Your employees are an untapped source of critical feedback. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be very valuable. They are working day-to-day with your customers, listening to their gripes, solving their problems, often times without bringing management into the fold. The insights your employees hold are valuable to your organization in ways you might not have realized, much like your customer feedback.
Utilizing early feedback from the source is the most surefire way to improve a process. This is a proven technique that a lot of businesses could learn from, and one that we leverage in every project we do here at ReviewTrackers.
Importance of Recruiting
For a VC-funded startup, we have been recruiting in high-gear for the past few years. Finding and retaining top talent is a must for our company to maintain momentum.
We recently published our first recruiting video. We thought it would be a great way to show prospective employees what we’re all about, and what we stand for.
The beautiful thing about being radically transparent is there isn’t anything we have to gussy up. Being raw and real is the a part of the artistry. We knew we wanted to keep the subject on the employees of the company, the real people we work with and the people the job applicant will be working with every day. There is no point in faking it. You should be focusing on how to improve your culture.
The process took 6 weeks from idea to publishing. We wanted to be as transparent as possible with the entire process so our employees, the stars of the video, could do the social selling.
Brainstorm
We knew what we wanted to achieve with our video: more job applications. Getting job applications isn’t as easy as it sounds. You don’t just want to pepper every hiring board in the world with an open job, you want to have a targeted strategy, driven by results.
Our results were going to be tracked by the number of visits to a particular page on our website. We had a pretty general idea of what it would take to convince people to apply. After all, we had already gone through the hiring process ourselves and could easily identify what we liked about it or not.
Script
Writing a script isn’t hard. Its when you’ve written the thirteenth draft of the script and you start to realize you’re repeating yourself that you start to stress about it.
Our script was central to the responses of the employees. We knew it was going to be difficult for them to open up to their coworkers about their real experiences, we planned on letting the camera run for a long time before and after each take. This decision was made was the approval of the editor, who ended up having to watch thousands of hours of awkward silences and second-takes.
Storyboard
Some of the best videos I’ve seen are the ones that don’t look storyboarded. They look like the director and producer just picked up a camera one day and started filming, and beautifully framed shots came out. In reality, every shot was carefully planned and even drawn out in freehand with a pencil and paper. This helped up outline how much we needed to shoot, where we needed to put the lights and cameras, and how to frame each shot.
For our shoot, we knew we wanted to show a little bit of the city of Chicago, since it’s such an important aspect of our company culture. Hence the opening shots in our final video.
Scheduling
Because of the nature of our script, we needed to coordinate 30 people’s calendars. This was much too complicated for Google, so we turned to a spreadsheet that allowed to find the amount of time we needed with each interviewee, which we were able to sync with an open slot on their calendar and get the shots we needed.
Shooting
On the day of the shoot, everyone required to be on screen was placed in standby mode, in case we had someone drop out or an actual work issue pulled them away. This helped keep everyone on their toes, and helped immensely when we had a few people who needed to rearrange their schedules last minute.
Editing
For the editing process, we first had to make sure everyone was approved by interviewee, which meant private screenings. Once approved, we had a company-wide viewing to collect feedback and improve before launch. After launch, we asked every employee to blast it out on their social media channels to maximize impact.
Results
At the time this was written, our video “Why Are You Here?” has garnered over 775 views in just 20 days. All by itself, it has brought in over 200 new views to our Careers page. If you think about it, that is a 25% conversion rate. I’d consider that a huge success.
