Putting the Hiring Manager in the Hot Seat

Much has been said about how it is a “candidate’s market” today because of all the choices at a candidate’s disposal and the hiring sprees anticipated in 2020. However, hiring managers and recruiters have more power and tools at their disposal than they might think.

A “candidate’s market” makes hiring managers and recruiters dig deep to find ways to better attract remarkable talent to their organizations. Paying attention to their brand and how they go-to-market with candidates will pay immense dividends in their talent acquisition efforts. One opportunity that isn’t being taken advantage of to the degree that it should is the use of video-based open role summaries for a hiring manager to inform and attract the top candidates.

According to research by Talent Board, video job descriptions were the #1 recruiting technology investment for employers in 2019. Despite this, using video content to promote job openings remains a novelty approach to many hiring managers due to various addressable reasons and concerns — time constraints, skepticism, privacy, and so on.

The fact remains: hiring managers know best what they need for their team and company. It’s within their power to sell the potential candidate market on the company, role, and opportunity. Video is the most efficient way to get those points across to a candidate, as well as recruiters who are tasked with finding the right candidates. As video becomes more embedded in recruiting and talent attraction processes, many benefits come under consideration.

Builds Trust and Transparency

Recruiting is a competitive, cutthroat industry that is, at times, unrelentingly harsh on all sides. Hiring managers can decide they will re-scope, hold, or completely scrape a role midway through a candidate search process. Recruiters can ghost on candidate screens or just never be heard from again. Candidates can also ghost on their phone calls or be non-committal in the job search process. Even with complete buy-in, there still could be disconnect between a hiring manager and a recruiter on what the desired candidate profile looks like for a given role.

Most of these problems are human-driven and unavoidable. However, there are ways to reduce the likelihood of ghosting and increase consensus and buy-in. One way is through, you guessed it, video.

Having a hiring manager record themselves discussing the type of candidate they’re looking for an open role in an exclusive setting will increase transparency with recruiters as well as build trust that the hiring manager is all-in on this position. Think of it as a forcing mechanism for a hiring manager to stick to their guns regarding an open position and the profile of candidate they think will be successful in said role.

Heightens Recruiter Engagement

Despite all of the technology that has been infused into talent acquisition since the function formed in the mid-century, recruiting as a profession is still going strong. This is due to several factors, many of which are inherently HUMAN-centric. At the very crux of the matter, hiring is an instinctual game. That final offer decision to a candidate may be based on a bunch of data gathered throughout the interview process, but the action is inherently based on the opinion of the hiring manager. Is this candidate going to fit with our team? Do they have the intangibles necessary to succeed in this role? Are they truly motivated by our company’s mission? For this reason, recruiters will always exist in some form so they can support the hiring managers as they make these instinctual hiring decisions.

As such, recruiter engagement on particular job openings is super important. Headhunters are incentivized by the commission potential, but they are also motivated to service clients who show that they mean business and are serious in working together to find remarkable talent. Incorporating a video from the hiring manager that is transparent and clear has shown to increase the activation of the job posting, especially driven by recruiters:

• Recruiting agencies report 800% more engagement with job postings that have video embedded
• Job listings with videos get 34% more applications than listings without
• Video-job posting platform Ongig’s new study shows candidates spend on average 55 seconds viewing a text-only ads, whereas job seekers spend 5 minutes and 23 seconds watching a video advertisement (when they choose to play the ad).

Increases Fit and Quality of Candidates

With increased clarity around a specific role comes precision and accuracy of the applicants therein. Video is shared 20X more often than any other type of content on LinkedIn. But while reach is important, it is more about the clarity that candidates get from video that results in higher quality applications. Much of the time, job postings on LinkedIn result in a lot of noise — candidates who do not fit the job description for a multitude of reasons. With video, there is another layer of clarity regarding the role and the intangibles of the company culture that one cannot easily get from reading about it online.

Hiring managers have the obligation to be an effective recruiter of talent to their organizations in order to achieve the business and team outcomes they seek. There are a multitude of recruiting and networking strategies they can use to achieve these outcomes, but they must make sure to utilize tools for a society that is captured by visual and audio media. That is they should put themselves out there on video to capture the best talent in the market.

About Careerlist

Careerlist is on a mission to make recruiting better for everyone.

Careerlist is building the first modern talent platform, pairing the industry’s top recruiters with technology that transforms the job search experience for candidates. The company provides software to recruiters to eliminate busy work and help them become more efficient. Meanwhile for talent, Careerlist opens the doors to thousands of hiring managers around the world directly for the vetted candidates they represent through their software.

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