We built Vocal Video to help people like us (marketers and entrepreneurs) easily create and share customer video testimonials. But after launching our video testimonial app, we noticed that tons of our clients were using our platform to create employee testimonials to improve their recruitment marketing and talent acquisition strategies. In fact, employee videos quickly became our largest use case, empowering teams at companies like ADP, LivePerson, Cloudflare, Honeywell, and thousands more.
This started to make a lot of sense for us. There’s a big overlap between the headaches of creating a testimonial video about a product or service, and creating an employee testimonial video. Headaches like scheduling conflicts, complicated editing processes, and massive investments of time and money to make just one video. These are all headaches Vocal Video solves.
And, of course, the things that make product video testimonials so effective — such as capturing genuine, believable stories from a credible source — are also what make employee testimonials so effective in your recruiting strategy. When prospective candidates hear about your company culture straight from your employees' mouths, they will better understand what it’s like to work at your company. The very authenticity of these videos helps you attract the right candidates and encourage them to apply.
In this post, we:
Sign up for your free Vocal Video account, or read on to find out where it all started.
Our Founding Story: A Better Way to Create Video Content
When we started developing Vocal Video, the founding team had already worked together for over a decade — most recently on a product called TechValidate, which was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2015. TechValidate helped companies collect static case studies, statistical evidence, and quotes to use in their marketing. It was a great tool for supporting our clients’ value props with social proof.
But, when we did our own marketing, we realized that video testimonials were a far more convincing way to explain our product’s unique features and benefits. If we could get more video testimonials, we could achieve a greater level of connection, engagement, and brand understanding.
But every method we had for collecting videos came with significant challenges and downsides.
- Coordinating video shoots by ourselves put us in charge but demanded a lot of time and energy from everyone involved. When we tried to record spontaneously at conferences instead, the clips we captured with our iPhones were barely usable.
- Working with our in-house video team at SurveyMonkey got us access to pro-level equipment and creative talent, but we could never get the volume of video content we needed. Their expertise was always in demand across the company. When Lauren asked for 12 new videos in one quarter, she basically got laughed at.
- Hiring external contractors to shoot and edit the video got us a great end result. But the process was expensive (we once spent $25k for just one video, completely burning through our marketing budget) and not flexible enough for our needs.
After experiencing those frustrations, we built Vocal Video. And it was a success. Here are just a few examples of the different types of businesses that use Vocal Video:
- Clari, a revenue software company, collects Vocal Video product testimonials to share in marketing and sales channels. The social proof increases velocity of prospects through their marketing funnel on LinkedIn and their website. They love how quickly their marketing team can use the content they get with our asynchronous video process.
- UC Berkeley Skydeck, a venture capital fund, sources founder stories from all over the world to help potential investment partners imagine themselves working with the company too. They love how the diverse voices of their existing partners build trust and differentiate them from their competitors.
- Career Village, a non-profit that democratizes careers advice, uses beneficiary testimonials to show the impact their organization is making. They love the quality of the videos they get, and how easy it is to share them on social media.
But, as we mentioned above, we quickly learned a good number of our clients were using Vocal Video to create and share employee video testimonials. This meant embedding employee testimonials on their landing pages (like their About Us page or Careers pages), sharing video testimonials on social media, and including testimonials in job descriptions.
The employee video testimonials were helping these companies connect with their ideal candidates and helping companies stand out to prospective hires.
You can sign up for a free Vocal Video account and make your first employee testimonial within a day. Or you can keep reading to learn more about specific features that are perfect for creating employee testimonials.
6 Vocal Video Features Perfect for Employee Testimonials
Vocal Video started as a tool to get client video testimonials, but we’ve grown it into a scalable solution that benefits every organization that wants to supplement its marketing strategy with user-generated content. So, when companies want to use employee-generated video to show the diverse range of voices in their company and attract a wider range of customers and candidates, we’ve got every feature they need to put their plan into action.
1. Asynchronous Video Collection to Remove Scheduling Conflicts
When we worked with SurveyMonkey, our customers never had to schedule a meeting to ask someone to fill out a survey — they just sent a link and gathered responses. With Vocal Video, we wanted to build a similar friction-free experience to encourage more people to create the valuable video responses we wanted — without meetings, flights, studios, and all-day shoots.
That’s why we built Vocal Video around an asynchronous video collector interface. Your team sets the questions they want people to answer and generates a collector link to share with your potential respondents. They record their response in 5-10 minutes, and it arrives in your library as a ready-to-share video.
Collecting videos like this populates your video library fast and helps keep your content fresh. Instead of building your marketing campaign on a single testimonial you painstakingly recorded and edited a year ago, asynchronous video can ensure a steady supply of new content and build a culture that values feedback from employees from across your company.
What’s more, our Vocal Video Pro and Enterprise plans now include our revolutionary Kiosk Mode — another option for recording testimonials on a single device at conferences and live events.
2. Cloud-Based Video Library to Manage Testimonial Responses
When your team starts to get more testimonials, you also need an easy way to manage the videos so you can use them in all the places where they can be effective. We’ve developed the Vocal Video library to be the perfect place to store responses from multiple video collectors, track their performance, and help your team discuss the best clips to use next.
Our dashboard includes key stats and analytics on your videos, and we’ve made it easy to sort, find, and highlight the best videos. Plus, our Pro and Enterprise users get an API key to integrate Vocal Video with all the platforms where your team collaborates — including Slack and Google Docs.
3. Authentic and Shareable Videos to Increase ROI
Your marketing department could spend thousands on a blockbuster video ad, but you can never be sure it’ll look at home on social media. Your recruitment team could film your CEO as they describe the company culture, but there’s no guarantee it’ll come across as genuine on your website. In contrast, a down-to-earth, employee-centered Vocal Video testimonial is much more usable, because it makes a connection with the viewer that just can’t be faked.
What’s more, every video you produce is hosted ad-free on a public Vocal Video page, which means it can be discovered by more people.
Read about the SEO benefits of video testimonials.
In recruitment, Vocal Video is the perfect solution for adding employee testimonials and success stories to your job ads on sites where it’s not possible to embed a video. Simply add the URL of the public Vocal Video page, and your potential applicants will be able to click through to the testimonial on a page that matches your company’s branding.
Our client Sunrun links to their employee Geo’s testimonial in their ad for a new energy consultant.
When they follow the link, potential candidates can hear Geo’s answers to these prompts:
- Describe a day in the life of retail sales at Sunrun.
- What gets you excited to come in to work each day?
- What stands out about the culture at Sunrun?
The enthusiasm is infectious, making a far more memorable impression than a list of buzzwords in a job ad. That’s why there’s no better way to promote your company as a great place to work than by foregrounding your best asset: your existing employees.
4. Automatic Editing to Flatten the Video Production Learning Curve
It can take hours to edit video on a platform like DaVinci, Creative Cloud, or Final Cut, and professionals spend years mastering these tools. In contrast, Vocal Video edits the stories your customers or employees send automatically.
Our automatic editing process was born when we noticed that all the most watchable videos on Twitter shared some core features. Now, we stitch the responses together and add some more great elements to help your video catch and hold the viewers’ attention — great for recruiters who need to attract new talent at the top of the funnel:
- Easy-to-read interstitial slides showing the questions someone is responding to
- Catchy music from our library of royalty-free tracks
- AI-generated subtitles
- Eye-catching animated transitions between slides
- Trust-building attribution information to introduce the speaker.
Video branding is also a cornerstone of the automatic editing process. Your company’s visual identity is crucial in helping customers and applicants recognize and trust the content you produce — especially if they’re juggling multiple applications. So, our automatic editing process creates an opening slide with your logo and company name, works with the brand colors you set in your collector, and adds your logo to the top corner of the video.
You can see all our automatic editing features in action in these employee testimonials from LivePerson.
5. Dynamic Testimonial Galleries to Display More Social Proof
Once you’ve published a video testimonial, you can share it on its own, as a video testimonial card with an intriguing featured quote, or in a beautiful gallery of employee stories.
Vocal Video includes five different gallery formats — from walls of love to carousels — each with a transparent background to blend seamlessly with your website. You can always find a gallery layout that matches your intent, the layout of the page, and the number of testimonials you have to share.
What’s more, if you publish testimonials as a gallery (like our client RCA does on their careers page), the embedded gallery will update automatically whenever you add a new testimonial in your dashboard. There’s no need to take down the existing gallery and upload a new version, it’s all done for you as soon as you save.
Test out all our interactive gallery formats in the Vocal Video Help Center.
When it’s this easy to collect, manage, publish, and update testimonials from one dashboard, the entire process can stay in the hands of the same HR or marketing team. There’s no better way to keep the momentum behind your testimonial collection process and help your content keep pace with the most promising candidates.
6. Accessible Pricing for Everyone
In a context where talent acquisition teams are having their budgets and their headcount reduced, the investment of time, energy, and cash associated with traditionally produced testimonial videos is increasingly difficult to justify.
Vocal Video has a pricing plan to suit every team. We offer better value than other employee-generated video platforms like Seenit and VideoPeel, and we serve small businesses better than bells-and-whistles HR platforms like the iCIMS video studio.
We even have a free forever plan so you can get to know the features of Vocal Video with no two-week time limit and no credit card required.
See for yourself! Set up your Vocal Video account today and build your first employee testimonial collector for free.
How to Use Vocal Video to Make Employee Testimonials
Our video collector solution is just as easy for marketing and recruitment teams to set up as it is for respondents to use.
Step 1: Build a Video Collector
Great testimonials start with great prompts — proven questions and queries that guide the respondent to explain why they’re passionate about their work, but which don’t feel like leading questions.
If you don’t know where to start, check out our tried-and-tested testimonial templates — including Employee Testimonial Videos, Executive Story Videos, and Company Culture Videos — that we designed specifically for employee-generated video.
Each template comes with a series of questions that you can customize with your company’s name. You can also add to or replace the questions in every collector you build.
Next, write or record a short welcome message to let your employees know how much you value their time.
Then, add your logo and brand colors to the brand kit in your dashboard, so they can be automatically applied to your video collector and to the clips it collects.
Finally, generate a URL to send the collector to the respondent. All they have to do is click the link to open the collector, and they can record without downloading any software or setting up a Vocal Video account.
This process solved some of the biggest pain points we faced when we tried to make video testimonials.
- No more in-person meetings. We could record testimonials from employees with Vocal Video even if they lived on the other side of the world.
- No more interview prep. We could send the collector to the people we wanted to hear from, give them a few tips on positioning their cameras, and we were ready to go.
- No more painstaking design. Our brand elements were added without a second thought.
- No more eye-watering budget meetings. Vocal Video saved thousands of dollars compared to the cost of hiring a videographer, sound engineer, and editor, and you could complete the process in less time than it took to write a blog post.
When all the major hurdles of collecting testimonials were out of the way, we moved on to transforming the way that people edited testimonial videos, showing that this invaluable form of social proof belonged in every business’ marketing tool belt.
Step 2: Get Automatically Edited Testimonials Straight to Your Library
Every video your employees send to you arrives in your Vocal Video library branded, compiled, and ready to share. If you want to make any final tweaks, we’ve built our editing interface around self-explanatory drag-and-drop/slider tools that anyone can use.
For example, you can use our editing suite to trim or reorder your clips, edit the subtitles, or change the whole personality of the video by toggling between different video themes and soundtracks.
Put simply, when video editing is so quick and easy, video creation is back in the hands of the people who know the story they want to tell — the marketers and recruiters with the deepest understanding of what makes their company an exciting place to be.
Step 3: Publish Testimonials Everywhere, Effortlessly
The final step in the Vocal Video process is the tools that get the stories to the audience. You can share Vocal Video testimonials…
- On social media news feeds including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with one-click.
- On short-form video apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Reels by downloading a video file to upload to your chosen platform.
- On your website’s homepage, careers page, or blog with automatically generated embed codes for single videos and galleries.
- On third-party career sites by including the link to the video or gallery’s public Vocal Video page.
With Vocal Video, you can easily post and repurpose these trust-building testimonials to get in front of more qualified applicants in all the places they’re searching for jobs. There’s no better way to build recognition and make people excited by the thought of working with you.
BONUS: Use Vocal Video for Candidate Screening
Recruiters love the ways that video testimonials enhance their job posts, but you can also use Vocal Video to make the next step in the hiring process more efficient. It’s as simple as using a Vocal Video collector to set up an asynchronous interview template and screen applicants quickly and efficiently.
Video screening is an easy way to weed out the people who aren’t truly interested in the job, reduce the number of unqualified applicants you interview, and get an early idea of how a candidate would fit into your team. You don’t need a full-service recruitment platform or a dedicated video interview service to add this effective step to your hiring process — just use our Video Job Interviews template to get started.
Read more about choosing the best video interviewing software for your business.
Vocal Video: The (Unexpectedly) Perfect Solution for Employee Video Testimonials
Vocal Video got us to a place where we could finally use fresh, relatable product testimonials in all the places where they can make a difference. Now, our software does the same for all types of employee testimonials.
Today, Vocal Video’s top features include:
- A user-friendly video collector set up for asynchronous video interviews, which eliminates the need to coordinate shoots and empowers more employees to share their stories.
- More than 45 industry-specific video templates to get started quickly and encourage even more responses.
- Automatic video creation with subtitles, branding, animated transitions, and soundtracks that make videos eye-catching and memorable, with no extra effort from you.
- An intuitive and comprehensive suite of tools to make video editing easy, even for beginners.
- Easy-to-create (and update) video galleries including walls of love and video carousels.
- Built-in, ad-free video hosting and responsive embedded video players.
- Affordable pricing to make video collection a permanent part of our marketing strategy — whatever the size of your budget.
Recruiters are responsible for stories about your company, your employees, and the people who want to join your team. Help their stories to have an impact by introducing the most effective, most memorable video testimonials to your recruitment marketing.
Vocal Video makes the awareness-raising and conversion-boosting benefits of video accessible to everyone. Sign up for a free Vocal Video account and get unlimited employee video responses from your first video collector. Check it out today.