I’m real impressed by Amazon’s Beyond the Badge set of recruiting videos utilizing different female team members. A few reasons:

  • Video length — Each recruitment video is around one minute or less– this is good. Ongig’s data shows that candidates usually trail off after about 45 to 60 seconds.
  • Diversity — The videos are all of women, which makes a statement about who they’re trying to attract. However, within the videos they don’t stuff female diversity down your throats (just a few women mention what it’s like to be a woman at Amazon, which I think is effective).
  • Good Marketing =”Alienate the Non-Prospect” — The recruitment videos use one of my favorite marketing concepts which is to alienate the non-prospect. Examples of this in the videos include lines like:

“You either fit here, or you don’t.”

 

“If you’re not ok with a little bit of chaos, you’re not going to like it.”

 

“…a lot of pressure on you”

 

“You can innovate as long as there’s a business justification for it.”

 

“I’ve seen cases where we got a call at 10pm (with an issue) and we were ready by the time the sun came up.”

Using recruiting videos to show off the truth about your culture is just common sense.

The only tip I’d give Amazon is to use these videos direclty within the job descriptions (e.g. The Lisa Boucher (software engineer) video should be on every software engineer job description page Amazon has). Otherwise, a lot of Amazon candidates searching for jobs will never see one of these great videos.

About the Author — Rob is the Co-founder & CEO of Ongig, the first-ever Employer Branding SaaS that allows employers to attract the best talent in the world faster (including by letting candidates and employers make comments to each other in an open dialogue!). Yelp, Autodesk, GoDaddy, Auction.com and BMC Software are among the early customers of the Ongig SaaS.

by in Recruiting Videos