The 2008 CareerXroads Mystery Job Seeker study (available here), systematically compared the jobseeker experience on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For websites.  Now 18% percent of these companies are using video is some way to engage jobseekers.  Here is an excerpt for the study:

“Special features that companies provide to enhance their job application experience. This year 18% of the companies are using video to illustrate “a day in the life� of an employee. In our 2007 Fortune 500 study, only 13% of the companies provided this feature. Video usage in corporate sites has dramatically increased and it offers enormous advantages (when done well) in providing realistic expectations, realistic previews, virtual job shadowing, enhanced job descriptions, richer case studies, simulations and even improving the face validity of assessments.�

Even some of these “bestâ€� companies have room for improvement.  Here’s part of the study’s conclusion.

“Corporate recruiters need to periodically apply to their own firm. Links break, videos don’t always work as well as planned and tools that seem to be time-saving are anything but when put into practice. Staffing professionals need to re-examine their corporate job pages as if they were seeing themselves in a mirror. ‘Why would I work for this firm’ and ‘why would I stay’ are questions that need to be answered when reviewing corporate job pages.�

The published findings didn’t specify some of the issues with the video on these sites.  From my experience some the issues that sometimes arise are:

·         Video does not play: Video is only formatted with Real or QuickTime codecs to play on your computer, these formats are available a lot less than Windows Media Video or Flash.

·         Video automatically plays: Users prefer to click the play button; some sites intrude the experience with video that automatically plays.

·         Video blocked by pop blocker: Some video players that are created by the web developer or video producers are blocked by pop-up blockers.  Pop up video players can be programmed to be considered safe by blockers or better yet embed the video on the career page.

·         Video takes too long to load.  Make sure your video is hosted by a tier 1 CDN (content delivery network); video should load instantly upon clicking play or buffer for less than 3 seconds.

·         Video style: Content should resonate with your target audience, scripted video and pitches can be a turn off.

Avoiding some of these pitfalls still doesn’t ensure that the enormous advantages the report mentioned about adding video to your website will be achieved.  I believe it’s important to add video that addresses your company’s particular recruitment goals and challenges.  Do you need an Employer Branding video or Job Branding video profile or both?  Videos of job profiles, employee stories and testimonials can provide a glimpse of what it’s like to work at the company.  Gen Y in particular, is advertising averse and they want to see authentic examples of what the job and lifestyle will really be like.  I think this is a best practice for all demographics. 

Companies that do this well will indeed enjoy enormous advantages differentiating themselves from there competitor and attract A-level talent.