If you work in recruitment marketing, you already know about the popularity and power of video. In the near future, video content will make up over 80% of all internet traffic. When comparing the effectiveness of video against text, viewers retain 95% of a video’s message, compared to 10% when reading text, making video a far more effective tool at engaging and informing candidates.
Many are already adopting video as part of recruitment marketing campaigns, whether that be as an employer branding exercise, to advertise specific job roles, or to publicise the opening of new locations and facilities.
However, when it comes to recruitment, despite its many benefits, traditional flat video has some disadvantages that hamper its effectiveness as a recruitment tool. Nearly all of these drawbacks can be remedied by switching to an interactive video format.
1. Reducing Candidate Drop-off Rates
While video is great for effectively communicating messages, candidates have a very short attention span when it comes to watching them. By the time your video reaches the two-minute mark, you will have lost 60% of your audience.
While two minutes is enough time to instill simple ideas and concepts into your viewers, more complicated subjects, like a full job description, will take longer using traditional flat video. This is because you need to go into detail about things such as qualifications and experience needed, the role’s responsibilities and remuneration packages, to name a few.
Interactive elements can increase candidate engagement
However, by using interactive video, you can fit much more information into a shorter run time. By giving candidates optional interactive features, candidates can choose to access information about the aspects of your role that they are interested in, without forcing all your potential candidates to sit through this information.
For example, candidates that can’t drive might be interested in seeing an interactive map showing public transport links to your office, whilst those candidates that can drive don’t need this information. So, interactive video can increase your candidate engagement, by keeping your video’s runtime shorter, and allowing candidates to self-select the information they need.
2. Increasing Engagement With Interactive Features
Your video can lose candidates due to the passivity of the experience. While candidates might retain 95% of a video message, in order to do this, they need to make it to the end of the video. Although keeping your video short can help with this, adding interactive elements also bolsters the chances of viewers making it to the end of your video.
Interactive elements can increase engagement and conversion rates
A recent video marketing campaign by Buffalo Wild Wings, which included an interactive ‘Foodoo’ doll that viewers could interact with at several points in the video, resulted in a massive total of 46 million interactions. Even more astounding, the video reported a 93.4% completion rate, which is almost unheard of in video marketing.
So, as well as keeping your videos shorter to improve engagement, the interactive features themselves actually increase engagement by providing viewers with an interactive experience.
3. Being a Trend Chaser vs A Trend Setter
Whilst flat video is incredibly popular, the problem is that everyone is doing it. Cisco estimate that within the year, there will be over 1 million minutes of video content traffic exchanged per second. With this amount of video content being produced, it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate your video content from that of your competitors. If everyone is making video content, how do you get candidates to take notice of your job postings?
Making the switch to interactive video will give you an edge over the competition
However, using interactive video can help you distinguish yourself from the competition. As well as having all the engagement and retention advantages described earlier, the novelty of the interactive format has yet to wear off from over-exposure.
Interactive video is still a fairly new medium, so the fact that you’ve commissioned a unique interactive video for your job posting will be enough of a draw to hook candidates in. This way, you can gain an edge over your competition, which is important in today’s candidate-competitive market.
So how do I get an Interactive Video?
Enhance Media have been making award-winning interactive recruitment videos for a variety of clients, such as the John Lewis Partnership, BT & Eni. If you would like to know more about HireCastTM Interactive Recruitment Video, visit www.hirecast.co.uk or contact us here