to find any company doing something different enough that it may change the way we interact and communicate with candidates. All the social networks I am aware of are based on reading and writing. You have to create a written profile and list and bullet your experiences, education, and so forth. Recommendations are written. Resumes are written. Any interactivity is through asynchronous conversations (e.g. email), a smattering of instant messaging, and sometimes the ability to post messages, pictures, and videos and make comments.

There is, however, one company that has gotten my attention. It is U.S.-based and aimed squarely at college students.

It is called ThinkTalk Networks and, while it has not yet revolutionized the recruiting or social networking industries, it is thinking and doing things differently. ThinkTalk provides video-based career TV for college students. It allows organizations to make videos that are professionally produced that talk about their careers, culture, environment, and people. None of this is revolutionary.

What is different is that ThinkTalk is also an online video-based career community. On ThinkTalk students can ask questions of upcoming guests, chat with human resource professionals, and interact with students who have similar career interests using video. It has also developed a a TV broadcast network that includes over 175 colleges, and is growing. These colleges play a new 30-minute program that ThinkTalk provides each week to help it build their online audience.

What excites me is envisioning ThinkTalk becoming a social network where communication takes place with video used in a variety of synchronous and asynchronous ways. I can easily picture candidates and recruiters creating and uploading video content using webcams, professional studios, or cameras in laptops or cell phones. Gen Y will surely be attracted to that kind of site, and I imagine other age groups, even Baby Boomers, will too. After all, for most of us it’s a lot easier to talk than write.

Corporations and individual recruiters could produce their own videos. And, nicely produced videos become the equivalent of the musical videos singers produce and link nicely to the way young people think and act. Many of ThinkTalk’s videos have already been picked up by other sites such as AOL Video which shows their viral marketing potential. It seems more and more that any video posted to one site will end up on many.

But, ThinkTalk does more than simply showcase an organization: it also provides career guidance and inspiration through other videos they produce. In this interview with actor Emile Hirsch, students ask him how he got started and how he picks the roles he plays. The students become part of the show, get involved, and ask what they want to know. This becomes an educational experience as well as entertainment and information. I also see recruiting messages being integrated into product marketing and overall branding messages. Smart phones, like the iPhone for example, with their ability to connect to higher speed 3G networks become tools for watching, making, and spreading short videos. Already there is a video equivalent of Twitter called 12seconds which allows you to post — yes, you got it — 12 seconds of video.

Getting the word out about your organization, career opportunities, and culture will become more and more video-based over the next few years. I believe that social networks will quickly adapt and evolve into video platforms as it becomes ever more painless to make, edit, and post short video segments. It has taken growth in bandwidth and the development of higher-speed cell networks to power this revolution, but the time has come. ThinkTalk Networks won’t be the last of these innovative video-based services.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

Greg Rokos, founder of FutureResume.com and its affiliate, GreenJobInterview.com, and Darryn Severyn, founder and CEO of Interactive Applicant, will try to convince recruiters that video resumes and video interviews are effective ways to screen candidates without the cost or carbon expenditure of bringing them onsite.

FutureResume.com is where candidates post a video and standard resume, the latter searchable by the usual means. Then, instead of bringing in a candidate for a first meeting, they can be interviewed online.

Interactive Applicant takes a little different tack, pre-screening applicants via an automated series of questions that candidates can be required to answer via video, audio, text, or any combination. Then the recruiter can review the candidate’s presentation skills before bringing them in.

SnapTalent’s CEO and founder Sumon Sadhu will describe how his company’s online advertising service helps recruiters and hiring managers source better candidates. It’s similar to a keyword marketing campaign but places targeted ads on content sites, rather than on search results pages.

Jeff Stewart, Urgent Career’s serial entrepreneur founder, will show how linguistic technology can be used to match sales candidates to jobs. That’s different than voice analysis, though there are some similarities. Just how it works and how effective it really is are questions that Stewart will be answering next week.

If the Spring show is any guide, these founders will get questions as tough — maybe tougher, since the audience knows recruiting — as any venture capitalist will ask. Hardly a shy bunch, the Spring ERE audience point-blank asked that crop of company founders and executives how they intended to make money and why an employer should do business with them.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder of Standout Jobs and one of the presenters at the first Startup Forum, told us that since the show he’s learned more about the HR industry than he thought possible. “The panel was a good place for us to start getting feedback, ” he told us recently.

His company provides easy-to-use software for smaller companies to build their own career sites.

Since the spring, Standout Jobs has grown to over 200 customers. While still a free service, that will soon change. An upgrade to the service is also planned. And, Yoskovitz says, now that the intensive testing and learning period is mostly behind the company, promotion of Standout Jobs is the next major effort.

Path 101, a content-intensive community networking site, is still in alpha, which, though growing in depth, is about where it was last Spring. But then, it’s an ambitious effort, which founder Charlie O’Donnell, at the forum, described as a site for job-seekers to research their career options before they apply for jobs. The site itself says it is a place where “Job candidates can figure out what “people like me” are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research.”

At Jobscore, CEO and founder Dan Arkind told us that the last six months have been a learning and testing period. “Not much to report,” he said at first. After a little prodding he said the resume-sharing site has been making inroads into the smaller employers the company is targeting. Especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jobscore is headquartered.

The company was developed to help smaller businesses source better candidates by sharing resumes and easily post jobs to one or multiple sites. Companies can choose to pay to gain access to the resumes or earn free access by sharing resumes. So far, Arkind said, 96 percent of the customers share.

He has intentionally kept Jobscore low-key. Soon, he said, it will be making a bigger splash. When? “When it’s ready,” Arkind said.

Finally, there’s VisualCV, a site where jobseekers build an online presentation of their experience, background, skills, and more using text, multimedia, and even work samples. It’s an adjunct to the standard resume, not a replacement, at least not yet. Though COO Doug Meadows told us, “What we want to do everyday is wake up and replace the resume.”

We didn’t get to talk to our presenter co-founder Clint Heiden, but Meadows said the company has been “going gangbusters.” VisualCV has been the most visible of all our startups. Cheezhead, alone, has featured the company no less than four times since the Startup Forum in early April. It has a new CEO.  It’s also added new features, most recently a VisualCV Marketplace.

There are now 800 companies signed up with VisualCV, meaning they accepting the VisualCV and have their own posted on the site. Participation in the program is still free; the company is generating revenue from private labelling VisualCV to business groups, associations, alumni organizations and others. The China Business Network uses it to help its thousands of members better connect. Search firm Heidrick and Struggles uses it for its elite group of candidates. A few firms are also using the site to search for candidates, Meadows said, paying a findersfee when a VisualCV member is hired.

What will the next six months bring for these startups and for the four new companies presenting next week? That’s an even tougher question today than it was last Spring because of the economic conditions in the U.S. and around the world. We don’t know how they will adjust, but you can be sure that’s a question our latest crop of presenters will be asked.

Richter teamed up with Yahoo! HotJobs (profile) creative director David Lam and created “Runway” which features Liz Claiborne’s chief creative officer and mentor from TV show Project Runway, Tim Gunn.

Lam approached several clients late last year about creating recruiting videos as part of a Yahoo! HotJobs pilot program, and Richter jumped at the chance. She also came up with the video’s main concept and the basic script. Richter said that the video’s production costs would typically average $20,000 to $25,000; she received a discount for being part of the pilot program.

Besides revealing the company’s creative side, Richter also wanted to show prospective applicants that not everyone who works in the fashion industry looks like Kate Moss and that a typical day at Liz doesn’t begin with a cry of “gird your loins” as it did when Miranda Priestly arrived at the office in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

The company has been opening new retail stores and creating real jobs for real people; many of its 10,000 jobs are in typical support functions like IT, accounting, and marketing.

“We wanted to show our brands and a representation of the wide variety of careers you can have here at Liz Claiborne,” says Richter.

The video features actual employees talking about their jobs and career paths at Liz, but the highlight is a 30-second clip of a mock fashion show where employees listen to a motivational speech by Gunn and then bound down the runway.

So far, the video is delivering the goods. It’s loaded on the Liz Claiborne website and advertised on Yahoo! HotJobs and StyleCareers. As of mid-July, Richter said the video had received about 6,000 to 7,000 views on the Liz Claiborne website and another 6,000 views on HotJobs. At a job fair held just last week, Richter said the longest applicant lines were at the Liz booth and Gucci. But, besides energizing applicants, the video has also motivated the company’s employees.

“Despite the difficult economic times, our company is poised for growth, so the video has really been a motivational tool that has energized our existing employees as well as applicants,” said Richter.