technology
Video: The Secret Weapon
of Communications
CHANGE HOW YOU PRESENT YOUR MESSAGE AND UP YOUR RECRUITMENT
GAME BY USING CORPORATE VIDEO
By Jess Campbell
Imagine it’s the early 1990s. You’re an HR professional at a shiny
new dot-com who’s been tasked with the enormous challenge
of hiring several people, like, yesterday. But they can’t be chair-fillers;
every person you bring on must be The Right Person.
Being the innovator that you are, you present the idea of creat-ing
a corporate video for recruitment. Being a shiny new dot-com,
the C-level loves it and throws lots of money at you to get the
video produced.
You decide that the best people to tell your company’s story are
the people who founded it: the C-suite. They jump in with their
I-can-do-anything perspective and tell the camera exactly what
they think good candidates want to hear: an embellishment here,
a downplay there, and not particularly accurate. At all.
The video does what it was intended to do. You get a moun-tain
of applications and, in a few weeks, candidates have turned
into employees.
Except a few months later, some of those good hires start trick-ling
away, leaving for your competitors. That trickle becomes a
steady stream, then a raging river called mass exodus. Your em-ployees
are leaving their positions and all you can do is wonder
what happened.
The C-suite – the folks who smiled and talked at the camera
and got their teeth whitened for their moment in the spotlight –
are looking at you and trying to figure out where you went wrong.
Well, take heart in knowing that it’s truly not your fault.
It’s theirs.
Photo courtesy of Tribe Pictures
HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ SEPTEMBER 2017 ❚ 31