Produce Videos to Recruit & Attract Financial Services Talent
The below abstract was prepared in anticipation for the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit - happening next Tuesday at Bloomberg in NYC. If interested, there are still a few seats left. Join my workshop!
In a candidate-driven labor market, the quest for attracting new talent to define the future of your organization is growing ever more competitive and challenging. According to DHI hiring indicators, working positions in the Financial Services industry remain unfilled for an average of 45.6 days (this is the second longest across industries, with Health Services being the first at 49.3 days). Meanwhile, the Financial Activities industry (encompassing both Finance and Insurance) has the lowest unemployment rate, proving that there is a considerable amount of need across organizations and a very small applicant pool, let alone talent pipeline.
In order to attract talent, organizations should consider marketing their workplace, or employment brand, to prospective talent as much as they market their consumer brand to customers. Content marketing through social media has become a primary tactic within a strong employment brand strategy, with video being the best medium for communicating who you are as an employer. In fact, according to Forrester Research’s James McQuivey, one minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. When compared to other mediums such as written word or photographs, nothing has the ability to capture the feeling, culture and relate-ability of a workplace like video.
When it comes to finding better ways to connect and relate to the talent you are seeking, best practice is to allow your own employees to do the talking. LinkedIn reports that content shared by company employees is 3X more trustworthy than content shared by a brand or CEO; company review sites like Glassdoor are a perfect example. In other words, when building a content marketing strategy, rather than reporting from the executive level, plan on speaking from the middle of the organization – I like to say, speak from the heart. Speaking from the heart can occur in a number of ways. One way is by producing videos that document your employees and allow them to represent their role and the working lifestyle of your company. Another way is to expand your social media outreach strategy by training employees to become brand ambassadors. Through this, you’ll find that your proudest employees will enthusiastically help you in this endeavor.
Lastly, it’s important for your content to be thoughtful and compelling. How do you go about uncovering the unique stories in an organization that are worth telling? It might require some internal research, but a great place to start is by identifying the most hard-to-fill positions and then highlighting the best and brightest working within in them.
