The scene: Four executives of a company sit at a long table. “Ms. Beisenhirtz, please send in the next candidate.” Enter a young woman, sneakers and a colorful dress, talking into her phone: “You know I got 25k on Insta, right? Do you know who’s following me? Celebrities, baby, celebrities.” She gets off the phone and tells the panel to wait a moment and if they could move in closer for her selfie. They acquiesce.
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She tags them on social media and then says, “Sorry I don’t usually tag people under 15k.” She sits down and is now all business. “All cell phones off and everyone look over here. I brought a concept. Hand this out please but don’t look at it yet! First of all, only one thing matters to me: Sell. Sell. Sell. High-quality products for the benefit of the customer.” She tells them how many “A-list” followers she has and says, “Now let’s see what you have to offer.” Side note – “sell” sounds much better in German. Verkaufen. Verkaufen. Verkaufen.
This flashes on the screen: “Behr’s is hiring: Sales Manager for electronic products for B2B clients. Apply now.”
What’s so wonderful about this 2020 SIPAward winner for Best Use of Video in Marketing produced by Behr’s GmbH in Hamburg, Germany—besides the two key account sellers that they found within just a month!—is that the applicant is portrayed with respect. She’s full of life but gets to show her professional side. If anything it’s the “older” panel sitting there a bit stunned that looks out of touch.
“With this video we address self-confident young applicants who do not feel addressed by classical job advertisements,” said Behr’s CEO Arno Langbehn, who plays one of the panel. (You can watch the two-minute video here. Use “CC” for English subtitles.) In previous video ads, we’ve seen Langbehn playing the piano, the accordion—he had never played before and it sounded fine—and skydiving.)
“Every company looks for the best employees,” he explained in his SIPAward application. “In former times companies got many good applications and they chose the best candidate. Nowadays the game has changed. The best applicant can choose the best company him or herself.
“In this video for job applications, we turned around the relationship between the applicant and the company to stand out from other job advertisements in order to get more applications in particular from young professionals.”
It worked. The scope for this job advertisement video on Facebook reached 21 times more than a previous text ad they placed on Facebook. It also drew 40 times more impressions but only at 7% of the cost per result. They also posted it on Xing (the German LinkedIn equivalent) and on their website.
In order to use this video for future job positions, they produced four types that differ only slightly. “The beginning is the same in every video,” Langbehn wrote. “The applicant (colorfully dressed) enters the board room and behaves in an unusually [outgoing] way (continuous calls on a mobile phone). The four employees of the publishing house are irritated.
“Normally the applicant presents herself with her strengths. The market has changed: today the applicant makes the demands. In this video the applicant defines her requirements to the employer. The explanation was adapted to one of the four different videos for job positions. And we integrated an individual slide with a short description of the position.”
The whole series cost just $2,100. Langbehn said that in addition to the many views, about 50% of the interested applicants watched the video up to the end.
“Even better from our point of view is the rate when we [put] this video in front of YouTube clips as paid ads. YouTube users click on a video they want to watch. Instead of that video, our ad video appears first as an advertisement which they can click off after 5 seconds. Nevertheless, 20% of the viewers watched our two-minute-long advertisement video up to the end and did not click off.”
A well-deserving SIPAward winner. Again, you can watch it here.
