While India has one of the biggest young population with higher education degrees, the sad truth is that talented workforce doesn’t get right opportunity while organizations spend millions to attract right talent. In a survey by information week, 88% of respondents at larger IT companies admitted that see an IT talent shortage today in one or more technology areas important to their business!
Organizations are resorting to all possible medium to attract the right talent and in this league. HCL technologies, one of the largest IT companies of India emerged as pioneer in using digital medium for recruitment and employer branding through its #CooolestInterviewEver campaign. Now again it has launched another campaign #HiralVideos to leverage power of digital for recruitment.
The Campaign
The campaign is a video-based campaign, consisting of 4 videos-each sharing the details of a particular job in an interesting manner with an urge to make it viral for those people who are busy in their work so much, that they get no time to watch videos.
The campaign seems to have twin objectives:
- Get a boost in job applications, and,
- Establish HCL’s leadership in using digital for employer branding.
The execution
The campaign was launched on 19th November, 2014. All 4 videos were published on HCL’s official YouTube channel. A campaign landing page was created and shared on HCL’s social channels. The campaign is also been promoted on job portals like Timesjobs. Apart from this, the paid medium is used to bring traffic to YouTube videos and the campaign landing page.
What’s good
The most remarkable point of this campaign lies in its novelty. I don’t recall any such campaign previously to hire employees, more so for non-creative roles. The videos are quite interesting and even their titles generate curiosity in the mind of viewer.
Scope of improvement
HCL is an IT company operating in B2B domain and they missed on few basic promotional methods useful for B2C domain, especially when CTA is request to share the video and target is enticing viewers to share the videos. Below are few small points that the company can work upon to achieve better results:
- To begin with, a playlist could have been made with all 4 videos, and the url from the list could be shared, so that viewer gets automatically next video at the end of first!
- A Google search for #HiralVideos yields 1 result! Yes, the google plus post is the only search result. A quick keyword check suggests it to be missing from the YouTube keywords. This important hashtag can be used as a keyword in YouTube videos
- A little SEO for landing page wouldn’t hurt much but can be useful.
- Since the youngsters are more on social channels, paid promotion on social channels can help in fetching better results. ( I can write a separate post on how social media and HCL’s social channels could be used in most optimum way)
- It has been established that “native content tends to aspire more to going viral”, this option can be explored to widen the reach.
- This amazing work can be shared on sites like Kulzy so that more people get to know about it and help in its spread
- Remarketing can be attempted aggressively to enhance the impact of the campaign.
Conclusion
#HiralVideos is one of its own kinds of campaign and its HCL has once again used digital medium impressively beyond product marketing, for recruitment and employer branding! A more holistic integrated digital strategy could have brought better results, and all the aspects of digital-social, search etc. could be leveraged simultaneously for synergistic effect. Though, trying digital beyond product branding in itself worth applaud!
However, a question ponders in my mind: Such videos could have given better results if they were for entry level positions or positions with 3-4 years. The population helping in making videos viral would not be really interested in sharing videos which detail about jobs requiring 9-10 years of experience! What do you think?
