Companies must show that they promote diversity and inclusion to attract talent. But when it comes to writing corporate diversity statements, Groupthink is a feature, not a bug.
On the one hand, most companies still use phrases culled from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or simply copy from another company page without personalization, leading to D&I statements that read like a legal copy rather than a genuine expression of a company’s values.
On the other hand, and this is worse, writing D&I statements has become so problematic that companies must tiptoe around the things they had better NOT say lest they remove themselves from an applicant’s consideration, rather than figuring out what to say to improve their chances.
If you Google “how to write a diversity statement.” You’d find more results about how NOT to write your D&I statement than intended. This illustrates the extreme tenuousness of declaring your intent.
Is it surprising that job applicants can detect weak diversity statements in one read?
To be fair, many organizations are well-intentioned. They just struggle to translate their vision into a strategy for attracting talent. As a result, some of them use team photos to show their diversity and inclusion.
But team photos aren’t the best channel for demonstrating diversity either.
Most companies rarely use images of underrepresented groups on their company website and career page.
And when they do? Team photos still fall short because:
- Team photos are taken infrequently and rarely updated, making them less representative of the current diversity within a company.
- Most team photos feature only executives or high-level employees rather than the everyday coworkers who comprise most of a company’s workforce.
- Most team photos feature a marginalized person in the far angles—applicants can read through the pixels.
- And, of course, a photo alone cannot express a person’s unique experiences.
So, if texts are bland and images are generic, how can well-meaning and diversity-led companies move from good intentions to lasting impact?
That’s where videos come in. Specifically:
Employee Testimonial Videos
Employee testimonial videos feature employees discussing their work experiences with culture, collaboration, communication, and D&I.
As a tool for employer branding, employee testimonial videos are an effective means for communicating your D&I commitments more engagingly. That’s because video testimonials allow employees to share their stories in their own words.
You might have seen companies posting employee videos and imagine it’s just a trend among the woke brands. That might be right– but for the right reasons. There is sufficient proof that employee testimonial videos are the best way to communicate D&I.
Videos perform better than photos and text
HubSpot’s State of Content Marketing research shows that, for the fourth year in a row, video content has engagement & retention rates higher than photo and text. This makes it a powerful tool to bring diverse voices to life by highlighting individual stories and experiences in a way that text or a photo alone cannot.
Hubspot’s State of Content Marketing, 2023
Candidates Look For Videos When Applying To Jobs
The #1 obstacle candidates experience when searching for a job is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organization (LinkedIn).
That’s why 1 in 4 applicants look for your company videos before they apply (Seenit, 2022), and 66% of them prefer listening to employees when it comes to understanding what diversity and inclusion really look like at a company (Glassdoor, 2022).
Why?
They want to get a feel of the culture, leadership, and everyday life. Beyond your diversity statement and team photos, applicants also want to see and hear from people who look like them when making the decision.
We shouldn’t be surprised that multimedia content and employee testimonial videos demonstrating inclusion and diversity are now important elements that make an effective career website (WilsonHCG, 2023).
More and More Companies Are Turning To Employee Videos
This is true for three reasons:
- The number of mass layoffs last year means talent has become more sensitive to a company’s culture.
- Remote work, thanks to COVID-19, encouraged people to value their flexibility and freedom even more. Companies that aren’t showing these are losing talent.
- Job ads that have a video get 800% more engagement (Seenit, 2022)
Everyone is writing text and sharing handout pictures. Companies that want to stand out and attract talent faster must show and tell.
Additionally, employee videos help companies tap into the co-creator economy to boost employer branding and show diversity.
Gone are the days of “we’re a big happy family”– that’s a tell. These days, companies record day-in-the-life videos to show future employees how they celebrate diversity and inclusion–and it works.
Sharing Employee Videos Helps Retain Your Workforce and Reduce Hiring Costs
What does it take to retain your workforce today?
If we know one thing, it’s that the conversation starters and deal breakers that were once commonplace are no longer as relevant as they once were.
Following the great resignation and great re-negotiation, employees now demand more than office donuts, free WIFI, and access to the break room. They are increasingly seeking opportunities to feel connected to their colleagues and the companies they work for (Glassdoor, 2022).
In fact, CIPD research forecasts a rise in demand for responsible business, transparency, accountability, and diversity and inclusion by 2030, alongside giving employees a voice within their organization.
The solution is to give employees what they want:
- They want their voices heard
- They want to feel included
- They want to take pride in promoting their company.
Not so surprisingly, organizations doing this are already seeing a 27% turnover reduction, a 50% cost-per-hire reduction, and attracting 50% more qualified applicants than their peers.
But if employee videos are that good,
Why Aren’t More Companies Using Video Testimonials?
Only 3% of companies engage their employees in recorded video content, even though 58% of employees will take part in company videos (Seenit, 2022)
Here are some of the reasons most companies aren’t producing employee videos:
Most companies don’t have the support and resources needed for employer brand creation
PandoLogic surveyed 400 HR professionals. The three most-cited barriers to successful employer brand creation are:
● lack of personnel devoted to it (36%)
● lack of time (31%)
● lack of interest from leadership (30%)
We found similar results in our survey of 456 marketing professionals.
Creating Professional Employee Testimonial Videos Is Expensive
Most organizations aren’t even investing in video marketing yet. Thus the cost of producing high-quality testimonial videos is a barrier. With distributed teams, the cost and time required for travel and coordination can quickly add up. Our survey shows that
- 44% of marketers pay more than $15,000 to make a single testimonial video with outside agencies.
- 54% of marketing professionals spend over 2 months creating testimonial videos.
Asynchronous Video Recording Software Lacks Employer Branding Features
People describe asynchronous video recording software as the future of team collaboration. But when teams attempt to do more than just internal communication, they fall flat.
Tools like Loom and Zoom have the following problems
- Lack of video editing capabilities (you cannot use brand color or themes)
- Cannot produce high-quality, interactive, captioned, and engaging employee testimonial videos.
- Require third-party tools to publish to the company marketing channels
- Cannot embed into job boards.
So, in addition to their monthly subscription, companies must purchase additional tools to promote their employer brand with videos.
There has to be a better way for companies to relish the benefits of employee videos without breaking the bank.
Show Authentic Workplace Culture With Vocal Video– The #1 Remote Video Testimonial Platform
Vocal Video was built around one mantra: “Robust features; Simple control”. Why? Because the product team spent years helping companies grow their brand online, and they know the pain of producing videos, it’s where the buck stops for most companies.
They wanted to change that. So they asked one question everyone’s been too cautios to ask:
What if there is a way to produce high-quality studio-grade employee testimonial videos with:
- No equipment
- No downloads
- No video experience needed
- No 2-month production time,
- No traveling the world to shoot 2-minute videos.
The answer? Vocal Video.
VocalVideo is the only end-to-end video recording software that allows you to produce high-quality employee testimonial videos, faster, cheaper, and without requiring expensive tech.
The platform makes it easy to record, edit, and share employee testimonial videos anywhere. You simply send a link to an employee, and your respondents can easily record answers to preset questions from their phone, tablet, or laptop.
After that, Vocal Video automatically transforms the raw footage into multi-scene videos with motion graphics, soundtracks, subtitles, and your brand themes. Additionally,
- Video responses are automatically transcribed.
- You can review them within your private account,
- Or use the integrations to export them to your existing hiring systems.
Now you can record, edit, and publish an employee testimonial video in 24 hours– not 2 months.
With VocalVideo, companies save months of video production and see a 20% cost-per-hire decrease within the first 90 days.
The following are key features Vocal Video customers love.
Vocal Video Key Features.
- Easy video collection anywhere
Your respondent simply clicks a link to record directly from their phone or laptop. The simple experience is optimized for high response rates and easily customized to your brand.
- A Drag-Drop-n-Trim Video Editor Anyone Can Use On Any Device
Once your employee responds to your video request, you’ll receive an email notification containing a link to the draft video. From there, you can easily customize every aspect of the video to make it uniquely yours. For example, you can
- Give it personality with a preset theme or select your brand’s custom theme and color.
- Add your logo and change its look to integrate the video with your existing marketing materials seamlessly.
- Customize the subtitle font, where it appears, or turn it off altogether.
- Choose from over 30 licensed soundtracks or upload your own and adjust the soundtrack volume to match the speakers‘.
- Select and set a frame as your video’s thumbnail to give viewers a sneak peek of what’s to come.
Don’t want to bore your viewers with a lengthy video? No problem! You can trim a video scene to a digestible format for your audience or make it audio-only.
After editing, preview the full video, add a Call-To-Action, and publish straight to LinkedIn. Or, embed the published video on your blog, hiring page, or job boards with integrations to boost engagement from applicants and readers.
Say goodbye to the hassles of complicated video editing software, and hello to a drag-and-drop, trim-and-edit interface that anyone can use.
See the videos customers are making.
- Create Videos Featuring Multiple Employees With Ease
If you want to merge a video testimonial from Brooklin in the same frame as the one from Amanda, you can add the video scene from a different respondent by selecting “Add Scene” and choosing “Video.” You can then search or browse for the response you’d like to add, and your new video will appear in the video editor. Just repeat to add additional responses.
That way, you can create highlight reels, montages, and compilations without installing expensive merge & compress software.
- Custom Video Card Builder
Aside from creating a full pro-style video, Vocal Video also allows you to build beautiful video cards that use quotes and attributions of the speaker. That way, a candidate quickly understands the context of an employee’s experience even if they don’t get to view the video.
- Inclusive Features For Camera-shy Teammates.
We all have one of them on the team. Don’t we?
If your super employee is too shy to face the camera or feels more comfortable off the lens, you can still turn their audio responses into branded videos. The audio interface features an interactive audiogram, your brand’s logo and theme, the speaker’s profile details, and automatic on-screen subtitles.
- Flexible integrations & Ad-free embeds
Vocal Video makes it easy to pull candidate and employee videos into your applicant tracking systems, project management tools, and your website.
You can also integrate Vocal Video with Greenhouse, Jobvite, Lever, BambooHR, Slack, Google Docs, Airtable, and thousands of other platforms with our Zapier integration.
Vocal Video gives you the tools to share employee videos across all digital channels, internally and externally. Easily incorporate video collection into existing hiring processes and track videos in applicant tracking systems.
- Embed videos and dynamic galleries on your site to boost conversions.
- Share your videos on social media & YouTube to amplify your brand
- Quickly create highlight reels for engaging social media ads
- Publish any video in horizontal, vertical, or square format
- Use expert-designed templates to create turn-key employee videos.
Pro video editors design our video testimonial templates. They are optimized for high-quality graphics, fast upload, interactive user experience, and smart storage management.
Each expert template includes questions to ask, instructions for respondents, a three-touch email invitation sequence, and examples to inspire you.
That way, you get started with everything you need fast, make it match your brand in seconds, and publish it all in the same place. You can even add a video greeting & incentive to boost response rates.