The online recruiting world is a noisy place. One search on Indeed for “developer” yields more than 145,000 job postings — all of which look remarkably similar. On the flip side, great people are being constantly bombarded with messages, thanks to LinkedIn Recruiter.
How does a company stand out from the sea of bullet points and template messages? By creating and sharing remarkable content.
Here are three ways that companies are using creative content to attract top talent.
Sharing Employee Stories on Instagram
Over 40 million photos per day are uploaded to Instagram, the social photo sharing social network. Corporations like Starbucks, Marriott, and Yelp are actively sharing their employee stories to engage with passive candidates on Instagram.
What are the most effective photos to share?
- A look inside your company office
- Photos of your employees
- Pictures of team events and celebrations
- Puppy pictures. Obviously.
Above all, have fun! The goal of social media is to be authentic, and using a tool like Instagram is a powerful way to humanize your employer brand.
Going Viral on YouTube
People upload over 48 hours of video to YouTube every minute. That’s a lot of cat videos. Companies are joining the fun by making their own recruiting videos that range from the informative to the absurd.
Recruiting videos are becoming a rite of passage for fast growing companies, and necessarily so. It is a powerful way to bring your recruiting efforts to life. Here are three of the world’s most popular recruiting videos (in order of absurdity).
Google is still ruler of all things recruiting, with over 2,300,00 views of its Inside Look at Google video.
Twitter’s cheesy “ The Future is You” video boasts over 1 million views on YouTube in less than 4 months.
Kixeye’s NSFW recruiting video went viral with a foul-mouthed tirade to the tune of 544,000 views.
And its not just fun and games. According to CareerBuilder, job postings with video receive 12 percent more views, and a 34 percent increase in applications. What if you don’t have the time nor budget to make a highly polished recruiting video? That’s fine.
You don’t need to go viral on YouTube to utilize video as an effective way to recruit talent. Consider a video job description as utilized by Deloitte for its Analytics Insight Director role. Over 3,000 views without any special effects (or cats).
Educating With Engineering Blogs
Smart people want to work with smart people. And smart people love to learn new things. The best way to communicate learning is through detailed blog posts.
This has led to the advent of the “engineering blog” which many technology companies are embracing. Not your standard blog, engineering blogs are focused on topics that nerds will love. They live separately from the company blog as they are focused on very niche subjects for a very niche audience.
AirBnB shares engineering employee stories, open source code, and how they solve complicated problems on their http://nerds.airbnb.com/ engineering blog.
Etsy, the cute online marketplace for homemade and vintage goods, shares interesting statistics and engineering challenges on the Code as Craft Blog.
Engineering blogs aren’t just about the code. Companies are sharing more than just words on a website — contributing open source code to the developer community that truly adds value.
The advantage? Good Karma, and attracting great engineers.
Is It Worth It?
Creating remarkable content is not easy. It takes time, money, and creativity.
Though you can quantify page views, the real question is whether an effective content strategy leads to happy new hires. As with all things branding, it’s a long term game that may take months (or years) to pay off. It is also very hard to fake.
But in a world of constant messages and a sea of soulless job ads, companies need to do all they can to stand out from the noise and engage with top talent.