The best recruitment ideas steal strategies from sophisticated marketing teams that use social proof, rather than just checking boxes of posting job descriptions online, attending jobs fairs, and putting together an employee referral program. Using creative recruitment strategies can help you share what makes your company unique — and can help you stand apart from the competition and attract more qualified candidates.
Here, we list 13 recruitment ideas to freshen up your current strategies and give you new techniques to explore.
These ideas will increase the number of candidates who know you’re hiring, encourage top talent to engage with your recruitment process, and give your new employees a great onboarding experience. They include…
We believe that recruitment video is the most effective addition companies can make to their hiring strategy. It’s a simple way to connect with potential candidates before you meet in a live interview. Plus, once you’ve collected the content, you can use it to bring multiple parts of your recruitment strategy to life.
That’s why the first three ideas on this list focus on using employee video testimonials — made with our platform, Vocal Video — to share information about your jobs and deepen candidates' understanding of your brand.
A Game-Changing Recruitment Idea for Everyone: Use Video
Video — specifically employee-generated video — is the best addition you can make to your recruitment strategies. Compared to careers pages and job posts that don’t include employee videos, content with testimonials from your existing team is…
- More authentic and trust-building than a corporate script
- More memorable and believable than a written testimonial
- More shareable and relatable than an ad that only describes the role’s responsibilities
When you publish videos from people across your team, you can also show how diversity and inclusion are fundamental to your company, instead of just telling candidates when you talk about your vision and values.
Here are some ideas to get you started with video recruiting.
1. Use Video Testimonials on Your Careers Page
For job seekers, your work environment and your team can be as important to their decision as the compensation or benefits. Including employee testimonials on your careers page is a great way to help job seekers start imagining themselves as part of your organization.
For example, Whistle uses a wall of love testimonial gallery — built entirely with Vocal Video — as the foundation of their jobs page. The gallery comes after their mission statement but before their current vacancies. This gets job seekers excited about applying and shows how much they value their employees.
2. Use ‘Meet the Team’ Videos to Show Your Company Culture
Your company culture can massively influence potential candidates as they choose where to apply, but you have to convince them it’s more than a series of value statements on your website. Again, employee testimonials and ’meet the team’ videos can give a relatable, trust-building picture of life at your company that shows how your values influence the way you work.
For example, the RCA includes employee testimonials and ‘Day in the Life’ videos on their website. In these videos, candidates can see how the organization’s mission shapes the team’s daily routine. They get a glimpse of motivated employees making a difference in their real work environment. This helps convince them to apply to a position where their work will be truly meaningful.
3. Use Employee Video in Your Job Posts
Job seekers browsing third-party sites might see dozens of job ads every day. Many of these will be walls of text — difficult to process and instantly forgettable. When you include video in your ads, job seekers are more likely to stop and read about your company in detail.
For example, Vocal Video customer Optimizely uses recruitment video across multiple channels to boost their talent acquisition process — including posting videos on LinkedIn.
Even if the site where you post your jobs doesn’t support video, you can include video testimonials. When you publish a testimonial with Vocal Video, we’ll host your content on a public page. Simply add the URL to your job posts, and your potential candidates can hear about your team and your company culture, even if they’re browsing job boards that don’t include a video function.
For example, our client Sunrun includes a link to Geo’s testimonial in their job postings.
When they open the link, job seekers can view the testimonial in full on a public page that includes the company’s logo and brand colors.
How to Get High-Quality, Shareable Employee Testimonials with Vocal Video
Vocal Video is the easiest way to collect, edit, and share high-quality employee testimonials. It’s easy to set up and effortless for your team to use. Even if you’ve never worked in video marketing before, you can create informative, shareable, attention-grabbing videos to build your employer brand across your recruitment efforts.
First, Create an Employee Video Collector
Every great employee testimonial starts with a video collector. This interface takes your respondents through a testimonial interview and records their responses. Once they have the link to the collector, they can add their thoughts wherever and whenever they find time, and the collector looks great on any device.
The fastest way to set up your video collector is with a template, which includes pre-written welcome and thank you messages, and some questions to customize with your company’s name.
Vocal Video includes over 45 industry-specific collector templates.
For recruitment videos, try…
Whether you open a new collector or a customizable template, simply move through the steps on the left side of the dashboard to make sure your collector gathers the information you need.
As well as customizing your questions, add your company’s logo and brand colors to the collector. Setting your “Logo & Colors” or adjusting your brand kit means your branding will automatically appear in all your finished videos.
Then, Share the Collector with Your Team
Click “Get Responses,” and we’ll automatically generate a link to share with your team.
Drop the link into an email, text, or company announcement. Your employees can respond whenever they have time to open the link, with no need to download an app, create an account, or even leave their desks.
Next, Get Automatically Edited Responses
Vocal Video’s unique automatic editing process means every video your team records arrives in your library ready to share. We stitch together the employee’s answers, insert interstitial cards showing the prompts they responded to, and add your employer branding to every slide.
Automatic editing adds these eye-catching features as standard:
- Royalty-free backing tracks
- Attribution overlays with the respondent’s name and role
- Dynamic animated transitions between slides
- Opening and closing slides with your company’s logo
- Automatically generated subtitles
These features are perfect for recruitment videos. They create an upbeat and open tone, make your videos accessible to people browsing with the sound off, and help potential candidates remember your company’s name.
The videos in this carousel gallery from Advance Local show automatic editing in action.
And if you want to make any tweaks to the video before you publish it, just open your editing dashboard. Here, you can add a final slide with a call to action telling job seekers how to apply, trim your clips, or change the personality of the video with a new theme or soundtrack.
Finally, Share Your Videos with Job Seekers
Once you’re ready to publish, just go to “Publish Video,” and we’ll set up your public Vocal Video page. Once this goes live, open the video in your dashboard and click “Share” to see your options.
These include…
- One-click sharing to social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn.
- Video files to post on YouTube or short-form video platforms like TikTok and Reels.
- Downloads to add to digital signage at your location or your booth at a job fair.
- Automatically generated video embeds for the careers, about, or company culture pages of your website.
With Vocal Video, it’s also incredibly easy to create a gallery of employee testimonials.
Combining your testimonials like this is a fantastic way to show diversity and unity across your team. The process is as simple as dragging and dropping published testimonials into a gallery layout, and it doesn’t take any technical expertise to embed a gallery seamlessly on your site.
Find out how to create galleries — like this one from Velocity Resource Group — in the Vocal Video help center.
Ready to start making your first employee testimonial videos? Sign up for Vocal Video’s free-forever plan today.
More Creative Recruitment Ideas for Your Company
To truly stand out from your competition, your recruitment methods need to energize every stage of your hiring process. You’ll need to widen the pool of qualified candidates who know you’re hiring, keep them engaged throughout the application process, and make them feel valued during onboarding.
Here, we’ve gathered the most actionable and effective strategies to help with each of these challenges, including some great ideas for using your employee testimonials throughout the process.
Recruitment Ideas to Attract More Candidates
4. Write More Engaging Job Descriptions
Modern job descriptions are full of clichés that job seekers can see as red flags. Instead of asking for a “rockstar” to join your company that’s “like a family,” focus on telling a story potential candidates want to be part of.
For example, where has your company come from, why are you looking to hire new staff now, and how would you support your new employee as they continue to develop their career in the future?
You can also engage job seekers by making it easier to find the information they need. An FAQ section at the bottom of the job description or your careers page is a great place to start. This helps people scan for information about, for example, your hybrid work policy, your interview process, or how to apply. They’ll find it easier to decide if your job is for them, and it’ll be easier for them to apply immediately if it is.
Remember, you can also make job descriptions more engaging by linking to employee testimonial videos. Just include the link to your Vocal Video video page or gallery of videos.
5. Host Non-traditional Meetups and Recruitment Events
Spending time with potential candidates helps you identify people with skills that would fit your company. Framing these as networking events — not just hiring meetups — is a good way to attract the passive candidates who have a lot to offer, but aren’t actively looking for a new job right now.
These events should emphasize your benefits, the most exciting work you’re doing, and opportunities for internships or training and development that might encourage people to apply.
You might find that more people attend networking events with your hiring managers if you host them at a local venue rather than your office. Some companies host coffee and pastries, lunches, or even “hiring happy hours” at restaurants or cafes in their area. As a bonus, building relationships with local businesses can be great for your brand.
It can also be worthwhile to hold these events at different times of day to open your hiring process up to more people. For example, if you’re holding a remote webinar event to recruit internationally, consider the time zone your ideal candidates are in. Or, if you want to attract people from other companies, lunchtime or after-work events might be more effective recruitment strategies because they’ll be easier to attend.
6. Include Vacancies in Your Email Signatures
Asking your employees to change their email signatures is one of the simplest changes you can make. Still, it’s a straightforward way to broaden your candidate pool and make sure your customers or the other companies in your B2B network know there’s an open position at your company.
Simply include the job title or a brief description of the open roles and a link to the page where they can learn more.
Recruitment Ideas to Advance the Best Candidates
Once you’ve found candidates you want to learn more about, you’ll also need to keep them engaged with the recruitment process. There’s a high chance they’re looking at job openings with other companies. Your challenge is to give them a better candidate experience and make them an offer before someone else does.
These strategies can help.
7. Collect Screening Interviews during the Recruitment Process
Asynchronous screening interviews are an excellent tool for recruiters. They let you…
- Focus your energy on serious candidates by weeding out the ones who won’t take the time to record an interview.
- Speed up recruitment by eliminating the need to schedule a live screening interview.
- Compare candidates on an even playing field by asking everyone to answer the same questions.
- Get a deeper understanding of candidates’ personalities than resumes alone by showing you their tone and body language during the interview.
Remote interviews are also great for candidates. They show how keen you are to kick off the recruitment process, let them respond in their own time in an environment where they feel comfortable, and show an element of flexibility that’s important to many of the top candidates.
With Vocal Video, it’s easy to set up an asynchronous video interview collector. We even include a Video Job Interviews template with every Vocal Video plan.
8. Communicate Transparently
Quality candidates take how they’re treated during the hiring process as an indication of what your company would be like as an employer. Show consideration and courtesy by keeping them updated as their application progresses and making sure they always have a contact person if they want to follow up. When you reject candidates, contact them promptly so they can focus on new opportunities.
It can be extremely worthwhile to work with recruitment software or an ATS (applicant tracking system) to streamline the process here. Choosing a platform with communication automation features keeps candidates in the loop without risking errors (like inviting the wrong candidate to the next round of interviews) or taking your recruiting team away from their other tasks.
Read more about how recruitment platforms like iCIMS compare to Vocal Video.
9. Use Task-Based Interviews to Help Candidates Showcase Their Skills
It’s very common to ask new candidates to tell you about their problem-solving or teamwork skills, but asking them to work together or tackle a challenge shows you how they apply those skills. When all your candidates complete the same tasks, you’ll also have another way to compare applicants and decide whose approach would suit your existing team’s dynamic.
Well-designed, relevant challenges can also be more enjoyable for candidates. It gives people who dislike traditional interviews a chance to shine and gives them a taste of the tasks they’d be completing if they became part of your team.
As well as including tasks in formal interviews, some companies have “gamified” the earliest stages of their hiring funnel. To shake up your hiring process completely, consider publishing a challenge on your website or app and inviting the people who solve it to apply for a job.
10. Host Shadowing Interviews
In the final round of interviews, it can be a good idea to invite your candidates to your location for as much of the day as they can spare. You’ll show them what a day in the life of your company is like and see how they get on with your existing team.
Shadowing interviews show a candidate how serious you are about their application. They also give both sides a chance to ask the final questions that might only occur once the candidate sees the work environment in person. Once you’ve spent a longer, more informal time with the candidate, you know that everyone is making their final decision with all the details in mind.
Recruitment Ideas to Boost New Employee Retention
Even once you’ve sent someone an offer, you can hone your recruitment process to give new hires the best possible experience. It’s obvious when a company’s onboarding is just a box-ticking exercise, and this can make it harder for new employees to feel engaged and integrated in their new role.
Thankfully, there are plenty of strategies you can use to humanize the process.
11. Use Video Welcome Messages during Onboarding
Just as candidate screening videos show a company more about a potential hire’s personality, team welcome videos can give your new employees a glimpse of the atmosphere they can expect in their new workplace.
These videos should say hello, let the new employee know how excited you are to work with them, and tell them more about what to expect.
For example, Possip uses welcome videos during onboarding to explain key elements of the way they work. This is a more engaging way to present the information than a written document, and the new hire still has a reference to go back to if they need to review the process.
Try the New Employee Welcome Videos or New Hire Videos templates to help new hires feel at ease and appreciated from their very first day.
12. Connect New Hires with Existing Employees
Peer matching supports new hires during their first weeks and months in their new role. It gives them a contact person who can answer their questions more quickly (and informally) than a line manager, and shows them how welcome they are.
New hires are often matched with a mentor during onboarding, but you could also introduce your candidate to their mentor earlier. For example, you could introduce them to the employee they’ll be matched with during a shadowing interview, or send an employee bio video to introduce their mentor before their first day.
This way, your new hires will have a familiar face to turn to when they first show up for work. They’ll have some help to get integrated into the team, and they’ll be more likely to stay in their role or advance within your company rather than looking elsewhere.
13. Collect Candidate Feedback Videos
To keep attracting the best candidates, you need to continually refine your recruitment process. The best way to do that is by acting on feedback from people who’ve experienced it firsthand. Candidates have a completely different perspective on your hiring process, and they may well be able to compare their experience with you to one of your competitors.
Asking candidates to complete a survey about their experience is the best way to get the insights you need. Alongside basic questions like “What position did you apply for?” try asking open questions like …
- How would you describe the hiring process at [your organization]?
- How would you describe communication and feedback during the hiring process?
- Did the job description align with the role you interviewed for/were hired for?
- Which area of the hiring process would you improve, and how?
- How likely are you to recommend [your organization] to others based on your experience?
The experience of changing jobs is extremely personal, so don’t forget to include a final question asking if there’s anything else the candidate wants to add.
These questions will give you more detail than the 1–10 ratings on standard online survey forms, which means you’re more likely to uncover an actionable suggestion.
When you show you’re taking notice of feedback and actively improving your hiring and onboarding process, you’ll continue to make a great impression. You’ll stand out to the best candidates, and give your new employees an experience that makes them want to stay in the role long term.
Read more about how to get better responses with Vocal Video's video forms.
Bring Fresh Ideas to Your Recruitment Strategy with Vocal Video
The best way to attract, engage, and retain new employees is to treat them like customers. You should sell your company to them at every opportunity, show them that their time is important to you, and make them feel at home as they come on board.
The authenticity of recruitment video is a great way to create the connections that help candidates feel supported and valued.
Sign up for Vocal Video today and see what recruitment video can do for your hiring process.