Anatomy Of A Terrible Recruiting Video
January 30th, 2012 by Brian Baumley
Twitter Does It Right (By Showing How To Do It Wrong)
Recruiting videos – most of the big companies have them. I remember sitting through some bad ones, courtesy of Circuit City and east coast theme park Great Adventure in my high school days. Neither of these videos were the reason I’d applied for the job and they had a neutral to negative impact in terms of exciting me about the possibilities of a career with those companies. In fact, they instantly sprang to mind when Twitter debuted its terrible-on-purpose new recruiting video today.
I could write a blog post about all the things not to do when making a recruiting video. But it’s easier to just reference the above video from Twitter. Because I’m pretty sure they capture them all:
- Uninspiring music that is meant to sound inspiring
- Clunky graphics with unnecessary effects
- Grandiose promises (e.g. Friends for life)
- Acting (It takes a lot of skill to pull off an acting job depicting an average day at the company without looking fake/staged.)
- Terrible (and again unnecessary) sound effects
- Shaky camera work and bad edit choices
- Featuring employees that don’t show well on video
- Anything chanted with faux-enthusiasm by a team of people (“Join the flock today!”)
The list could go on but those are the big offenders.
Twitter wins with this video because, even with all the cheese, they still get their point across. And because so many people can relate to terrible corporate video, this little gem is now circulating pretty widely. Though, for the record, while Dick Costolo gets cool points for authorizing and participating in the video, he doesn’t come off as a particularly inspiring or pleasant CEO. I realize that perhaps they were going for a certain vibe as a joke, but Costolo doesn’t pull it off well. Which goes back to a key lesson: if you’re using employees in your video, play to their strengths and learn to recognize when something doesn’t work.
We can save another post for a more lengthy discussion of what TO do in a recruiting video. In the meantime, here are some things to keep in mind to help ensure that your recruiting video can actually recruit for you:
- As mentioned above, if you’re going to use employees, don’t push them beyond comfort boundaries – it will show.
- You’ll likely work with an outside video producer to put your video together. Ask for recent work to better understand if they’ll be able to pull off your vision. For some video shops, a recruiting video means including many of those terrible techniques noted above as standard practice. Have an idea of what you’ll get before you get it.
- Be honest. Don’t try to be something you’re not in your video. People will notice.
Why not end with a recruiting video done right. We posted this one back in August, but it remains one of my favorites I’ve seen. Courtesy of Facebook.
