Why including video in your job board postings is crucial if you’re trying to hire students and recent grads

They say that video killed the radio star. At least that’s what The Buggles sang way back in 1980. Could they have actually been singing about the death of text-only job posting ads? Doubtful, but I suppose possible.

So although I doubt that The Buggles were considering job posting ads while writing out the lyrics of that iconic song, I do think that video is killing the text-only job posting ad. Why? There are 86 million members of Gen Z, they’re beginning to enter the workforce, and they rely upon YouTube and other video sites for information far more than their Millennial older siblings and even more so than their Gen X and Baby Boomer parents.

Our friends at Google recently conducted a survey with Qualtrics Research to better understand how 18- to 24-year olds decide who to date. The decision of who to date is not quite the same as who to work for, but there are similarities. Some 41 percent of this age cohort learned about dating apps like Tinder through online video sites like YouTube. Taken alone, that number didn’t surprise me. But it did when I found out that it meant that 57 percent more of this age cohort found out about dating apps using online video sites than did 25- to 34-year-olds.

In addition to using video to learn about dating, Gen Z uses video for just about all kinds of learning. Indeed, 80 percent of teens turn to YouTube as a source of information. Why does this matter to employers? Because a generation that prefers to learn through video is going to be more likely to apply to a job posting from your competitor that includes video instead of your posting that does not.

A few years ago, College Recruiter embarked on what others in the job board industry told us was foolish: to exponentially increase the number of postings on our site with embedded video by offering that feature for free to our employer customers. Today, hundreds of thousands of the postings on CollegeRecruiter.com have video embedded into them, even though most job boards don’t allow employers to embed video. Of the minority of job boards that do offer that feature, most of those are very large and charge employers a fortune. Our strategy to encourage the inclusion of video isn’t unique, but it sure is unusual.

Quite simply, College Recruiter believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career and we’re passionate about the candidate experience. Anything that we can do to help the job seekers using our site find that great career in a way that creates a better experience for them is something that we’re going to want to do. And video fits that description perfectly.

Whether you’re posting a single job for 30-days or using our JobsThatScale product to help you hire dozens or even hundreds, we’re going to want you to embed your YouTube employment video into your posting and we make it really, really easy for you to do that…for free.