Recruitment Videos, What’s Holding You Back? | @MarkHopkinsREC on The #SocialRecruiting Show

Mark Hopkins is an Engineering Recruiter

More specifically, he’s the Director of Thomas Lee Recruitment – but that didn’t stop him from cracking a joke when we asked him how he got into recruiting in the first place.

“I once murdered a person and they told me to go into recruitment.”

On a more serious note, Mark, like many others, just kind of fell into recruiting.

“I worked for a breakdown company in the UK whose jobs were moved to India 13 years ago. One of the guys I was talking to, his car had broken down and I was talking to him about renewing his membership. He was a recruiter and we were chatting about how my job is moving in to India and he said, ‘come chat with me,’ and I did, and about 10 minutes later, I got offered a job in recruitment.”

Using video wasn’t always a part of Mark’s process. He noticed that at first, any time he tried to do something different, he was “squashed by the internal process.” After starting his own business, he decided to do all of the things he was previously not allowed to do, like better blogs, more pictures, and better videos. He noted that “the first few recruitment videos were strange,” but more people were doing video – so he took a year to really sit down and learn video. Now, he’s able to take video seriously and release a video every week on different topics in recruitment.

“It’s been a process to get where I’ve gotten and it’s still evolving.”

And through that process, Mark has definitely learned a thing or two about what makes a bad employer brand video.

There are a lot of examples of bad employer brand & recruitment videos. Sometimes people are just standing there talking about jobs. Other times, there aren’t even people in the video – there are just graphics. A bad recruitment video can also focus too much on the “me me me” without including any reasons why a candidate should work for the company.

Biggest mistake in recruitment videos? “Corporate masturbation videos.”

😳 Yes, you read that right – according to Mark, the worst kinds of employer brand videos are corporate masturbation videos. These are the recruitment videos that are professionally filmed and include only content about how great the company is.

Luckily, Mark had a few quick tips for creating a good employer brand video:

1. No crying
2. Make sure the content is valuable
3. With every video, try to evolve everything
4. Constantly watch videos to see what you can change for the next one
5. And most importantly, no corporate masturbation

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Mark share more: