Talent Acquisition Promo

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During a key project, Experian’s Scottsdale office needed to hire a large number of people in a short period of time. A good deal of those people would be contributing to my initiatives so I had extra motivation to help this process along! 😉

Because I have a keen interest in filmmaking, I offered to put together a promo video that would help attract talent. While I don’t have exact metrics, we considered the video to be very successful as we were able to hire about 20 great people in 3-4 months. First, let’s take a look at the video and then I’ll dive into how I put it together.

The video is essentially an advertisement which means it needed to be as enticing as possible. But it’s also selling a significant personal commitment (employer/employee relationship) so needed to be as accurate as possible. The last thing we want is to spend time and money bringing people in the door only to have them leave after three months because they felt the experience was misrepresented.

When it comes to talent acquisition there are a few key things that must be addressed:

• Mission & Meaning: How will I be helping others?
• Corporate Culture: What values are actually practiced?
• Team: Who will I be working with?
• Compensation: How will I be rewarded?

With this list in hand, I wanted to touch on as many of these points as possible but without using any scripts. Scripted video work is incredibly difficult to do well and usually requires professional actors. On the other hand, sitting down and interviewing someone almost always produces natural and believable dialogue because people are usually telling the truth! 😄

I asked a handful of people ahead of time if they’d be willing to sit down with me for 15 minutes and talk about work. I’d conducted plenty of interviews before as part of my UX research efforts and had experience setting up mics for quality audio. (Pro tip: high-quality audio is more important in video production than high-quality video.) I brought in a few lights, scouted out some key physical spaces, and then set up and conducted interviews with my a7S, tripod, and zoom field recorder.

Interviews were very open-ended but I made sure to get each person to touch on 2-3 of the topics above. Other than that, I had no plan for the narrative.

I also spent time getting b-roll to provide visual interest and tell some of the office story that may not come through with words alone. For example, a candidate may hear that lunch and snacks are provided but when you see people eating together you get a much better picture of what that means. Also, how many monitors do people have and how big are they? What do the desk and individual workspace configurations look like? What are the conference rooms like? Etc.? Can a candidate imagine themselves in this environment? This question is easier to answer when pictures are provided.

In post-production I had a methodical process to convert raw footage into a story candidates would be interested in hearing.

1. Select the background music first - something that won’t interfere too much with dialogue and doesn’t have too much or the wrong kind of emotion.
2. Review each interview carefully and topically tag sound bites.
3. Select the best sound bites in a round-robin fashion so the same story is told by different people.
4. Find the best opening and closing statements.
5. Assemble everything on the timeline and add b-roll for context.

Some of the key sound bites I choose to keep are:

Mission & Meaning

“…at my core, I like that I’m doing something noble every day…”

Corporate Culture

“…it’s very easy to get travel approved…”

Team

“…we acquire really good talent, we have a lot of talented people here in the office…”

Compensation

“…they definitely have good benenfits, the 401k matching, the bonus…”

It’s actually quite easy to build a powerful narrative when you cut away the noise and get right down to what candidates are most interested in. Although the source footage is long gone, for kicks I pulled up the Davinci Resolve project so I could screenshot it below. 😝

Crafting a good video narrative is a fantastic mix of creativity and technical precision. Like UX, many micro-decisions add up to an overall experience that users will judge. I felt this project required authentic expressions from the people new hires would eventually work with.

The promo was attached to all Scottsdale-based job listings and was very successful based on the response we received (higher than typical). Because people are the superpower of organizations, it was worth investing extra time and effort to find the best talent available. The promo video was also passed around frequently and played at internal meetings which boosted the pride and morale of existing employees. An important lesson to take away here is—treat your people well and they’ll be your most powerful voice!