The best employers in the world make employer branding a key initiative. They recognize that reputation impacts the quality of applicants you receive for your open positions and your ability to retain the workers you do have.
This branding effort is where employee testimonial videos come into the picture. These are a relatable tool for communicating your culture and employer value proposition (EVP) to potential employees. Keep reading to learn why video testimonials make such a big impact and about some of the best practices for creating those videos.
The Importance of Employee Testimonials
Employees overwhelmingly cite reputation as a key factor in their decision to apply for a job. That should be enough motivation to work proactively to build and promote your positive employer brand. Your ability to promote your company to talented job seekers will eventually impact your team and their productivity.
People want to work for companies that treat employees well, compensate them fairly, offer engaging work, and provide growth opportunities. They also want to know that employers have values that are in line with their own. These things are so important to workers that they will conduct intensive research before filling out that application.
It’s easy to see why engaging testimonials from your employees are so important.
When your employees publish positive reviews, they give applicants a trustworthy testimonial about your company. That’s something candidates will give more credence than anything they hear from an executive or a recruiter.
There’s also the shareability factor. While written reviews are great, the truth is that video gets more engagement and is more likely to be shared across multiple platforms to a wider audience.
Employee Video Best Practices
If you want candidates to be impressed by the video testimonials you produce, you must adopt some best practices. These will allow you to help your team members make videos that are informative and engaging.
Answer the Right Questions
Content is key. The best testimonial videos should answer the questions that most prospective employees have:
- What are the company’s values?
- Is the company culture a good fit?
- Why do other people choose to work here?
- Who will I be working with?
- What does this company do?
That’s not to say that every testimonial video should answer each of these questions, but they should cover some of them. Here are some ideas of stories that employees can incorporate into their videos:
- How the company allowed them to grow
- The authenticity of the company’s branding and external reputation
- The story of the company’s founding and mission
- Unique aspects about the work environment that contribute to a positive culture
- Examples of the company’s vision leading to great customer experiences
While employee videos should be honest and organic, it can be helpful to give them a bit of guidance via some broad topic ideas.
Choosing the Best Testimonial Video Format
Too many employee review videos are high on production value but low on meaningful content. They also tend to lack structure. This approach can lead to videos that don’t make an emotional connection.
Before employees determine the type of video they want to create, they must understand that they need to incorporate the following elements:
- An engaging story
- Meaningful details about the job and company
- Authentic emotion
- A structure that is easy to follow
With that in mind, there are three key formats for the best employee testimonial videos:
Telling a Story
There are many things that an employee can tell others about their experiences with a short, engaging story. For example, an employee could share a story about a personal struggle they faced, the support they received from their manager, and how the available benefits helped them.
Stories are valuable because they connect emotionally, engage the viewer, and provide context that makes what you want to communicate about your company believable. To help employees tell great stories, encourage them to focus on a single event that is meaningful to them and one or two positive facts to communicate.
Questions and Answers
Q and A videos are an ideal format for answering the most common questions that prospective employees have. There are a few different ways to approach this.
The first is to film a video using an interview structure. This approach can provide a great perspective of a single employee’s experiences. You can even produce several of these with employees in different roles.
Another option is to lead a video off with a single question then allow your team member to answer that question in great detail. This structure works very well if you want to provide job seekers with an in-depth view of your company mission or culture from a source they trust.
Finally, you can ask several employees to provide a short but compelling answer to a question that most job seekers might ask about the company. Then, you can edit these together to create a powerful testimonial video.
Employee Journey
Is there an opportunity for growth and advancement? This query is one of the most common questions that job prospects have, and you can answer that with an employee journey video. This type of testimonial video allows a successful team member to describe their experiences working for you and their path to their current position.
Helping Employees Create Amazing Testimonials
Here are some quick tips to get the best out of employee testimonial videos for social media and other platforms:
- Give helpful guidelines but don’t use scripts
- Encourage employees to rehearse
- Provide questions that they can answer to help them get started
- Keep things short
- Get employees talking about something that makes them happy to set the mood
Remember that the best videos aren’t heavy with expensive-looking production values. In fact, the most engaging, authentic videos are often those that your employees can produce on their own.
