Podcasts about skill scout

Elena Valentine has created partnerships with recruitment agencies that have trusted them to capture & share workplace stories for some of the world's largest brands. She takes a consultative role, not just on video but on employee and external communication , which has led to 70% of their clients becoming repeat clients. Here's what you're going to learn from Elena: How they navigated economic uncertainty. How to avoid getting caught up in the fundraising cycle. How to stay focused & scale without VC. How she redefined success in 2020 not as growth but rather what she wanted to be remembered for as a leader. Get 5-Min Growth Playbooks Weekly HERE Explore Membership HERE

Shelley came bearing gifts for Serge's sweet little girls and they got to meet IRL over the weekend! Plus Shelley's oldest son, Chandler crossed the stage, for his Bachelor's degree this week, a very proud moment! Our recruiting insights this week Avoid seeing your boss the same way you see your dad. Mixed messages on calling your workplace ‘family' can spell disaster Solid recommendations for TA content in 2022. Employee stories will dominate top employer brands and it will be authentic, not scripted by CorpComm.  **Find our past episode with Elena Valentine, Founder of Skill Scout for more inspiration. Employee Referral programs, please stop making employees grovel for their reward money! You are better off with a dollar store card and a hand written thank you note. TA needs to drive the whole thing - no strings attached. Just pay people their referral fee!

Shelley came bearing gifts for Serge's sweet little girls and they got to meet IRL over the weekend! Plus Shelley's oldest son, Chandler crossed the stage, for his Bachelor's degree this week, a very proud moment! Our recruiting insights this week Avoid seeing your boss the same way you see your dad. Mixed messages on calling your workplace ‘family' can spell disaster Solid recommendations for TA content in 2022. Employee stories will dominate top employer brands and it will be authentic, not scripted by CorpComm.  **Find our past episode with Elena Valentine, Founder of Skill Scout for more inspiration. Employee Referral programs, please stop making employees grovel for their reward money! You are better off with a dollar store card and a hand written thank you note. TA needs to drive the whole thing - no strings attached. Just pay people their referral fee!

Are your employees engaged? 70% of people say they are not engaged in their jobs. Creating a workplace environment that employees enjoy is key to providing fulfilment. A few things you can do to increase employee engagement and candidate engagement when hiring new staff, is to make your company more human, treat people with kindness, and invest in your people's well-being. Social media and video has become an integral part of modern culture. Video job ads are viewed 46% more than one dimensional job descriptions, job posts get 36% more applications if accompanied by a recruiting video, many companies are changing their views and teams are embracing social media and video platforms as a powerful communication tool - and it's about time. With the competition for talent as competitive as ever, selling your company to potential hires is vital. Lewis Maleh was joined by Elena Valentine CEO and Co Founder of Skill Scout on The Recruitment Show Live to give us their valuable insights into the importance of crafting a great story virtually. Key Takeaways: - How to make your company more human - How HR is using visual storytelling to build brand awareness - How to tell a great story - Why you should incorporate video content in your job ads

Wepa! I'm Marina. I am a technologist, mom, podcast host, leadership coach, cruciverbalist and aquarian. ;) UNBOSSED is “Stories of Amazing Women in Chicago”. If you are a new listener to UNBOSSED, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Contact Page and let us know how we can help you today! Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/marina-malaguti In this episode: Elena Valentine is a workplace filmmaker and design researcher. Elena has made it her mission to help people find meaning in their work through stories that matter. With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about careers. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has since built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike, McDonalds, and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. Elena's particularly excited about Skill Scout's latest project, the Humans@Work documentary and virtual film festival series that shares stories of people who find passion and meaning in their work. Elena was recently named HR Superhero by DisruptHR Chicago and Newcity's Film 50 of 2020. She is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective, a a thriving community based Chicagoland non-profit that elevates femme identifying filmmakers of color. Key Highlights/Tools: Building businesses to last The Power of an Eternal Prayer The Entrepreneurship Journey Memorable Quotes: You cannot be what, you cannot see. Useful Links and Resources: https://www.skillscout.com/ http://www.mezclamediacollective.org/ Digital Minimalism Join the Conversation Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section. This week's question is: What challenges have you faced as a woman founder? Ask Elena anything by leaving a question/ comment on Substack. Follow UNBOSSED Podcast Anchor: https://anchor.fm/marina-malaguti Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDTz6_FepG04QTs1BjFLBjw/ Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eUhfH8E Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/e7cWtBv Google Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/enjChPt Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/cea4c49e-6c7e-4dab-833e-eb57d204c493 Substack: https://thechicagowoman.substack.com/ And all others… Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/infraction/live-it License code: 0OYRKRXZRCJPIFYY --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/marina-malaguti/support

In this week's episode, Patrick is joined by Elena Valentine, CEO, and Co-Founder at Skill Scout. They discuss storytelling, Elena shares an astounding story about vulnerability, reality, and how we can grow stronger by retaining and attracting talent.

This episode of the Jason Cavness Experience is a replay of my talk with Elena Valentine CEO/Co-Founder of Skill Scout from March 29, 2020 We talk about the following How Elena started out in media. What are some common mistakes when making videos Her entrepreneurial journey Why is HR important Elena's Bio Elena is an expert in leveraging video stories in the workplace. With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about the world of work. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has since built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. She was recently named “HR Superhero of the Year” by DisruptHR Chicago. She is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective. A non-profit that elevates women filmmakers of color. Next up for Elena and her team is the Humans@Work. Elena's Social Media Elena's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenavalentine1/ Elena's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elena_Valentine Elena's Advice While we are working remotely and while our lives are being uprooted. One of the things that I'm doing every day as someone who does video is I'm creating a short video piece every day. I have committed to every time that we are in quarantine, to create one short video piece a day. This isn't necessarily about work. It is just to provide moments of pause for myself and for others if it happens to strike them.

In this week's episode, Patrick is joined by Elena Valentine, CEO, and Co-Founder at Skill Scout. They discuss storytelling, Elena shares an astounding story about vulnerability, reality, and how we can grow stronger by retaining and attracting talent.

We are excited about today's Digital Meetup, and we have two stellar guests on deck! How we tell the story of work changed completely when work changed completely. Jess and Jason are joined by Katrina Kibben, CEO of Three Ears Media. Katrina is a professional work storyteller with special expertise in writing job descriptions FOR the candidate, not ABOUT the employer. We talk about using inclusive language at work, the use of pronouns, and writing job advertisements that don't stink. We also focus on the power of storytelling for work during our chat with Elena Valentine, CEO of Skill Scout. We will unpack the art of visualizing and illustrating opportunity when it comes to talent, the work they do, where, and how they do it! Grab some coffee or a snack and TUNE IN. Jess will be live from the Black Hills of South Dakota. I have a feeling this is going to be a good one to share with your colleagues and team. See you soon on our live broadcast! Connect with Katrina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinakibben/ Connect with Elena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenavalentine1/

Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast.I'm Max your host and today I am delighted to welcome on the show, Elena Valentine from Skill Scouts. Elena: Yes. Max: Hi, Elena. Welcome. Elena: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 3:30 PM my time and 5:30 AM. Hong Kong time. Max: Oh, don't embarrass me, come off as this person with social skills.Now, everybody knows  I work before everybody wakes up. It's sad, but it's true. So Elena thanks for coming and for taking time off your working hours to share your story with us. I connected with you after hearing your voice on LinkedIn, which by the way, is getting increasingly populated with crazy content.I don't know if that's part of the strategy that you support for your customers. But we've got a lot to cover for today's interview. I'm going to ask Elena how she ended up in the wonderful space of employer branding and production of content for employers.  And how to give a talent acquisition team, an edge through content and maybe if we're lucky and then I will sing a little bit for us.  I don't know. Elena: Depends how close we hit to the 20 minute mark. Max: Perfect. So yeah, Elena, tell us how did you end up in employer branding? Did you grow up dreaming to be in recruitment? Elena: Not at all. Didn't even realize this.Yeah I didn't grow up as a five-year old wishing I could recruit people to a company. I didn't think that existed, but where my story, you know, does start is I'm a former design researcher that used to work, you know, for design thinking kind of an ideal like environment. And how this really came to be was because of a project that I worked on there as a design researcher that inevitably would change my life and that of my co-founder. And in particularly it was a national kind of challenge here in the U S around, how do we connect 6 million young people to employment? And primarily young people who may not look good on resumes, Maybe they don't have a lot of job experience. Maybe, you know they've had to go through the juvenile justice system. So how do we connect those who are not in school, in the workforce to more meaningful pathways to employment. And that's where, you know, we saw our lives change and what our purpose would be, which was, we were talking to hundreds and hundreds of incredibly talented, young people of workforce development leaders and employers and what we saw loud and clear is that there was a hiring process that was shutting out non-traditional talent. And out of many of the challenges that were there. One of the things that we saw in particular was that you cannot be what you cannot see. And for young people who have never left their neighborhoods, they lack access and exposure to jobs, so at the essence of what we started to do, even prior to founding, skill scout was just a film jobs. Realistic in a visual way so that young people could kind of see what these jobs were actually like. And it started to work, they started to put their phones down. They started to ask questions, they started to get excited.And that's when we realized that we had something that we could hack for candidates, this opportunity for them to really understand what jobs were like. But inevitably for half companies to hack what it could be to really differentiate themselves to provide more realistic previews for candidates so that they have an opportunity to self screen in our self screen out.And that was really the origin for why we started what we do. Max: Yeah. Well thank you for reconnecting all of us and me to why we're in this industry. Yes. It's great to help people get to work and find employment and find a place in society and  I think whether you went to, you got the best education in the world, or you never graduated from high school it's a real mystery. What goes on in most people's jobs when you're at that age, when you're 20 something when you're starting out, you just don't know what you're getting into job descriptions. They don't tell you anything really. They don't feel real. Elena: Yeah the whole thing was, that we saw, look, job descriptions don't show what a job is like and resumes don't depict a candidate's skills. And so, you know, look at what we're seeing over the past several years. Of, types of via technologies or approaches like ours, like yours that are really coming into this market to, really helped to de-mystify and provide a bit more transparency, provide a bit more humanity into, you know, how we really care for in our case candidates.Max: And Elena, how does your business work? Do you typically work with a recruitment marketing team that says we want to run a big, national campaign for our graduate hiring program? Can you make us look good?  Is this kind of  what kind of agency type of arrangement, or is it more a pay as you go? How does it work? Elena: It's really any, and all of the above. So inevitably we exist to capture the humanity of work primarily through the power of film. And so we work on behalf of agencies. We work on behalf of companies and employer branding, recruitment marketing leaders, themselves who are looking to infuse content to support via the employee experience and, you know, for our conversation,  the candidate experience. And so what that might look like might be. Us, you know, working to produce a job video or a cultural video, or, as we're thinking about the pandemic, we have so many processes that are changing. We have so many approaches to how we might be interviewing and what the candidate needs to expect that, you know, right now we're actually creating a lot of content, new content that needs to be created.So that, hiring managers can ensure that candidates are still having as much of a seamless experience as they can during this time. Max: Right. And even though. The buzz is remote work, work from home and all that the majority of jobs still require physical presence still require for people to come in and some time put on a uniform and do the things they do.Elena: So yeah. Yeah, I mean, so especially, so for example,we recently worked with Kohl's. You know they're hiring warehouse, logistics, distribution jobs, like crazy, but even more importantly, they have to show the realities of today because candidates are paying attention to, in addition to everything else. How is that employer going to keep me safe, going to keep me healthy? And so we've certainly been working with, you know, several companies that are having to not just rethink well. Yeah, the world is trying to rethink workplace safety right now as it comes to the pandemic, but even more so, when it comes to the questions that we know that candidates need addressed, how are we ensuring that we're telling the story of safety? and that's a really big one right now that we're seeing within kind of the candidate story cycle. Max: Do you have a big theme like this for every year you've been in business like this year was masks and gloves and your videos and two years ago it was maybe something else. I don't know. Elena: No, I like this, you know, it's hard to actually define the trends as close as they are.Now I will say when we started out. Because, you know we had a focus. We primarily had built this business proudly on the shoulders of small to midsize manufacturers in the Midwest. So, you know, we spent two or three good solid years. You know, really working on behalf of the tool and die makers and the CNC, machinist and production operators and engineers. So certainly there's been themes like that in terms of work. Certainly in the beginning, it was around attracting young talent between you know, of a certain age. So that definitely was a huge theme then. So yeah we've definitely seen some of those cycles. I think in part, because, you know, from business owner to business owner, we're kind of pivoting and in thinking through our focus But it's certainly, definitely shifted now.Max: So I'm thinking maybe it's because I work in talent acquisition, so I'm very exposed. I'm thinking I'm saturated. I'm like safety, safety, safety, safety, safety. I mean, if everybody's talking about safety, then I need to, you know, we need to latch on to a new theme or something else, but maybe that's me, you know, I'm never looking for a job, but I'm always exposed. So I may be a little saturated perhaps for it is still universally a driving force, I guess, for all employer branding campaigns right now to take care of their people. And but you know, I mean I started as an entrepreneur attracted to the kind of ethos of the startup culture of the Air bnbs of the world and the Netflix of the world where it was very performance driven and it was not about safety. I'll say that it was about something else. So I'm just thinking that It must be difficult to differentiate yourself right now, if everybody's talking about the same thing. So maybe that will come back stronger talking about but switching gear a little bit talking about video do you have a position on whether video is better as user generated content from the employees, scruffy and real or polished and you know, manicured.Elena: There's room for both. I mean, and I think maybe it's worth talking through the considerations of what that is because we've seen it done really well on both ends. And in fact, we work with many companies where they literally leverage both professional video and user-generated video. Sometimes it's a mix. So I don't even necessarily know if it's about one or the other, certainly there is data behind why user generated works. I think in part we're all very used to social media we see this as being most authentic and raw, right. There is data around that, says  55% of candidates see employee generated content as being more trustworthy if you will, you know, but I would say, typically what happens is..Max: No stock photos for sure.Elena: No stock photos and no stock photos. Max: And you still use actors.Elena: NoMax: No actors. Okay. That's good. No, I mean, if you come to a company, people should be on the lookout for you because it's their chance to be on camera. Elena: Yeah. Well, clearly you know, getting back to the point of professional user generated typically for example, stories that might not change for a long time, or think about origin stories, founders, stories, you know, kind of missions and values, things that don't change. Often times that's where we might see companies who are investing in more kind of high-level professionally professional quality video, especially because if this might be seen by even more kind of external audiences and communities  in sometimes what it is sometimes it's just a capacity issue.You know, you have a talent acquisition team, employer branding team that is just stretched so thin that their ability to, I think, be able to implement something like a user generated initiative just might be too challenging at the time. And certainly then there's things around budget, but sometimes the reason why companies might go to a professional video versus user-generated is because of marketing and legal, right? Like, and we know these companies where you might have these marketing brand watch dogs, where it just might be just. Next to impossible for, you know, the HR teams to get approved, to be able to use user-generated. So there's definitely some factors that are there for while Max: that's going away, progressively where the strong hold on, we want to control every piece of media that goes out.I would imagine it's eroding with time, but I mean, these are powerful forces, marketing and legal, Elena: For sure. No, and certainly I think that Marketing and legal is coming around to it. I think part of that is also a need for control. And so we're kind of constantly seeing the tug of HR and marketing doing that.Max: There'll be an endless battle really. They'll never, yeah. So continue forever. Elena: Yeah. And certainly the case for user generated content outside of the, some of the data I shared is. One it's  you get to tell more stories more often. If what we're really trying to do is at scale, be able to tell a diversity of stories and experiences.This becomes a great way to do it. And because plus one you're democratizing the tools. You're allowing anyone from any country from anywhere they're sitting to all primarily have access to things that they already have access to. And our big saying is, if you can take videos of your dog, cats and kids, you can take videos of your workplace.And so there's, you know, certainly kind of a level of access that everyone has, but then people are also thinking about a lot. How updatable are these videos? That's the biggest thing is, you know, roles, change events, drastically change. Max: Oh yes. You're a star employee  will become a persona non grata.Elena: Yeah, exactly. And so that's kind of certainly a case, you know, as we're working with clients, Long-term where, you know, every year we might update that video because it's evolved or maybe in this case, the environment has changed in this manufacturing facility and everyone's wearing masks that they want to be able to kind of provide some freshness to that video while still keeping some of the foundation.So I could go on and on about that. But yeah, those are the key factors. Max: Yeah that's a question I always had talking about these employees that leave is, what about the content that they filmed before?  Are you in trouble? If you didn't get a release form and the right to use their image on your social media maybe, you know the answer.I know you're not a lawyer, but. Elena: You know, I would say primarily most folks that might be participating in engagements that we work on typically are all signing media releases. And typically there is that language where you know, that employer you know, has kind of rights to that footage.Max: You guys I'm sure.But if we do like fully user generated content and we just kinda let the. Elena: Yeah, I think that really depends on the culture of the company. I think so much of that is typically defined by what are kind of  the rules already in place for so many other things. And so you kind of get a sense already if that's the company that's like, as soon as that person leaves we're done or inevitably look at that, if that employees still had a great experience and they're in a, you know, a little fraction of a video it may not be the biggest cause for concern.Max: Yeah, sure.   I guess  I'm getting my models.  My demo models you know, on the cheap and I felt a little bit guilty asking my staff to play out on videos. So maybe that's where it's coming from. And well you see some trends in terms of the way media is being consumed?The rise of TikTok and the new platforms does that affect the production work that you do? Are people I would assume wanting to consume shorter and shorter videos might be one trend. Are there other trends like that? Elena: Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, more than one, anything, what we're seeing even back from when we started six years ago was that video is no longer a nice to have, it's a must haveso that's certainly kind of becoming even for some of your most traditional HR, unfortunately, maybe a checkoff, the list. You know, certainly some of the big trends we're seeing is that you know, just the need for more and more content. All the time, whether that's around celebrations or a project, right.It's never, here's this one big video initiative and we're pushing it out for this one year. It really all kind of happens over time. And it's a living organism just in the same way that your workforce and your company is a living organism. So we've certainly seen a lot of trends around that. And certainly then the user generated content, which is something that, you know, we've kind of done really all the way from the beginning in terms of offering that at this point now for many companies, it may be the only way, right? You do have folks that are now all kind of working from home and everyone kind of has to figure out how do we still push out, you know, quality content? How long do we wait? So we've definitely seen an uptick in that, but I will actually, you know, at least I pushed back a while.It is true that candidates are, you know, anyone online is going for shorter and shorter and shorter content. Sometimes it's not just because we have short attention spans sometimes it's because. The content is bad. And so, you know, especially I think the kind of new energy that I want to bring as a leader to skill scout films, is that, you know, look, you could create incredible, beautiful 20 minute documentaries about someone's work and the entire time that person doesn't realize that this might be someone who's really talking about a role. And so that's what I think is really interesting about storytelling is that I would argue Max: Is that just a story or this movie, are we going to go inside the life of a warehouse operator forklift driver. You can stretch that out.Elena: Yeah. We just Maya for talking about just kind of  you know the changing kind of world of work. Absolutely. But it goes beyond, and I think this is what we're seeing, right. Especially for this generation, Z  you know, our personal lives, our work lives are often one in the same, you know, this is no longer separate.And so for me, what I see as being a good film, That people resonate with is because it gets personal is because they, you go behind the scenes of that person outside of their suit. And outside of what you see on zoom and you really helped to kind of understand the context of their lives and even more so really start to see why is it that they do what they do and what does bring them meaning?Max: I work with a lot of call center companies and so. They're not a consumer brands, so nobody knows about them except in the countries where they hire, they're known as an employer brands, which gives them quite a lot of freedom, actually, because if you have McDonald's or Coca-Cola, maybe  you have a much stronger marketing department, you have less room to play.And it was like a beautiful campaign. I remember the exci where. It was a single mother that was talking about how work allowed her to send her daughter to school. You know, these kinds of stories  that just lifted everybody's hearts. And I'd like to see more of that really kind of fallen off with it.Elena: That's what makes it all relatable? You know, like I don't have to know about exactly what you do, right. If I were to see a film, right. About recruitment automation, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Some of that is likely to go over my head, but what won't be right is when I get to see, Hey,  like he has this wonderful relationship with his mother or kind of look at who, how he's honoring his mentor.Right. And these are all kinds of life experiences that many of us have, or have a connection to negative or positive, but it allows us to feel something. And that allows me to even better understand how you show up to work as a leader of talk, push.Max: Okay I'm going to give it a go. The zoom revolution, zoom was maybe the best performing communication platform of 2020 an opportunity for people  saying and get-together on group calls.  Did you use that medium to create some content last year, or is that just using the generated.You let the other companies handle that without any,Elena: Oh, this is so I'm a heavy user and fan of Prezi, which is, you know, originally a presentation tool and they've come out with a really great video product. And so, yeah great for presentations, great for training, sales enablement, all that kind of stuff.So  it's been a really cool product. I've been really excited to use it more as it just came out last year. Long story short. That is all to say, no, I don't sing on every presentation. If at all ever there typically, never is a reason why I would break out into song during a sales conversation, but a Prezi put out a fun challenge to create a 32nd to video that they could potentially leverage in a real and the winner.Would receive a $1,000 donation to the charity of their choice.Max: Oh, and did you win ?Elena: I did ! Max: did you, did you give it to the Elena Valentine charity fund?Elena:I gave it to Mezcla media collective, which is a nonprofit that I helped to co-found. Max: Yeah. Okay, great. And what does this nonprofit do? we might as well, a little bit of advertising for it. Elena: Yeah. We're a kind of a nonprofit community of femme identifying filmmakers of color, primarily in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. So  we started in 2017 and we've grown to well over 600 community members. Max: Congratulations.Elena:Thank you.Max: Okay, well, what, where can our listeners find out more about the Mezcla media collective and Skill Scouts and what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? Elena: Be my friend on LinkedIn, let's start there. And however, I can be helpful. Either myself or Skill Scout will always find the right path for you.Max: We didn't do any singing. I just don't know how to bring that up.Elena:  I haven't been a part of a band in years.Max: Where can people log on to listen to you sing.Connect on LinkedIn. And maybe if they asked nicely, you'll send them a little on LinkedIn. You know, you can send a little voice now.Yeah.  I hear that's an effective way to do sales these days. If I had your voice, I wouldn't hesitate a second. So thanks for coming on the show and all the best between 21.Elena: Perfect.Inspiring words from Elena Valentine, CEO of skill scout, who reminded us that there's nothing like a personal story. Tell the story of why the people came to work for you. Their personal story, and maybe as a differentiator in a world where everything is bite-sized and short, maybe this is an opportunity to go deeper and tell a long story and try to make a film that people want to watch.Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll come back for more. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Please share with your friends. Thanks.

How do you bounce back after losing 50% of revenues? I've never cried during a podcast interview until I interviewed Elena Valentine. I wanted to interview Elena on how she scaled her company to 7-figures bootstrapped. However, it was of the most meaningful conversations I've had about leading through a storm. Elena's storm was the pandemic stripping her company of 50% of revenues in 2020. The entrepreneurial ecosystem tends to discuss when people failed or when they succeed. But what about what it's like to fall? To get back up? To keep going? THESE moments define GREAT leaders & companies. Here's what you'll learn from Elena, Founder of SkillScout: How external validation led to a worthiness conundrum. The raw reality of what it's like to fight for your team so they can feed their families. How she redefined success in 2020 not as growth but rather what she wanted to be remembered for as a leader. Elena successfully navigated her company through & WILL be remembered for that. What will you be remembered for as a leader? Subscribe & Rate Now. #getsshitdonepodcast Learn More About the Get Sh!t Done: shegetsshitdone.com Have feedback, a show topic you want us to cover, or just want to say hi: tribe@shegetsshitdone.com

Elena is an expert in leveraging video stories in the workplace. With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about the world of work. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has since built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. She was recently named “HR Superhero of the Year” by DisruptHR Chicago. She is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective. A non-profit that elevates women filmmakers of color.  If you like what you hear, we would like to encourage you to subscribe to our channel! We would also appreciate it if you would rate this channel by going here: RateThisPodcast.com/inclusiveaf We create this podcast as a labor of love. But if you would like to support this channel you can buy us a cup of coffee here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/InclusiveAF

Elena is an expert in leveraging video stories in the workplace. With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about the world of work. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has since built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. She was recently named “HR Superhero of the Year” by DisruptHR Chicago. She is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective. A non-profit that elevates women filmmakers of color.  If you like what you hear, we would like to encourage you to subscribe to our channel! We would also appreciate it if you would rate this channel by going here: RateThisPodcast.com/inclusiveaf We create this podcast as a labor of love. But if you would like to support this channel you can buy us a cup of coffee here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/InclusiveAF

Elena Valentine, CEO/Co-Founder with Skill Scout, shares some #SnackableHR.

Elena Valentine is the CEO and co-founder of Skill Scout, an organization that specializes in talent acquisition and employer branding. She is also the co-founder and Board President of Mezcla Media Collective, whose goal is to elevate women of color and non-binary filmmakers in Chicago. She joins Mike Wood to discuss Skill Scout’s mission and how they have been carrying it out. Skill Scout Elena and her colleague realized that many youths lacked access and exposure to job opportunities, and were hindered from achieving success by their lack of knowledge. They founded Skill Scout to provide youths and the wider community with the opportunity to understand which jobs would be the right fit for them. Skill Scout captures and shares the stories of employees from various industries and brings their jobs to life on video. Humans at Work Elena describes Skill Scout’s latest project: a series called Humans at Work. It tells the raw, authentic and emotional stories of employees who have found their purpose as people first, workers second.  This series stemmed from a need to increase the number of positive stories in the workplace, as they have the power to shift bias and counterbalance and form our brains in new ways. One of the major objectives for filming was to recognize and celebrate employees, she adds. When employees feel appreciated, they are more engaged and loyal to their companies. COVID-19’s Impact We are not working from home; we are working at home during a crisis. In previous generations it was the social norm to have a different persona for the workplace than you do at home, but because of the virtual and mostly remote nature of the global workforce, it is almost impossible to separate your work life from your home life. It is important to have empathy during these uncertain times.  Resources Elena Valentine on LinkedIn Email: elena@skillscout.com SkillScout.com HumansAt.work

Elena Valentine CEO of Skill Scout joins Serge and Shelley to discuss the impact that video can have on your recruitment marketing efforts. Elena shares her insights on how companies can share true authentic stories through video.

As the leader of a business that set out to prioritize hiring women of color from the moment of their inception back in 2014, Skill Scout now finds themselves validated and invigorated in a renewed way, as the world shifts its consciousness and Black Lives Matter holds our attention. Skill Scout is a workplace media company to help tell the stories of work on video as a way to attract, hire, or engage talent. The passion Elena brings to her company is nothing short of manifested life purpose- and her intentions to lead with empathy shine through. This episode gets into the ideas of social justice, the importance of empowering and hiring young people, and the advantage of naivete when launching a new product. We discuss the responsibility of taking the weight of a crisis on your shoulders as a leader and making your workforce feel empowered, safe, and confident. All in all, through the challenges, we discuss how being an entrepreneur is a privilege and to creativity is the ultimate gift. Statement Sip: "Growth vs Grace"

Abby Cheesman, Founder @ Skill Scout and Ryan O'Donnell, CEO at EmployUs discuss Easy ways to use video in recruiting (that doesn't break the bank)

Right now, adaptation is the name of the game. In this episode, we break down one of many marketers’ biggest challenges at the moment— going from a live world to a digital one. In our introduction, host Elena Valentine shares some best practices for recording quality, compelling DIY video. Then, corporate speaker Ryan Estis joins us to share how he’s learning to deliver a high-impact customer experience digitally (10:01). Dr. Nick Morgan stops by to explain why video-conferencing is so frustrating — and the science behind improving it (17:47). Finally, comedian O’mar Finley shares what it’s like performing a standup show to his laptop (24:30). Want even more on making great video? Check out these great resources from Elena and the Skill Scout team. Click here for more about Margins from Managing Editor: http://www.managingeditor.com/podcast Subscribe to our Friday morning email: http://www.managingeditor.com/subscribe

On this episode of the Jason Cavness Experience we talk to Elena Valentine, CEO/Cofounder at Skill Scout cavnessHR website: https://www.cavnessHR.com Jason's email: jasoncavness@cavnessHR.com @cavnessHR   across social media @jasoncavnessHR across social media We talk about the following How Elena started out in media. What are some common mistakes when making videos Her entrepreneurial journey Why is HR important Elena's Bio Elena is an expert in leveraging video stories in the workplace. With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about the world of work. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has since built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. She was recently named “HR Superhero of the Year” by DisruptHR Chicago. She is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective. A non-profit that elevates women filmmakers of color. Next up for Elena and her team is the Humans@Work. Elena's Social Media Elena's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenavalentine1/ Elena's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elena_Valentine Elena's Advice While we are working remotely while our lives are being uprooted. Right now is finding ways that we can stay creative and grounded. One of the things that I'm doing every day as someone who does video is I'm creating  a short video piece every day. I've committed to every time that we are in quarantine, to create one short video piece a day. This isn't necessarily about work. It's just to provide moments of pause for myself and for others if it happens to strike them. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nancy Harris chats with Elena Valentine, CEO and co-founder of Skill Scout, an organization which specializes in talent acquisition and employer branding, about a more inclusive way to build your workforce. Here are a few highlights from their conversation: Elena is dedicated to looking past qualifications and sourcing talent in trendy ways: by media, which she calls the literacy of the 21st century. You cannot be what you cannot see, Elena says.  The idea for Skill Scout stemmed from Elena's and her colleague's realization that many youths and disenfranchised communities lacked access and exposure to job opportunities. “Production light” is a method Skill Scout uses to help companies attract more employees. By encouraging the employees to show their experiences via their own smartphones, they democratize the tools so more narratives can be shared. Elena quotes, “If you want to change the story, you must change the storyteller.” Elena shares some of the backlash she received from putting women of color at the center of her other business, Mezcla Media Collective. She explains that rather than being about diversity and access, the purpose of her decision was about equity. We have to look at our employees holistically, as more than just workers and as people with unique interests and families, Elena says. At the heart of diversity and inclusion is feeling like you belong. Resources SkillScout.com

Let’s Fix Work Episode 92: On today's show, I'm speaking to Elena Valentine, the Co-Founder, CEO, and Servant Leader of Skill Scout, a Chicago-based filmmaking company. Elena and her colleagues are workplace documentarians—they tell workplace stories. What's a workplace story? Well, it could be a video on a careers page. It could be a film attached to a job description. Or, it could be a welcome video on your first day of work.  Listen in as Elena and I talk about the many different work environments and how every job has a purpose and a story behind it. If you're interested in a far-ranging discussion about workplace identity, tune into this episode of Let’s Fix Work.    In this episode you’ll hear: BTS (behind the scenes) of a workplace filmmaker, what they do and how they do it. How social justice and equality intersect in workplace storytelling. Bridging the gap between HR departments and people in power with those doing the work. How Elena became a workplace filmmaker and why this is important to her. Elena answers the question, “Are there work environments that lend themselves to better stories compared to others?” The ethical dilemma of being asked to work with a company or organization whose values, mission, or viewpoints don’t necessarily match your values or those of your company.   Resources from this episode: Skill Scout Skill Scout on YouTube Elena on Twitter Elena on LinkedIn Laurie on Instagram Laurie on LinkedIn Read more from Laurie Work with Laurie   *** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com   

In this long conversation with the one and only Elena Valentine, we get into what employer branding means, branding fan fiction, telling better stories and all sorts of other goodies. Don't miss this one!   Show notes: What?! You don't know Elena Valentine?! Twitter, Skill Scout, LinkedIn Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.

In the world of Talent Acquisition (and attraction!), providing a clear and compelling message to candidates has never been more critical for organizations that want to differentiate themselves.  Join us for a lively and informative discussion with Elena Valentine of Skill Scout  when we discuss the foundations of effective storytelling and explore how the use of video can enhance the experience.    

Abby Cheesman from Skill Scout discusses tips and tactics for creating video that attracts the talent you seek. Transcript Chris Russell: Leveraging video to attract talent. That's next, on the RecTech Podcast. Speaker 2: Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Chris Russell: Hey everyone. Welcome to the only podcast at the intersection of recruiting and technology. I'm your host, Chris Russell. Our show of course is sponsored by our friends at emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. Head over to emissary.ai. Click on the Book a Demo and self schedule yourself a quick 30 minute demo with the team. Matt, Brendan, and Euan. And learn more about how text recruiting can really speed up and make your recruiting process much more efficient overall. So it's really great technology, overlays onto your ATS, and lets you do one-on-one campaigns. Lets you do group campaigns out there. Short codes for events. A lot of great stuff there around text recruiting. And if you're not texting and recruiting today, then you're not basically becoming a modern recruiter overall. Chris Russell: And of course we're sponsored also by workhere.com, the hyper-local [inaudible 00:01:20] delivery tool. WorkHere's geofencing ad platform will help you pinpoint your best to match talent. They attract passive [inaudible 00:01:29] with enticing targeted mobile ads where they live, work, and shop. So head over to workhere.com. Be sure to tell them you heard it on the podcast, and get a demo from them as well. Really good job advertising technology that you really probably haven't tried yet. So we'll give them a shot. People like FedEx use them, Uber, Great Clips. Carvana uses them. So check them out at workhere.com. Chris Russell: All right, quick shout out to one of my listeners, [Norm Fleming 00:01:59] messaged me on LinkedIn this week. He's an IT recruiter out there in Waukee, Iowa. So hello Norm, thanks for listening. And glad you're on board. Tell your friends to check out the show as well. Chris Russell: All right, so today you're going to hear Abby Cheesman from my friends over at Skill Scout, the video job company. They'll come to your place of work. They'll interview your employees and create great two minute videos out there for your employer rank purposes. Anyway, she's going to talk today about how to leverage video properly. And this was audio from I took out of the recent webinar they did or rectechlive.com if you want to go see that. I extracted the audio, cleaned it up a bit, and put it into the podcast here. So she's got a lot of great tips and tactics around how to make your video stand out overall. So really good stuff here, lot of good takeaways. So hope you enjoy the audio, and I'll see you next time. Chris Russell: All right, good afternoon everyone. How's everyone doing today? You got a last show of the year for RecTech Live, and I got my pal Abby Cheesman here from Skill Scout in Chicago. Say hello Abby. Abby Cheesman: Hey guys. Chris Russell: All right, we're going to talk about using video to attract talent today, and she's got some great slides to show us. I've seen this presentation earlier this year and thought it was great. So I wanted to have her on and talk about video. We haven't really done that yet much on the show overall. So you are the co-founder or CFO of Skill Scout, a company based in Chicago, which does employer videos. Give us a quick history of the company and a little bit more about what you guys do. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So maybe about six years ago, Elena, my co-founder and I, we were working at a consulting firm. And we got put on a project of how do we more meaningfully connect people to employment. So we talked to a bunch of job seekers, bunch of companies, and we heard something over and over. It's really hard to know what a job is all about until you've done it before. Abby Cheesman: So long story short, we started filming behind the scenes. What is it like to be a welder? What is it like to be a nurse? And from there, we really just got started with Skill Scout. Abby Cheesman: So we take a research approach to filming. So typically if you're going to film something, you come as a script. And this is what we're going to talk about. With Skill Scout, we treat it like discoveries. So I want to learn as I'm filming with you. I want to hear from the people in the position to know what it's all about filming. So we come in, we have a discussion guide. Film days are usually super fun. So we go in, we learn about a workplace from the people that are in the jobs. So we know what we might capture, but typically we open it up for discovery. Chris Russell: Let's get to the slides and tell everyone about what we're going to learn about today. Abby Cheesman: So today I'm going to walk you through some tips and tricks, with the idea being that you could go back to your workplace on Monday and/or tomorrow if you're a real go getter. And start filming your jobs. You don't need a huge budget. You don't need a film crew. You can start filming with your phone. So I'm going to share some examples. I'm going to share some real tactical ways that you can get started. Chris Russell: Fire up your slides and we'll get rolling here. If the [inaudible 00:05:31] has questions, just throw them in the chat there and I'll stop Abby and ask her. And Abby over to you. Abby Cheesman: Sassy title, your job post is as boring as this webinar. I'm only kidding. This webinar's not going to be boring. So Chris gave me a great introduction. My name is Abby. I'm a job nerd. I get to film jobs for a living, so I get to see what it's like to be a flight attendant, to work on planes, to be a nurse, to work at the department of corrections. Abby Cheesman: I have an awesome team based in Chicago. We have a real intentional strategy to provide opportunities for women in the filmmaking industry. Particularly women of color. And one of the things that Elena, my co-founder, she's the one on the end there. We've been really intentional about women of color because our industry is typically super male and super white. And we believe that if you change the story by changing the storyteller. So you're able to share a little bit more diversity in the stories that you tell if you have a diverse team that's working with it. Chris Russell: I love the job nerd title, by the way. Abby Cheesman: I wish I could put that in business cards. I love it. So we've been able to tell stories for some of the biggest brands. I never thought I'd be filming with Unilever, and Nike, and McDonald's. And one of the things that our clients have in common is that it's really hard to tell people what your jobs are all about, and give an authentic preview. Abby Cheesman: So I want to pause and give a moment of reflection for all of you guys who are watching. When was the moment that you knew you were in the right place for your job? Chris, you and I talked about this very briefly before we began about being an entrepreneur, working for yourself. But reflect on this question and we're going to come back to this. When was the moment that you knew you were in the right place? Chris Russell: Probably I got some kind of thank you from a client or a listener of my podcast maybe. And that feedback really meant a lot to me. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. Mine was when I was standing in that jet engine at American Airlines filming what it's like to maintain and keep those aircraft safe. Just the surreality of being able to show jobs that nobody else has access to. That was my moment. Abby Cheesman: But let's talk a little bit about the hiring process. So the hiring process is a little bit like packing one more bullet point on that job post. Fitting into skinny jeans, this candidate's a great fit. Or your Facebook profile. Job looks great. Here's what it is. But this is what it looks like for most people. Right? This is an astounding data point. This is 2019. Only 1% of job posts have visuals. This is still a true statistic. Chris Russell: Yeah. I've been after employers to at least add a picture in there of something, of a person doing the job or some kind of visual image. Because it's a visual web, and people want to see rather than read. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. And that's including pictures, which is the crazy part. Because pictures cost nearly nothing to produce. And along all of this, we have about the attention span of a goldfish. This is true for any adult with a fully developed cognitive brain. You have about eight seconds to capture our attention, the same as a goldfish. Abby Cheesman: So if we think about trying to attract talent to our brand, these are the people, the go getters, the activists that we want. Eight seconds is not very long. Abby Cheesman: I want to talk a little bit about the laws of attraction. So I have a psychology background. Brain science is fascinating to me. So this is a couple of studies that Elena and I have looked into. So just get an understanding of what the next generation of talent, Gen Z that's coming into the workforce now looks like. And I think if we design solutions that appeal to the modern job seeker, even if we're focusing on Gen Z, these are going to be human centered principles that any job seeker can appreciate. Abby Cheesman: So a couple of things that we know. 98% own smart phones. 85% report that they learn about new products and services on social media. This one is crazy, and I can attest to it just on an anecdotal level. 71% are watching more than three hours of video every day. So I have a seven year old and a four year old, and YouTube is life man. Just anything that you could explore is on YouTube. Abby Cheesman: But three hours a day, that's taking out of TV time. 50% are part of a minority ethnicity by 2020. So diversity stories and representation matter to the youngest job seekers. But everybody in the workforce. So just keep these laws of attraction in mind as we start talking about video. Abby Cheesman: Social platforms, we're spending a lot of time on our phone. We talked about three hours of video a day. 70% of that is happening on YouTube. So people report YouTube as the app of the generation. We're receiving about 3,000 text messages a month. Most people prefer prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So this stat is always super interesting as we think about marketing spends. I would say as a business owner, Facebook is one of the first places that I think about advertising. And when it comes to talent, LinkedIn is another that comes to mind. But when we talk to younger job seekers, Instagram and Snapchat is where it's at. Tick tock, keep your eye on that one. That one's up and coming. And I think while it might not have ties to recruiting right now, I think that's going to be a medium that's more and more popular where job seekers are. Abby Cheesman: So there are some rules to being a good participant on social media. Keep your content short and sweet. Spice it up with visuals. Video is even better than photos, but any kind of visual. Highlight global locales and background. So representation of the different people that make up your workforce. Showcase how you impact the world. So what are you doing as a company and what is your spot in the world, and who do you impact? That's a really important story. Abby Cheesman: And then leverage the right social media and communication platform for your business. So we work with companies that are hiring welders. That might not be on LinkedIn, but they certainly are on Snapchat, and Instagram, and Facebook. So knowing enough about your industry, you guys probably know the channels to reach your people. Abby Cheesman: So remember when I asked this question? We talked a little bit about remembering the moment. You guys have stories, each one of the stories that you would tell yourself in your head, that has heart. Those are the kinds of things that job seekers are interested in hearing. And, those stories translate very beautifully to recruiting on video. Abby Cheesman: So a little data about job videos. A job posting with a video is viewed three times longer than a posting without. We use about 85% of our brain power to process visuals. So that's not text on page. That is a visual that is lighting up different parts of your brain than when you're reading. And, you get about 46% more views with a posting that has a video. And as I mentioned, psychology background. So this data point always sticks with me. We recall about 65% of what we see in here and only 15% of what we read. So if the only way that a job is interacting with your post is by reading bullet points, no matter how well written, they're still only going to remember about 15%. Abby Cheesman: So video over streaming webinars is notoriously sketchy. So, I shared a couple of links in the chat. But I want to tell you a little story about SAC Wireless. So this is a company that came to us in partnership with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. They were working on a challenge. They're hiring tower climbers. So these are the people that are building the infrastructure of 5G in our country. And they can't build towers fast enough to launch 5G. So this is an in demand kind of position. SAC was spending millions of dollars on agency recruiters, and they weren't getting the talent that would stay. And they discovered as part of their exit interviews, is that people didn't understand until they got to a tower how high up it is. So a very simple and very low hanging fruit piece of content for them was a video that shows people climbing the towers. Abby Cheesman: So we produced this video, and you guys can go check it out after the webinar. But it's a one and a half minute piece of people who work on a tower climbing team, talking about what it was like looking up at that tower. The safety and training that's required. What it feels like to work with a crew and travel with them, and ride in the same truck. Abby Cheesman: So they launched this video on Facebook. So this was a native post, which is what I recommend doing with posts on Facebook. So instead of linking to Vimeo or YouTube, upload it directly to Facebook, which is what they did. And they got this incredible response that they never expected. People started sharing the crap out of this video. So they had over 100,000 views in the first couple of weeks, and what they noticed was that their team was sharing it out. Wives were sharing, "Hey, check out what my husband does." And it became this organic piece of content that people were excited to show others. And it was one of their best performing pieces of content to get people into the funnel, applying for the job, and hired. Abby Cheesman: So this one video translated to the savings of millions of dollars for SAC Wireless, and it was part of a larger campaign. But this piece of content really jump-started employee referrals, advertising. And, it solved the problem of people not knowing that towers were 1,200 feet tall until they got to the job. Chris Russell: 1,200 feet? Abby Cheesman: Yes. When I watched that video, I still get heart palpitations. I was there when we filmed it. I would make a terrible tower climber. But for the right person, they see that and they're like, "Yep, I can build that." Chris Russell: Yep. Was this [inaudible 00:16:32] the candidates coming in from the video? Talk a little about how they might've- Abby Cheesman: Yes, they had some infrastructure behind that Facebook post. So they did do some lightweight tracking, and the Facebook post was their best channel that led to actual hires. And I think there were a few reasons for this. One, the video is just great. It's shared by people in the industry. And tower climbers tend to all work in pods, and so a lot of them know each other. It's kind of a small world. So that was a place that got eyeballs on content, maybe better than on LinkedIn or other channels. So that was part of it. Abby Cheesman: And then they linked directly to the application. So there wasn't like a link to a careers page and then I have to go find the job, and this and that. You could go directly from seeing this video to going into the application. So I think that was a win. But there's certainly more data. And Crystal Stanfield, she's since moved on from SAC, but she speaks at a lot of events. I would encourage you to go see her. She breaks down exactly how much money they saved, and how they did it and the rest of the ecosystem. Which included things like micro sites and using content and other channels. Chris Russell: I looked, and the video's about two minutes, 20 seconds. Correct? Abby Cheesman: Two minutes, 20 seconds. Yeah. And that's a little long, and I think the content is interesting and so it lends itself to be a couple seconds longer than I'd recommend. But typically we're looking to one to two minutes. Chris Russell: Yep. Abby Cheesman: So how'd they do it? This is what it could like to film a job video, right? You got 12 people on set, you got a grip. It could also look like this. For SAC, we did film a cameras and flew a drone just to get to the height and safely capture the position. But this is also what it can look like to film a job video. A cell phone, a tripod, a microphone, and two people talking. Abby Cheesman: So every single one of us has a cell phone. Every single one of our cell phones, if purchased in the last five to seven years, has a powerful camera on it. There are a few things that you need to make your camera even more powerful. So we package this up, but I can also share a link after this session to exactly what you need. Abby Cheesman: One is a tripod to keep your phone stable while you're filming. The second is a microphone. So phones are set up to capture audio as you're holding it up to your head. So capturing across the room can be tricky. And with a microphone, you can capture beautiful audio. And it's less than $25. And then a handheld tripod so that you can take nice, smooth pans. And with these three core things, you can really take your footage from being amateur quality to pretty high quality. Abby Cheesman: But let's start at the beginning. So one of the things that we found as we've talked to companies is that you have to be in the right moment to be sharing video. You can't put lipstick on a pig. What you are is what is going to appear on video. So I think most companies probably are ready for video, but we put together a little quiz so that you could do a little self reflection of is this a place that you really feel passionate about recruiting people for? And what are some of the stories that compel people to want to work with you? So it's just a self-reflection to see if video is a tool that you're ready for in your toolkit. Abby Cheesman: So if you take that quiz, you feel good, you would recommend it as a place to work. Here's some of the ingredients for a great job video. Be specific. So for the tower climber, we picked a specific role. SAC was hiring many roles, but that role was specific enough that we needed to go film it separately. Keep it real. We talked about the fear of heights. We talked about how hard the position is, that you're working in weather conditions. Two minutes tops. As Chris pointed out, we broke that rule. But two minutes is typically the sweet spot of how long candidates are going to give you. And show, don't tell. So while we might conduct the interviews in a quiet spot with good audio and good lighting, we want to see more than we want to see a talking head. So we want to go and see the work environment. Abby Cheesman: A little bit more about being specific. One video that I recommend to people is creating a realistic job preview. There's all kinds of content that you can create about your company. If you've not done video before, realistic job preview's a great place to start. So you can start thinking about one job that might be high volume or high turnover, an area of concentration for you. Talk to one to two people who are in the job, who are actually working in that role. Abby Cheesman: And then keep it real. So as I mentioned at the beginning, we take an ethnographic research mindset. So come in as a researcher. You might think you know what the job is on paper, but be prepared to discover and be open to what you see. You want to capture productivity. Don't stop it. Don't use a script. Use an interview guide. And remember that employees are the expert of their experience. So again, there's always the job description and then there's the, "Okay hey, this is how it really works." Those are the things that you're looking for. Abby Cheesman: Most importantly, show the stuff that makes people quit. This view here is why I would quit on my first day as a tower climber. You want to show people that. If there are things about your work environment. We have one client that it's an armored car service that all of the employees are armed. And for some people, that would be a deal breaker. And you don't want them to discover that deal breaker in their training or their first 90 days. That should come this early in the process as possible so people can self select in or self select out. Abby Cheesman: Two minutes tops. I checked our data today. We have a whole bunch of job videos that are live through our accounts. And I think the stat today was one minute and 49 seconds on average that people will watch. But it's less than two minutes. So giving people the top two to three things that are most important to share about the job, and spending about 30 seconds on each one of those is a good framework. Chris Russell: Excellent. Abby Cheesman: Show, don't tell. So you want to minimize talking heads, you want to show the work environment. One question I get a lot is, "What if we're in a boring office?" That's a great question. You're in a boring office, show the boring office, but also show the impact of your work. So if you're working in banking, you should certainly show inside of the branch of what are your banks. But maybe also go out to the community and showcase some of the things that you're doing in the community. Whether that's financial literacy training or other impact that you have. Abby Cheesman: Another example of this is in manufacturing. So while we might capture footage inside of the plant, we also want to go see what those products do in people's lives because that's important to candidates. So if you're building a medical device that helps give people allergy medicine faster and saves lives, that's an important part of the story to tell visually. So there are ways that you can depict the boring office. You should be realistic about that. If they're going to work in a boring office, show it. But also show the impact and how people stay committed to the work. Chris Russell: I'll also say too, you can show your employees in action outside the office too. Maybe if you're having a dinner or happy hour or something like that. Abby Cheesman: Oh absolutely. Events, anything that the team members are getting together after work. Anything that you can show to give people a flavor of what the experience is like working with you. That's the stuff you want to film. Chris Russell: Yup. Abby Cheesman: Teamwork makes the dream work. So, I've got a couple of clips and they're of course not going to play nicely over the stream. But, using employee generated clips is one of the easiest ways that you can capture content. Giving people a quick direction of, "Hey, can you take some footage across your work environment this morning?" And give them some ideas of what they could shoot. You will quickly get tons of different perspectives of your workplace from the eyes of the people who work in the jobs. Abby Cheesman: So employee generated content. Opening filming up to anybody who is willing to contribute is a really easy, fast way to get video. So this is one that we did in that armored car company. Here's another one. This job is a raw video clip of transportation assistance. No, what it really is, is driving really expensive custom order cars off of the boat at the Port of Baltimore. And this is a really different kind of job than what you would think on paper. So just getting a couple of employee generated clips showing the car, hearing the sound of the engine rev. Gives people a much more tangible feel for the job. Abby Cheesman: So we didn't watch the videos, but I do like to pose the questions, what did you notice about any of the visuals that we showed about that work environment? It was real. Yeah. And you can see that working with that armored car service is very different than the transportation assistant, is very different than the tower climber. Just the quick visual. You will remember that better, 65% more. And you'll be able to relate back to it, to that visual experience of watching that video. When you go to get the recruiter phone call or apply for the position. Chris Russell: Abby, question. When you go to your clients and you first talk to them, do you kind of look and see if their employees are already sharing stuff on social media they might not know about? Abby Cheesman: That is a great question. Yes. A lot of our clients actually have hashtags or employee generated groups. So Nike for example, has swoosh life. And that's customers and employees sharing experience alike. So sourcing stuff that people are already sharing about your brand is a great way to just kind of do an analysis of what's out there about us. And oftentimes, it's a great way to identify people who are already filming stuff and would be more than happy to be an ambassador or contribute their footage to your project. But that's a wonderful question. Abby Cheesman: And if you don't have that yet, you will also notice the people who are super active on social media. Those are the people that are top of my list for the people that I want to enlist in filming. If somebody is super comfortable sharing cat videos or kid videos, those are the people that are going to be excited about filming their workplace. Abby Cheesman: So we talked a little bit about what you need. Tripod, microphone, handheld tripod, and a lens cleaner. Phones are filthy. Cleaning them off makes the video much crispier. Abby Cheesman: Capturing quality video, audio is unforgivable. So earlier when we first started the echo, I was speaking super slowly because I was listening to myself. Audio can be super distracting, right? So you can forgive bad video to some extent. You cannot forgive bad audio. It's extremely distracting to the brain if there's something crackly or something that you can't quite hear the person speaking. So audio first, always use a microphone. Abby Cheesman: Second is lighting. The sun is your friend. Camera phones are super sensitive to light, and they're trying and trying to get better. But the more that you can utilize natural outdoor lighting, so sitting by a window. Or generate your own lighting. Get a halo light that cost 40 bucks on Amazon. Lighting is going to take your quality from super amateur to much more professional lifting. And it'll actually capture the 1080 or 4K level of quality. Without good lighting, your phone can't capture that resolution. Abby Cheesman: Film horizontally. This is always controversial and I'm constantly reevaluating this. But for now, phones capture higher resolution if you hold them horizontally. We see more mediums come up like Instagram, Snapchat, where vertical is how people are capturing and sharing. So I think we need to keep an eye on this. But the most important thing is keeping it consistent. So if you're going to edit clips together, you want them either to all be horizontal or all be vertical. Abby Cheesman: And lastly, heart. So letting people show who they really are. Not being too corporatey or too prescriptive. And show the nerdiness. Like I'm a job nerd. I'm happy saying that. You have nerds at your company too, and you want to show that flare. So if you've got engineers that geek out about something, capture the heart and the spirit of why they're excited to work with you and that will be super attractive to other people who nerd out in that way. Abby Cheesman: We've got a ton of tutorials on our site that just show you how to set up your audio. Some of the technical mistakes we made early in the first couple of years filming on phones. We've made a tutorial for everything so that you can capture the best quality possible in your phone. Lighting. How to film B-roll. So let's talk a little B-roll. Chris Russell: Yeah, explain B-roll to the audience. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So when we think about the ingredients of a job video, the first is an interview. You want to talk to somebody on camera about their experience working. The second piece is all the visual footage. So we said minimize talking heads. The interview is a talking head. You want to go out and capture a visual B-roll of everything that they talked about. So if a nurse is talking about checking vitals. In your mind, you should be making a note of take some B-roll of checking vitals, take some B-roll of filling out patient paperwork. The B-roll is all of the beautiful video footage that goes on top of the interview so that we can see what the person is talking about. Abby Cheesman: I also shared in the chat an example of a recruiting video we did recently for Wendy's. And you can see how we used their values on top of what people were saying to really tie their story together. Abby Cheesman: So here's how we captured that video. We used this exact list of questions. "Tell me who you are, where we're at today. What do you do here? Walk me through a typical day." And when people walk you through a typical day, they gloss over and they move quickly because they assume you know what they're talking about. So sometimes I say, "Be detailed. Pretend I'm your 12 year old niece and I have no idea what you do." And usually when people speak with that filter, that brings them to a level that's tangible and shareable outside of your organization. But all of us do this when we're talking about our work. We might get super technical, jargony. So just encourage them to talk to you as if this is the first time you're hearing about this. Abby Cheesman: What surprised you when you started this job? What's challenging? Being real about that? What's the best part about working here? What's your favorite memory from working here? And what advice would you have for somebody that is just joining your team? Abby Cheesman: I would add that question from the beginning when we talked about< "When was the moment you knew you were in the right place?" The reason I like this question, Chris, you told a story. I told a story. I didn't just say the people are great. The culture is great. What you don't want is general speak. You want to hear people's stories. "Well, tell me a time where you really felt like your team was great." And then those stories are what tell beautiful recruiting stories. Abby Cheesman: This is some ideas for B-roll. So hands working, work in action, the work environment, conference rooms, common areas. Two to three main tasks of the position. Team interaction. And for those boring officey jobs, impact. What's happening outside of the office as a result of the work that you're doing inside of the office? All right, a moment to reflect. Anybody has any questions so far? Chris Russell: Nothing yet in the chat. But if you do, feel free to throw them in there. And I'll ask Abby. Abby, question for you is, what's been the in terms of your client base, what's been the most interesting piece of feedback you've gotten from after doing a video like this? What stands out to you? Abby Cheesman: That's a great question. So often we get this feedback, and I always love hearing it. Is that recruiters who've been recruiting for this role for years learn something new about the experience of working in that job. So you can recruit for a warehouse position in a refrigerated facility. But until you've put your coat on and gone 40 degrees below zero, it's really hard to have empathy in a tangible way for what that is like. And a lot of recruiters go back to their work with that experience. So filming is this discovery for them, and this opportunity to engage with the job in a way that they don't normally get. Abby Cheesman: So people often really enjoy filming. It might seem stressful for the first time that you do it. But the feedback overwhelmingly that I love getting that we get a lot. "I didn't know how much fun it was going to be. I didn't realize how much I was going to learn about this job. I've been recruiting for it for 20 years." Right? We went through burning questions. I'm going to share some questions I get a lot. Abby Cheesman: Oh no, our trade secrets. Right? We work in a proprietary industry, right? I work in space and engineering a product that's top secret. That's okay. It's not just about what you make. It's about why it matters. It's your passion, projects, celebrations and your team coming together, training. So you don't focus on proprietary processes. Obviously you don't want to sell out your secrets and tank the business. But you do want to show what the employee experience is based on that position. Abby Cheesman: So avoid things as you're filming, like specs on a drawing. Any kind of measurements. In manufacturing, any kind of specific code or processes. You don't want to capture that stuff. Abby Cheesman: Privacy. This might look familiar to you, Chris. What about privacy? So we filmed in one of the more challenging work environments that we've filmed in a couple of weeks ago. We were in Connecticut. We were filming with the department of corrections who they're working on recruiting physicians to work in facilities. So there's two challenges to work through. One is HIPAA, right? We can't share patients on camera. And the second is we can't show inmates on camera. So a really easy workaround that have worked with our corrections positions in other states and areas, and our healthcare. Has been using stand-ins. So if you have someone else on the team that will play the role of patient or play the role of customer. Or any other sensitive role in your video, that will allow you to capture it. You'll get them to sign a media release and you'll have permission to share their footage. But you're not releasing anything about your customers, or your patients, or people that are of a sensitive. Abby Cheesman: And stand-ins allow you to still show bits of the job that are important. So showing the exam, taking vitals. That's a huge part of this role. So to remove it from the video altogether wouldn't have done it justice. So stand-ins on a volunteer basis is something that we've had a ton of success with. Chris Russell: Okay, great. Abby Cheesman: Another question, compliance is life. We work in the aviation industry, so we have filmed a ton of compliant driven and union driven work environments. And my advice for that is to have somebody who is a union steward. If you're a union shop or a union environment. And, a safety and compliance person film with you. So you have them right alongside for the journey. They can tell you what is and is not shareable on camera. Abby Cheesman: So while you probably all have compliant workplaces, there are times when things are done that are maybe questionable and not exactly up to policy, but a workaround. And just having those people in field with you as you're capturing content gets them on your side. They're part of the process, they're an engaged stakeholder. And, it prevents you from capturing anything that's not showing you in your best light. So getting them involved early and planning, and come along for filming. That's been successful also. Abby Cheesman: I'm broke baby. I ain't got no money. This is another question I get. You don't need $100,000 or even $1,000 to make your first video. You can do this for free. Abby Cheesman: So to do this for free, let's talk a little bit about editing. This is one of the biggest questions people have. There are a few options. You can do it in one take. I filmed a video earlier this morning for an internal team thing. I did it in one take, no editing required. Abby Cheesman: iMovie, Windows Movie Maker. Those are both low cost or free depending on your computer. And easy editing programs that you can pull in the interview, the B-roll, and some music to go along with that. Abby Cheesman: FiLMiC pro is an app on, it's available for iPhone and I believe Android. It's about 20 bucks. And you can actually edit video on your phone. I'll mention that iMovie is also available on iPhone and- Chris Russell: I use that one. Abby Cheesman: You use that one? Yeah. What's your experience been? Chris Russell: It's okay. You can just trim the clip, you can add some overlays of text on there and stuff like that. Abby Cheesman: Yeah, I find my phone to be a little small to edit on. So I'm a huge fan of popping everything over to my laptop and throw it in iMovie. But my daughter will edit in iMovie on her iPad. So depending on how big your fingers are, I guess. Mine are too fat for the phone, but FiLMiC pro is an awesome app. Abby Cheesman: And then are editing services. So this is something full disclosure that Skill Scout does. But there are other options or interns you can come and get to come in and help film, and edit your video. We see a lot of our companies engaging interns in this process. Not just because of digital natives and awesome at it, but also they have a fresh perspective of your company. So having them film, you often get things that you might not, or things that you didn't think about filming that's been interesting. Abby Cheesman: This is how you put it together. It's like a cake. Layer one is the interview. Layer two is the music. Layer three is the B-roll. So I just took a screenshot of what it looks like in iMovie. So you can see the green thing at the bottom. That's my music track. There are lots of libraries. You have to be careful when you're adding a music track that you own license. So if it's creative commons, that's something that can be shared anywhere as long as you credit that person. There are other libraries where you can purchase a song. Don't use a song off the radio or off of a pop singer. Don't use a recognizable track, because that will quickly get flagged on social media. And you don't have permission to use it, unless you pay us thousands of dollars to whoever made it. Abby Cheesman: So find a royalty free or creative commons music track. And then this middle piece is my main content. So this would be my interview. And then the little piece on top is B-roll. So you can add clips at different moments in your interview to depict what the person is saying. Abby Cheesman: So once you've edited, how do you use this? One very easy place is on the job posting itself. So on our job post, we have a video about what it's like to be an editor at Skill Scout. And then we ask them what stands out in the video. So not only do we know that they've watched the video, but they can talk about things that are the same or different from their other work experience. And we get really rich data about the candidates in that question. On the job post is a really great way to use it. Chris Russell: That should be the top of the job post too, right? Abby Cheesman: It should be at the very top. Yeah. Or depending on how your micro site is laid out, if you have a specific page for a job, it could be one of a couple of pieces of content. But yes, prominently featured. So if they're going to watch one thing, it's that. Chris Russell: Right. Abby Cheesman: Employee referrals. This is way better than sending out an email saying, "Hey, we're hiring." Giving people a piece of content that they can send to their friends to get a much richer information about the job. That's a great way to use video. You saw this with SAC Wireless, putting it on Facebook. Abby Cheesman: We see a lot of companies using video to onboard people into their hiring process. So as you can imagine, getting hired as a flight attendant, it's a process. So we just did a series with American Airlines giving people an idea of what this process looks like. And it gives candidates more human centered experience as they're going through what can be a difficult to understand and kind of long process. So using videos at different moments in your hiring process to be more human, to connect with them on a more human level. We see a lot of companies doing this. Abby Cheesman: In your recruiting outreach. So maybe somebody's applied, and you want to send them a little video with a little bit more information. Or you want to send them a video of the person that's going to be interviewing them to prepare them for the interview. There are lots of ways that you can use video in your email communications. Abby Cheesman: One tool that I find super helpful is called Loom. Use loom.com. And it basically allows you to film, you have to use a Chrome browser. But it allows you to film and then embed that video into an email. And the video comes across as a gif. So as somebody opens the email, this picture starts moving and they can see immediately that it's a video. They click on it, and they can watch it right in the email. It doesn't pop them out to another site. It just is right inside the email. And that's a free tool that's super helpful. Chris Russell: It's free? Abby Cheesman: It's free. There might be a cap on how many you can send. But I send a whole lot of them and I haven't paid for yet. Don't tell them. They might start charging me now. It's called useloom.com. L-O-O-M. Chris Russell: Throw it in the chat there. Thanks Abby. Abby Cheesman: Yeah, thanks. A word about audio. Silent is the new black. Data coming back day to day. It's getting more and more dire that people are not listening to the videos. 70% of mobile traffic is video, and 85% of that is viewed with no sound. I am guilty, right? We watch video in places that we're on the train. We're commuting, we're at home, we're cooking dinner. And we don't necessarily want to listen to it, but we do want to watch. Abby Cheesman: So how can we design around a good user experience? The easiest way is captions. Captions aren't just great because it makes it better for the person watching, but also it generates text-based information about that video that's used in SEO. So if you have a caption file in with your video, that content will help you appear higher in the algorithm. So captions are great. You can auto-generate them in YouTube to mixed success. I've also used this service that I absolutely love called Rev. Rev is a paid service that you can share video, either upload or through YouTube or Vimeo. And it will generate captions. It's a real person typing it. So it's way more accurate than the YouTube captions. Abby Cheesman: You can also translate. So we do this with a lot of our clients that have international offices. Where we might film in English, but it's helpful to be able to share it in Chinese or in Spanish, or another language. Rev has translations available, which has been really helpful. Chris Russell: I have an app Abby called, it's called Clipomatic. You do your video, it records the audio, it transcribes the audio within the app. And then you can go back and you actually, it'll show you the transcript of it. You can go back, correct certain words that didn't quite pick up on. You can publish it as a single file out there with the subtitles. Abby Cheesman: That's awesome. And subtitles are not just important for posting on video sites, but also social media. So being able to generate that SRT. I have a whole blog post about much to do about captions, because it's gotten complicated. And it's much better from a user standpoint, but the infrastructure of how do you that has gotten a little bit trickier. But that's awesome. I'm going to have to check that out. Abby Cheesman: Texts call outs. I'm sure you guys have seen these videos before. Recipes where they label each piece. I actually didn't know until I started doing research that there was sound to these videos. There's actually a dude talking as this is going on. But you don't need it because they've labeled with text. This can be done in iMovie. It can be done in other editing programs that you just put labels on things. I could see you doing this with uniforms where there's pieces of a uniform for the flight attendants if they're getting new uniforms or something's happening with uniform, that's important to communicate. You can use a call out of just somebody standing there in uniform and talk about PPE, protective clothing, steel toe boots, different parts of the uniform that are important. Call outs are cool. We're going to see more of them. Abby Cheesman: And lastly, text narration. This is a beautiful video put out by the National Park Service. It's simple B-roll of a national park, and then they share messages just through text. And you can see a little green bar at the bottom of the screen. It also tells you how long the video is, which I thought was just a beautiful user experience. I'm super impatient, so knowing that I only have a little bit of that bar left, I watched the whole thing. So text on top of B-roll. That's a really easy thing to do in iMovie or other simple editing programs. And the footage that you have to capture for it is just B-roll. There's no audio, there's no people talking on camera. It's just footage of your workplace. All right, that wraps this up to final questions. Chris Russell: Yeah, we do have one more [inaudible 00:47:00] to get chance before. But Jasmine's asking, "How often should we update videos for the same position?" Abby Cheesman: That's a great question. So we see our companies updating them about every year, depending on the position. So it's going to be really dependent on how evergreen the tasks of the role are. So for example, nursing. That job is going to be relatively the same across a two to three years span. So that's a little bit more evergreen. Tech positions, their shelf life is just shorter if you go into the details of the actual tech stack that people are working with and that kind of thing. So if you want a video like that to last longer, talk a little bit less about the technology of today's moment. And talk a little bit more about the greater context of that job. Abby Cheesman: But I would say we encourage companies to put as much video out as possible. Even if that means Instagram stories, stuff that goes away really quickly. Just getting in the habit of sharing on video will make each video faster and easier to produce. So if your first video you keep for a year and then you update it and you get more and more comfortable with the filming process, we have some companies that weekly are putting out videos. Not all job videos, but certainly content that engages their job seeker audience. Abby Cheesman: And then of course if you're going through any kind of change in that role, video is a great opportunity to communicate that internally and externally. So we have a company that's going through a massive uniform change, and it impacts their employees. So they're making video pieces about the change, why the change is coming. Some of those are internal facing, and some of those are external facing. Chris Russell: You have a super fan in the chat there. Mary says after listening to your presentation at our HR meetings in Iowa, we bought the equipment and use it all the time. Appreciate the- Abby Cheesman: Yay. I remember you. That's awesome. That makes my day. Video does not have to be expensive. It does not have to be out of reach. I actually taught my college roommate how to make a video. She and her sister own a daycare, and I taught her how to film, how to do interviews, and she produced her own video too. So I think small and midsize businesses, this is perfect to get started. And as you grow and see more opportunity, you see a lot of companies getting the bug for video and then start to do onboarding, or training, or other ways to communicate through video. Yay Mary, good job. Chris Russell: Awesome. Well Abby, thank you very much for this very informative, and a lot of good stuff in this video. I'll have to go watch it again. Abby Cheesman: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Chris Russell: Tell them where to connect with you and then Skill Scout. Abby Cheesman: Yeah. So as a participant in this webinar, I nerd out on this stuff. I'd be happy to do a free 20 minute video story boarding session. If you have any kind of questions about how video could work for you, I'm happy to chat with you. My email is abby@skillscout.me. You can get me on Twitter. I'm pretty easy to find. So get in contact. I love doing brainstorming sessions because there's probably not a challenge that we have not seen with one of our clients. So happy to chat through any questions you have. Speaker 2: Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on twitter @ChrisRussell, or visit rectechmedia.com. Where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars, and articles. So be sure to check out our other sites, Recruiting Headlines and HR Podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.

Julie and Torin have the honor to welcome master of her video universe, Elena Valentine, CEO and co-founder of Skill Scout. Video is so hot in Talent Acquisition and D/I and Elena and her team not only tell us how to do it better and authenticly, but they also LEAD by example. Join Torin and Julie with Elena as she sets the bar for leading in an HR and TA environment.  PREPARE YOURSELF FOR CRAZY AND THE KING!  Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CrazyAndTheKing About Elena Skill Scout: https://www.skillscout.com/ Mezcal Media Collective: www.mezclamediacollective.org Womxn of Craft: https://www.womxnofcraft.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/elena_valentine LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenavalentine1/ More on Torin and Julie: Julie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesowashdisabilitysolutions Torin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torinellis  Cred:  Produced by Julie Sowash Music by DJ Cellz Pic: Elena Valentine

Since its launch more than a year ago the Facebook job board has been missing jobs from one key segment: corporate employers. They simply did not have an easy way to share their jobs to the Facebook audience other than their own business page. But good news has arrived... Facebook will be partnering with ATS vendors to include their clients jobs into the Facebook job board automatically. This move will certainly add a huge number of credible, professional listings to the social network alongside the thousands of small business jobs already being posted. I was able to reach Facebook for comment and uncovered some additional details about which vendors have signed on so far. We currently work with a number of partners including SAP SuccessFactors, Workable, JazzHR, and Talentify. We’re looking to grow these partnerships as we know many businesses are already working with HR solution providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap onto the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.   We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publis job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook. Job seekers are redirected to the employer’s career site, and can apply to the role on the employer’s career site. Employers can also create jobs in their Applicant Tracking System, and automatically publish that job to Facebook.   https://recruitingheadlines.com/facebook-job-board-opens-up-to-employers-through-ats-partnerships/ BALTIMORE – StafQuik, a contingent staffing technology company, is introducing a faster, more efficient way for staffing agencies to connect their workforce to job opportunities. Using StafQuik’s platform, an agency can stay engaged with their highly mobile talent pool no matter where they are, independent of their devices or phone numbers, with significant improvement to the bottom line. StafQuik’s easy to use platform gives recruiters the ability to instantly connect the right workers to the right positions. Workers are notified of opportunities in less than one minute, and recruiters receive responses in minutes rather than hours, while getting insight into workers’ progress to job sites. Clients get all positions filled without any “no-shows,” resulting in more billable hours and time savings for recruiters. StafQuik is designed to work well with temporary staffing agencies’ back-of-house systems, such as payroll, applicant tracking and billing. StafQuik can demonstrate potential savings of $100,000 per year or more, while also providing best-in-class service to corporate clients. More information is available on the company’s website, http://www.stafquik.com.   https://recruitingheadlines.com/stafquik-gets-500k-for-its-job-push-notifications/   SparcStart has created Amplify VMS (Video Management System) for creating, sharing, approving, cataloguing and editing recruitment videos.  One central platform that every recruiter can access for brand-appropriate and brand-approved videos will simplify the management, and amplify the visibility, of candidate focused content. Whether videos were created by Corporate Marketing, SparcStart, Skill Scout, VideoMyJob, Stories Incorporated, AltruLabs or in-house on phones or webcams, the Video Management Center will make them readily available to the entire Talent Acquisition team. Amplify VMS also facilitates the creation of employee generated content with templated requests for Employee Testimonials, Q&A videos, Day in the Life videos, and special event or project videos. https://recruitingheadlines.com/sparcstart-launches-video-management-system-for-employers/   NEW YORK, April 30, 2019 –Namely, a leading HR platform for mid-sized companies, today announced a new integration with Hire by Google, a recruiting app built for organizations using G Suite. Available to shared clients today, this solution helps companies connect their HR and applicant tracking systems in order to minimize time-consuming data entry and speed new hire onboarding. “Our deep integration with Hire by Google helps joint clients streamline the earliest interactions between an employee and their company,” said Graham Younger, president and chief revenue officer, Namely. “By using Google’s robust architecture to instantly create a new employee record in Namely each time an applicant is hired, we’re speeding the onboarding process for HR, reducing even more burden for HR administrators, and creating a better employee experience from the initial interview to the first day on the job.” https://recruitingheadlines.com/namely-integrates-with-hire-by-google-for-onboarding/   And speakign of Google ….For enterprises, tracking down the right approvers for new job requisitions and offers can take time away from critical tasks like finding and interviewing great talent. To optimize Hire for these businesses, we enhanced the requisition and offer approval flows to automatically suggest approvers for new job requisitions or offers. This makes it easy for large organizations to establish consistent global approval processes, while empowering recruiters to move faster. We also introduced a referral portal to encourage every employee to source top talent, which can mean thousands of referrals for a large organization, and released a set of interactive reports to empower more informed decision making, so enterprises can make the most of all their data and optimize complex hiring processes. Lastly, we expanded our connection to the larger HR technology ecosystem through APIs and pre-built integrations with Namely, Sapling, AppogeeHR, and Zenefits, so customers can easily manage the entire employee lifecycle and improve the experience for new hires. https://recruitingheadlines.com/hire-by-google-is-now-optimized-for-the-enterprise/

Video is HUGE! Employer Brand is HUGE! Candidate Experience is HUGE! No surprise there. But how does it impact employment? Chad sits down with Elena Valentine, CEO and co-founder at Skill Scout to find out. "STORY TELLING IS DOPE!" - Elena Enjoy, and support our sponsors America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX.

On this episode, I Zoom in Elena Valentine and we chat about living in purpose and challenging yourself to achieve greatness. Workplace storyteller and Design Researcher, Elena spends her days leading the team at Skill Scout to bring jobs and company culture to life on video. Every workplace has a story to tell about the team, skills, environment, and output. Elena helps tell those stories to attract the right candidates for the job and keep existing employees happily where they are. As CEO, Elena wears many hats, but really geeks out on new media (360, VR, POV videos, silent storytelling), and building Skill Scout to become an employer of choice for women of color. She was recently named “HR Superhero of the Year” by the DisruptHR Chicago community. She's also the founder of Mezcla Media Collective, an organization that provides opportunities for female filmmakers of color to connect, partner, and build their skill sets as leaders and storytellers. Elena holds a BA in Spanish and Anthropology from Grinnell College and AA in Recording Arts from Tribeca Flashpoint College. She currently resides in her hometown of Chicago with her rescue pup Yofi and her husband Emilio (a.k.a her 11 year old school crush from the neighborhood). Connect with Elena on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elena_Valentine Don't forget to check out Minda Harts' podcast #SECURETHESEAT on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/securetheseat/id1364451513?mt=2

Diversity and Inclusion at Small Companies with Meara Charnetzki, Michael Donnelly, and Elena Valentine TableXI is now offering training for developers and products teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Get your FREE career growth strategy information and techniques! (https://stickynote.game) Summary What can a small company do to improve its diversity and inclusion practices when your company just isn't changing personnel quickly enough to improve via hiring? Here to discuss this are Meara Charnetzki from Table XI, Michael Donnelly from the FWD Collective and Elena Valentine from Skill Scout. We'll all about company values, supporting a wider community, using internal feedback, and what to do to encourage improvement at your company. Guests Meara Charnetzki (https://twitter.com/m34ra) of Table XI (https://www.tablexi.com/) Michael Donnelly (https://twitter.com/realmdonnelly) of The FWD Collective (https://fwdcollective.io/) Elena Valentine (https://twitter.com/Elena_Valentine) of Skill Scout (https://www.skillscout.com/) Notes 02:56 - Advice For Small Companies Interested in Being More Diverse 09:08 - Vetting Companies for Diversity & Inclusion Values 13:59 - Having a Healthy Company Feedback System - Know Your Company (https://knowyourcompany.com/) - Managing for Career Development with Claire Lew (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) 17:02 - Building Relationships as a Company Leader 20:09 - Diversity and Inclusion Benefits Everyone 23:31 - Encouraging Companies to Start D&I Initiatives as an Employee 30:45 - Company Exit Interviews 32:26 - Salary Transparency 35:51 - Flexible Working Structures Related Episodes Diverse Agile Teams with Marlena Compton, Betsy Haibel, and Jennifer Tu (http://www.techdoneright.io/38) Your First 100 Days at a New Company with Katie Gore and Elizabeth Trepkowski Hodos (http://www.techdoneright.io/36) Managing for Career Development with Claire Lew (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) Special Guests: Elena Valentine, Meara Charnetzki, and Michael Donnelly.

We’re all posting job openings, and our postings are competing with hundreds of others to grab the attention of top candidates. How do you fight through to be sure your posting gets in front of the kinds of candidates you seek, and then entices them to respond? Today’s guest, Elena Valentine, CEO at Skill Scout, has advice on how to add the “Wow Factor” top all your posts. A workplace storyteller and design researcher, Elena spends her days leading the team at Skill Scout to bring jobs to life on video. Note: This episode was recorded live at BLR's RecruitCon conference in Nashville, where Elena presented on the topic of visual job postings. RecruitCon 2019 will take place in Austin, TX next May. Learn more at http://live.blr.com/event/recruitcon.

Learn how the Gig Economy is important for the employer and the creative.  Today's guest is Elena Valentine. Elena is the CEO of Skill Scout and is passionate about Skill Scout because she believes job seekers need another way to tell their story and show what they can do.  Also, check out Mezcla Media Collective a hub for diverse boss women behind the camera. Go to www.mindaharts.com for the show notes.

With a focus on diversity and inclusion, the CEO of a Chicago-based media company focused keeps it real about the myths and struggles of leadership. Claire: Hi everyone, I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company and it is my honor today to introduce a very good friend of mine who is on the heartbeat, the… Read the full article

“Is this year going to be more challenged than last year” when it comes to talent acquisition. "Yes" is the nearly unanimous answer! Consequently, recruiters and HR are scrambling to chase top talent. Unfortunately traditional recruitment practices that just aren’t working anymore. One underutilized but massively successful solution is video which might explain its explosion of popularity in every marketing strategy except … you guessed it: HR! My guest for this episode is Abby Cheesman, co-founder of Skill Scout.  In this podcast we explore: Why companies should be using video for talent acquisition How companies should be using video for talent acquisition What are some of the pitfalls to avoid when using video for talent acquisition Let’s start with what was one of my favorite quotes from Abby:” Job descriptions are lame. They are the last thing candidates want to read but they’re often the first touch point. The job description is a legal document; a list of requirements that doesn’t tell anything about the look-and-feel of the job or company culture.”   Using video to post a job tells a story. It helps differentiate your company from your competitors. “It serves as a purposeful piece of the recruiting puzzle,” Abby told me. She offered an amazing statistic that tells it all: “When you use a text- based job description, people recall 16% of what they read …and that’s being generous. With video people recall 65% of what they see and hear on a video. On top of that, visibility skyrockets with video. Search engine marketing explodes because video is 50X more likely to be shared than text. Everyone wants to be #1 on Google but many recruiters don’t realize that the 2nd largest search engine in the world is YouTube! And since YouTube is owned by Google, video helps Google rankings too. And here’s one more twist. Skill Scout’s research has shown that candidates are not just going direct to job boards or company career sites to search for jobs. They are first  going to YouTube to find jobs and learn about your company before searching on job boards like Indeed and Careerbuilder.   Video opens up a whole new channel and source for talent acquisition. What I shared so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that I whet your appetite for why and how you should be using video for recruitment, it's time to download or hit play! As an added bonus, Abby shared this “Skill Scout Video Recipe,” a free checklist with questions to ask and clips to capture. Click here to download. In addition, here’s the link to a 1-minute video about how to set your shot with a smartphone. And here's the link to Abby's article 5 Ways to Introduce Video into Your Candidate Experience.

Welcome to the first mini episode of MakingChips. In this special MakingChips mini episode, we welcome back Elena Valentine of Skill Scout to the show. Elena talks about what brought her to IMTS, what's new at Skill Scout, the Smartforce Student Summit, and the resurgence of the maker movement.   Episode Structure: [01:30] - What Brought you to IMTS? [03:20] - Paradigm Shift in Manufacturing [07:30] - Smartforce Student Summit [08:20] - What’s New with Skill Scout? [10:45] - Conclusion of Episode Mentioned in this Episode: Skill Scout Smartforce Student Summit Elena Valentine | LinkedIn  We Want to Hear From You, The Metalworking Nation: jim@makingchips.com jason@makingchips.com ryan@makingchips.com Telephone: (312) 725-0245  

  We hang out with Abby Cheesman of Skill Scout to see why hiring the right people is so important to a good workforce, finish an awesome conversation with Stephen Cortiss of Citizen fusion, and speak with Sergio Gomez about Art influences in communities.

There are several options when it comes to selling one of your old machines. Some are more convenient than others, but might offer you less money than what you expected. With a little bit of added effort, you can get the most money out of your old machine. On this episode of MakingChips, Jim shares his steps for creating a successful eBay campaign. We also talk about the upcoming IMTS 2016, Chicago restaurants, and the problems the U.S. faces in manufacturing. Episode Outline: [00:07] - Episode Preview [03:15] - Manufacturing News [08:40] - IMTS 2016 [10:55] - Sandvik Coromant [13:05] - Selling Your Machine Using eBay [14:50] - Getting a Good Picture [17:30] - Fees [18:20] - Auction [19:40] - Buy it Now [23:15] - eBay vs Machine/Tool Dealer [25:15] - Skill Scout [26:20] - Episode Conclusion Mentioned in this Episode: Manufacturing News Article Our FAVORITE Restaurants in Chicago IMTS 2016 Sandvik Coromant Registration Metal Cutting Knowledge JIm's Office Manager Ad Ryan's Patreon Account We Want to Hear From You: jim@makingchips.com jason@makingchips.com ryan@makingchips.com Telephone: (312) 725-0245

An important part of what makes a manufacturing leader successful is their ability to think outside of the box. This line of thinking should also extend to the hiring process. Successful companies are good at bringing the right people into their team, but it isn't always so easy. What if you had the ability to see candidates in action before you made a decision about who to hire? “Manufacturing has always been sexy... It just needs a generational communications facelift.” - Elena Valentine This week on MakingChips, we welcome back last week's guest Elena Valentine. Elena walks us through Skill Scout's process of screening, assessing, and recommending candidates through hands-on manufacturing activities. We also discuss the Crain's Midwest Manufacturers Summit, the consequences of declining oil prices, how Skill Scout got involved in manufacturing, the "new" old way of doing things, and steps to finding the right candidate for your business.  Episode Outline: [00:07] - Episode Preview [01:00] - Crain’s Manufacturing Summit [03:15] - Manufacturing News [05:40] - Welcome Back Elena [06:15] - Why Manufacturing? [09:40] - How Companies Experience Candidates [10:11] - Skill Demonstrations and Work Samples [14:15] - Learned Interview Behaviors [17:00] - Finding the Right Candidate [20:00] - Virtual Meaningful Conversations [22:50] - Outside of the Resume [24:30] - Elena’s Call to Action for Listeners [25:50] - Conclusion of Episode Mentioned in this Episode: Crain's Manufacturing Summit Skill Scout elena@skillscout.com

Finding the right person for your company is crucial for building a thriving business. When recruiting for open positions, employers look for candidates with the skills, experience, and demeanor they believe will benefit their company. That said, it isn’t always easy to identify candidates who understand the needs and expectations of the job. What can an employer do to capture and relay their company's culture to a prospective candidate, while showing them exactly what the job entails? How can you more meaningfully connect a candidate to your company? "This is not just about building your employer brand, this is about getting quality talent in the door, so that you can get them on-board right away and build your business."          - Elena Valentine On this episode of MakingChips, we have a conversation with Elena Valentine, CEO and Co-Founder of Skill Scout. Skill Scout uses an innovative and fresh approach to connect potential employees to companies. Elena shares some of the methods the company uses to match candidates with employers, most notably in the form of video job postings. Also discussed in this episode is the Crain’s Manufacturing Summit and Jim’s recent trip to Jackson, Michigan.   Episode Outline: [00:14] - Episode Preview [01:20] - Crain’s Manufacturing [03:30] - Jackson, Michigan [05:40] - Welcome Elena Valentine [08:58] - Attracting Talent [10:20] - Bringing Job Posts to Life [13:45] - Better Hiring Results [16:00] - Logistics Behind the Video [20:52] - How to Shoot a Good Ad [23:45] - Authentic Window [25:20] - Success Story [27:30] - Conclusion of Episode Mentioned in this Episode: http://shoprat.org http://www.skillscout.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenavalentine1