Hiring with video: employer branding that actually fills vacancies

Why a job board is the wrong channel for the person you actually want

Think about who is on a job board on a Tuesday evening. It is people who are out of work, people who have just been let go, people new to the market, and a small group who are genuinely unhappy enough to search. That is the entire pool. In a normal labour market that pool is big enough to hire from. In technical and skilled trades in Flanders it is not.

The person you want is a thirty-four-year-old technician who is decent at his job, gets on with his colleagues, and has never once opened a job site. He is not unhappy. He is just not thrilled either. He would move for a better van, a shorter drive, a boss who answers his phone, or a company where the work is less chaotic. But nothing will ever prompt him to go looking, so no posting will ever find him.

This is the whole argument for advertising. A posting waits. An ad goes. If the only channel you use waits for people to come to you, you are competing for the group every other employer in your region has already seen, and in many cases already passed on. That is not a hiring strategy, it is a queue.

⚠️ This applies hardest to technical roles, installers, drivers, production and site staff. For office roles the active pool is usually larger.

What a passive candidate actually wants to see

A passive candidate is not evaluating your company. He is answering one question in about four seconds: would I rather work there than here? Nothing in a standard vacancy text helps him answer that. "A dynamic team in a growing organisation" tells him nothing, because every employer in Belgium writes the same sentence, including the bad ones.

What answers the question is footage of a normal Tuesday. The workshop at half past seven. The vans. The tools people are actually holding. Two colleagues taking the mickey out of each other over coffee. The boss, on camera, saying in plain words how he runs the place and what he expects. That is information. A slogan is not.

The strongest recruitment videos we make are almost boring in their honesty. Someone says what he does, what he likes about it, and what is annoying about it. The candidate believes it precisely because it is not polished into a brochure. Production quality should be high; the content should be true.

• →Show: the team, by name, talking normally
• →Show: the equipment, the vans, the workshop, the site
• →Show: the boss saying what he expects and what he offers
• →Show: a real working day, start to finish
• →Show: someone who joined recently saying why he moved
• →Never show: stock footage of an office nobody in your company has ever sat in
• →Never show: the words "dynamic", "challenging" or "family atmosphere" with nothing behind them
• →Never show: only the founder talking for ninety seconds
• →Never show: a salary range you cannot actually honour
• →Never show: a team of ten when four of them left last year

Your own employees are the best casting you will ever get

Nobody believes an employer talking about how good it is to work there. Everybody believes a fitter in a dusty hoodie saying he has been here six years and the planning actually makes sense. Your current staff are credible in a way no marketing can buy, and they cost nothing to cast.

The trick is filming them without it looking staged, and that is a directing problem more than a camera problem. Do not hand them a script. Ask questions and let them answer in their own words, including the pauses. Film them where they work, in what they normally wear, with the noise of the workshop behind them. Let them speak Dutch or French if that is their language and subtitle it, because a technician switching into stiff English is instantly less believable.

Expect the first two minutes to be awkward and shoot through it. The usable material almost always comes after someone forgets the camera is running. Plan for that: more time per person, fewer people, better answers.

A vacancy video is not an employer-branding campaign

There are two different jobs here and companies confuse them constantly. A vacancy video is tactical: one role, one message, run for a few weeks, aimed at getting applications now. An always-on employer-branding campaign runs continuously at a lower budget and does something else entirely: it makes your name familiar in your region before you have a vacancy.

The difference shows up in how fast you can hire. If you only advertise when a role opens, you start from zero every time. Cold audience, no recognition, and pressure, because the role is already vacant and the work is already piling up. If a campaign has been running quietly for months, the same ad lands on people who have seen your team before, and the response is quicker and warmer.

In practice the sensible setup is both. A modest always-on layer that keeps your company visible to the trades in your area, and a heavier push whenever a specific role needs filling. The always-on layer also builds an audience you can retarget, which makes each specific push cheaper to run.

Targeting: how you reach people who are not looking

On Meta you are not searching for candidates, you are describing them. You can narrow by job title and by professional interest, by employer where that data exists, and by geography down to a radius that reflects an acceptable commute. For most technical roles the radius matters more than anything else: nobody changes jobs to double their drive.

Keep the targeting broader than instinct suggests. If you narrow to one job title in three postcodes, the audience becomes too small to deliver and the cost per result climbs. A wider audience with a very specific video usually beats a narrow audience with a generic video, because the video itself does the filtering. Someone who is not a technician will scroll past footage of a workshop; someone who is will stop.

Also run in the right language. In Flanders that means Dutch, in Wallonia French, in Brussels usually both. English works for office and international roles, but for trades you are talking to people in their working language or you are talking to nobody.

Speed decides everything, and the customer benefit nobody plans for

In a shortage market the employer who replies first usually wins, because a passive candidate's interest has a short half-life. He filled in a form on his phone at nine in the evening on an impulse. By Thursday the impulse is gone and his current job is fine again. If your process is "HR will review applications next week", you have wasted the budget that generated the application.

The intake needs to be embarrassingly simple. Reply within the hour where you can, by WhatsApp or phone rather than a formal email. Skip the CV screening for a first conversation; you are trying to get twenty minutes of talking, not a complete file. One person owns the follow-up, every applicant sits in one pipeline with a status and a next action, and nothing goes quiet. This is the same follow-up discipline that decides whether commercial leads convert, and the same CRM handles both.

Then there is the benefit almost nobody plans for. Employer-branding content sells to customers as well. A prospect who has seen your team, your vans and your workshop trusts your quote more than one who has only seen your price. When your recruitment video runs in the same region as your commercial campaign, the two reinforce each other: the customer recognises the faces, and recognition reads as reliability. You bought hiring content and got sales content for free.

Frequently asked questions

Does video recruitment work for one specific vacancy, or do I need to run it all year?

It works for a single vacancy, but it works better and faster if something has been running before you needed it. Starting cold under time pressure is the expensive way to hire. A modest always-on campaign plus a heavier push per role is the setup that keeps working.

Should the boss be on camera, or is that too much about me?

The boss should be on camera, briefly and honestly. For a technician, who he will work for is one of the biggest factors in the decision, and a face answers that question faster than any text. Keep it short and let the team carry most of the video.

What language should a recruitment campaign run in?

The candidate's working language. Dutch in Flanders, French in Wallonia, both in Brussels. English is fine for office and international roles, but for technical and skilled trades it narrows your reach for no benefit.

My employees do not want to be filmed. Now what?

Start with the two or three who are comfortable, keep it very short and show them the result before anything goes live. Once people see that the video is normal rather than cringeworthy, the rest usually follow. Never force it; a reluctant person on camera does more harm than no person.

What does a project like this cost?

It depends on the objective, the number of videos and the size of the advertising budget behind them. We have delivered projects from €7,000 to €30,000. A recruitment campaign sits at the lower end when it uses the same footage as your commercial work.