Creating an engaging recruitment video

We recently had the opportunity to produce an employee recruitment video for Abacus Group. They had originally approached us with a scripted concept that would introduce two of their current employees. After our initial conversation, we suggested a small change in the idea. Instead of reading a script, why don’t we just sit down and chat with the two employees about their real-life experience at Abacus Group and how their lives have changed.


We usually try to steer our clients away from non-professional actors/hosts reading scripts because it can take away from the sincerity of the message. Most people cannot read scripts and come across naturally without experience and practice. Simply setting up a natural interview and having a human conversation does wonders for getting important messages across, so we agreed to conduct real interviews with Michelle and Charlie and tied in supporting b-roll visuals to help tell the story.

3 KEY FACTORS

  • What problems can you solve for new employees?
  • What does Abacus do?
  • Why is Abacus different from their competition?

During our discovery meeting and email conversations, we asked Abacus to answer these 3 factors. This helped us create the perfect questions to ask Michelle and Charlie for the interview.

PROBLEM SOLVING

  • Employees can make more money working at Abacus
  • If you want to make even more money working on the weekends, you can but you don’t have to
  • Employees are their own boss and not micro-managed with a boss looking over their shoulders

WHAT WE DO

  • Abacus helps place motivated financial professionals with great great companies
  • Abacus helps companies find great financial professional talent
  • All Abacus employees come from the financial industry so they are experienced

DIFFERENTIATORS

  • Lowest turn over rate in the industry (which means no one wants to quit)
  • Won awards from Crain’s best places to work
  • Employees want to come to work, they love their jobs
  • High income potential

Once we had this information, we were able to ask the right questions to the two employees we interviewed to get great messages for narration. After we conducted the interviews, we spent the 2nd half of the day filming “fly-on-the-wall” scenes and a few directed scenes with Michelle and Charlie as they walked around the office and chatted with co-workers/bosses.