I spend almost my entire professional (and, sadly, some of my personal) life trying to figure out how to best identify, attract, screen, select and onboard talented people. If you take away all of the fluff, that’s about what our team does. All the time. And I am always looking for a better way to do it.
Part of that effort is trying to figure out how to accurately represent our company and the employment opportunities we have available. Call it attraction, advertising, marketing, branding, whatever…how do we represent ourselves to potential talent? And so part of thinking about that is looking around to see what other people are doing. And, as I look at other firms’ recruiting sites and materials, I often ask myself:
Why do so many companies think their own employees are ugly?
They do, apparently. They must think that they have hideous, awful, fell-off-the-top-of-the-ugly-tree-and-hit-every-ugly-stick-on-the-way-down ugly employees. Why do I say that? Because so few of them ever use pictures of them on their career sites or on their recruiting materials. Take a look around…there are not many.
When you think about creating imagery that supports your talent acquisition efforts, it should:
- Accurately represent your company and your employees
- Show a realistic representation of what employees at your company do
- Reinforce whatever messaging runs through your overall recruitment process (teamwork, ownership, exciting projects, challenge, etc.)
Instead, most materials say, “Look at this overly staged, obviously fake, somewhat spooky picture of some models in awkward poses, smiling creepily at each other.”
I admit, as I said above, I’m a TA guy, not a marketing expert. It’s not my area of expertise, and most of my knowledge of recruiting messaging is home grown. Still, it seems that companies can basically choose from one of the following options:
- Stock photography—inexpensive, generic shots of eerily similar people. For the absolutely best series analyzing bad HR stock photography, check out Frank Roche, awesome author at KnowHR and partner at IFRACTAL.
- Custom models—expensive, but still fake. It screams, “we have so much money we can hire pretty people to impersonate our real people.”
- Real employees, high end—think the GE commercial that ran during the Super Bowl. Pretty awesome, but most of us have 1/1,000,000 of GE’s recruiting ad budget.
- Real employees, mid-range—your employees, a marketing guy, a recruiting lady, and maybe a pro photographer touring work sites for 2 days.
- Real employees-low dollar—a few folks, no scripts, maybe a nice Canon SLR or a digital camcorder. As genuine as it gets, this often leads to some of the best material you can find.
Why does this matter? Here’s why: When that talented pro in your industry gets ticked off at work one day and starts surfing websites that night, maybe thinking about her next move, don’t let her find your sorry website with a picture of some generic model smiling at some other creepy generic model. Show your company, your people, your business. Be authentic. Fake is never compelling.
Frank ran a post in 2010 called When You Use Bad Stock Photography You Make Baby Jesus Cry. I send the post to anyone I know who uses bad art for their recruiting work. The title is so great it makes you think before you make a really bad decision. Don’t make baby Jesus cry.
Okay. I get it. But, as someone who worked in Marketing Communications for years before building her own talent agency…I gotta say taking a great team picture is harder than it looks. First, there’s the diversity shot where you grab all the *right* faces, all of whom never worked together in the same department for a *team* picture. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Everyone looks uncomfortable because they don’t know each other. However, even when employees do know each other, you’re not guaranteed a money shot. Someone’s eyes are always closed, they are looking the wrong way, and oh, just feeling uncomfortable. And then there’s the perfect shot that gets taken and then one minute later a key person in it leaves which means that the whole process has to start over again because someone is insecure about how that looks to the outside world. For all of these reasons, many comms officers skip pulling together people for company photos. So it’s not that the people are ugly, the process is. I actually like the way social media is driving things today. We own our own personal brands, and our own pics and we work in harmony with the companies we work with. A great tip here is to work to pull a *look* together for your company. At The Hired Guns, we let people choose their fave photo and then we use a great illustrator to turn them into an avatar. The talent gets to keep their own identity and so do we!
BOOM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QaiXYm7fLbY
We pride ourselves in using our own employees.
BUT WAIT! There’s more!
We encourage our employees to make their OWN commercials. They do really well at it, and we even provide them with our company photographer. We then share the videos on our company Facebook page and in email blasts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in1ne0AO4RU
They really feel like they’re a part of our company.
Allison–Thanks for stopping by and thanks for commenting. Great point that the process can be “ugly.” I think your point about the “diversity shot” is too often true, in a kinda spooky way (“everyone looks uncomfortable because they don’t know each other.)” Yikes.
We gone the channel of creating illustrations based on our consultants – it’s a nice fun way of doing things that gets our clients attention. We included them in our consultants emails signatures, twitter profiles and marketing literature. It actually works out easier to produce an illustration then get someone to do the photography, most our consultants get quite shy and self conscious behind the lens.
Great article.. By coincidence, today I ran a post about a supervisor’s drastically opposite viewpoint : http://www.evilskippyatwork.com/?p=1330 .
Ha! This one made me laugh. @iCIMS we use our actual employees. It makes such a difference!
http://www.icims.com/careers/teams.aspx
RJ –
Great post – Love it!
I think I have the best looking employees in the entire world – http://www.hru-tech.com/connectwithhru/our_staff
T
Interesting topic – I have seen both the good and the bad. I worked for a shipping company which used its own employees and they looked just great and I would have been proud to show that video to anybody.
I worked for an IT company which used its own employees and it was one of the most cringe-worthy things I have seen (to the extent that although it took 18 months to put together, it lasted 2 weeks and someone pulled it – for which I am eternally grateful).
So I don’t think it is a matter of what your employees look like, it is a matter of what you are prepared to do with them in terms of production values, some training or coaching (the IT firm didn’t think it was necessarily to suggest that one of the employees to stand up properly) and some proper scripting.
great post – sending it to our creative team as an fyi. also, we’re in the midst of a redesign on our career site and recruitment marketing materials — we’ll be using our associates, for sure.