In this episode, Marcus Edwardes speaks with Maury Hanigan, CEO at SparcStart, an innovative recruiting platform which uses video, social media, and mobile capabilities to differentiate jobs and overall make recruiting much more productive.

Maury is a recognized industry expert and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Economist, ABC World News, amongst many other prestigious media outlets. She was also named on HR Tech’s list of the 100 Most Influential Talent Acquisition Thought Leaders and Top 30 Influential Women Leaders.

Listen in as Maury unpacks her best strategies for using video to build a powerful employer brand, alongside a stronger candidate pipeline in the outreach and recruiting process. By incorporating video into the application process, a company can attract not only more applicants, but better-quality applicants.

Maury also addresses common roadblocks to standardizing the use of short videos in an organization’s approach to job advertising, including video-phobia, privacy issues, and deciding on how to structure one’s message in videos directed at candidates.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• [02:18] The current state of the job advertisement market
• [05:40] Making your job advertisement stand out
• [10:14] Why show candidates video of the hiring manager in the application process
• [15:00] Overcome video-phobia and roadblocks to incorporating video
• [21:24] Tailoring your video’s message to your candidate
• [28:27] Potential security issues with video
• [30:09] Why videos fail
• [33:46] The kind of story candidates want to hear in videos
• [38:23] The benefits of using the SparcStart platform to host your videos

Key quotes:

• “When a recruiter includes a hiring manager in their outreach, their response rate is eight times what it is when you only include a job description.”
• “We don’t advertise products by telling consumers what they must have in order to purchase our product—we tell them what benefit the product gives them. And yet, in recruitment marketing, people are still doing laundry lists of requirements of what you must have to be considered for the role; then they wonder why people aren’t attracted to their roles.”
• “The video that the candidates are most interested in seeing is of the hiring manager: They want to meet their boss.”
• “The biggest challenge is to have to have employer brand and TA leaders understand that the content has to be what the candidate wants to hear rather than what the company wants to say.”