How to make a good recruiting film?

The Standard for a Good Recruitment Video

A recruitment video is effective when, by the end, a specific person can envision themselves in a specific job. Operating a forklift in the aisle between the shelves, working the sorting line for incoming mail, on the early shift at six. Everything else—the camera work, editing, music, and drone footage flying over the company grounds—either contributes to that one image or distracts from it.

This leads to four criteria you can use to evaluate any film—including your own. Real employees in front of the camera. Only one job per film. Keep the awkward lines. A runtime that keeps the target audience engaged until the end credits.

Many videos on career sites fall short on the second point. They show the corporate headquarters, the executive board, the mission statement on the wall, and—just before the logo—a brief glimpse of the facility where the position is open. Anyone looking for a job in that very facility has long since clicked away.

Real employees in front of the camera

An actor holds the handheld scanner differently than someone who picks it up from the charging station every morning. The grip is wrong, the gaze is directed at the camera instead of the shelf, and the steps between the pallets are too short. Applicants from the industry notice this in the very first shot.

That takes preparation. People are on shift that day, the warehouse continues to operate, and everyone who films in an aisle with forklift traffic receives a safety briefing beforehand. At GLX Global Logistic Services, six warehouse employees appeared on camera on a single day of filming, while operations were ongoing.

If you're filming your own staff, ask them first if they're okay with it. Some won't want to, and that's fine; an employee who stands in front of the camera just because the boss told them to looks like an actor who doesn't know their lines.

The effort pays off in one area that no casting process can replace. Whoever appears in the film will also be there in the hall later, when the new colleague arrives for their first day.

Only one job per movie

A film that’s supposed to showcase the entire company ends up showing no workplace at all. GLX operates eight locations in Germany with about 250 employees and is always looking for people to work in its warehouses. That’s why the film is about the warehouse and nothing else.

The idea originated during a creative workshop at GLX, at a table with the executive team, site management, and HR. Afterward, concept developer Danny Wünsch developed four concepts, and GLX chose the fourth one. The email about it had the subject line “Concept 4, The Fast and the Furious.”

The finished Recruiting Video for GLX Global Logistic Services It lasts 30 seconds. A warehouse worker imagines himself in a race: a forklift instead of a sports car, an aisle between shelves instead of a boulevard, a red cloth as the starting signal. He wins, cheers, and a coworker wakes him up.

The final shot shows the team standing together and raising a glass to a typical workday on the factory floor. A job applicant who operates a forklift will recognize his own aisle in these 30 seconds, along with the coworkers who are toasting at the end.

Uncomfortable lines remain in the film

The most credible line in a recruitment video is the one that a marketing department would have cut out during editing. The Recruiting Video for Allianz It begins with an employee who says, “Who wants to work for an insurance company?” She goes on to say that she would have preferred to become a lawyer, and that she’s glad she stayed because she was able to grow professionally.

The sentence comes first because it articulates what the target audience thinks when they hear the word “insurance.” Anyone who had that objection in mind will listen after hearing it.

About 540 people work at the Logistics Service Center on the Allianz Campus in Berlin, processing over 140,000 transactions every day; that’s where the video was filmed. The employees speak off the cuff, in their own words, about why they stay. One of them started out as an operating room nurse and now leads a team.

Others describe the route the mail takes through the building, early shifts and flexible scheduling, or how technicians turned a hobby into a career. At the end, everyone claps as the last box arrives.

A script provides the phrases that are always found in job postings anyway: exciting tasks, a dynamic environment, flat hierarchies. Without a script, someone in front of the camera searches for the right words, and the target audience listens to them do so.

Length and Playback

The right length depends on the channel where the target audience watches the video. GLX had realized that image posts on social media were no longer effective for them and that video conveys emotion in ways that photos don’t. A warehouse worker scrolling through their feed during a break will give a clip a few seconds before swiping past it.

That's why the GLX video is 30 seconds long. GLX launched the campaign in March; in three months, they received 400 applications.

The situation is different for the careers page and at trade shows. People who click there are already interested in the company and are willing to watch a longer video if someone from their own department is speaking in it. At Allianz, two days of filming resulted in a whole series of videos.

One day of filming yields enough footage for more than one video. If you take this into account during planning, you can get both the clip for the feed and the extended version for the career page from the same days of filming.

What a recruitment video Can't Do

A movie can’t fix a job posting, an application form that requires you to upload your resume and then enter it again in text fields, or a lack of response that drags on for weeks. Anyone who wants to apply after watching the movie but gets stuck on the form will give up, and the movie will take the blame at the next meeting.

Production costs aren’t a factor either. A cell phone video showing the shift supervisor standing in the factory and explaining who he’s looking for, when the shift starts, and what the pay is beats out an expensive film with actors and drone footage. If you don’t have any ideas beyond the company logo, you’re better off with the cell phone video.

Ultimately, it’s the budget that determines where the line is drawn between a cell phone video and a professional production. The three tiers we work with are clearly listed on our page about the Recruitment Film Cost.

One Recruitment Film Production It makes sense when you have a role that’s been open for months and a vision of who should fill it. During the workshop, that vision gives rise to an idea; that idea becomes a shooting schedule; and from the day of shooting emerges a film that this one person will recognize.

Checkpoints for Your Own Film

Place your current video next to the four criteria. Time how many seconds it takes until you see a workspace where the open position is located. Count the number of people in the frame who are actually doing that job.

Look for the one line that sparked debate during the approval process. If it’s there and made the final cut, the film has a chance. If it never existed, then presumably no one spoke off the script.

And show it to the person you want to hire before it’s released—a forklift operator, a mailroom clerk, someone on the early shift. If that person says afterward that the video accurately captures what the job is like, you’ve got a good recruitment video.