Creating an engaging recruitment video

by Adam Forgione | Oct 7, 2015 | Video Production

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.

Stand Out From The Crowd – The Yellow Apple Story

by Adam Forgione | Oct 5, 2015 | Business

The Yellow Apple is a story that we came up with to describe our ultimate goal with our clients and partners. It goes like this..

“There is a basket with red apples, but somewhere in the middle there is one yellow apple.”

Q: Where does your eye go at first glance?

A: The yellow apple.

Q: Why did your eye go there?

A: Because it stands out or because it’s different, because it appears to stand out from the crowd.

Did you think the same thing? Most people do and we know this.

This helps describe our vision to our clients because our goal is to make them the yellow apple and help them stand out from the rest.

This idea is a simple one but often overlooked by many. We find that many video production and marketing companies look for a one-size-fits-all strategy to create a video marketing campaign because it worked in the past. The fact is we are all different. I mean our businesses of course. Yet we don’t act this way. We try to follow the success methods of others which is exactly what everyone else does. This ensures we do not stand out in a sea of similarity.

We believe in a strong story and a strong storyteller. We believe too many characters can hurt a story. We believe that it is important to get across the most important messages and if there are too many, we need to lead them into other media/videos, instead of piling everything into one video. We believe every successful business solves problems for their customers and customers need their problems solved. Remember the old saying “If there’s a need….fill it!” We believe human stories are the most emotional and compelling of all stories.

If you align with these beliefs when getting your message out, then you are our kind of client. Contact us for a free consultation so we explore your company vision and find your story. Let’s make you the yellow apple!