We recently completed a very rewarding project to produce a set of recruitment videos for Caremark Ltd, one of the largest home care companies in the UK. A 2-minute master video and a series of micro clips for social media. It’s a great example of what can be achieved with close collaboration between producer and client.
The recipe
Caremark knew who they wanted to appeal to. And they knew what their care assistants valued about their work. All we needed to do was to make a film that joined the latter to the former.
The most direct way to achieve this is with proof. Human proof. If it works, it can be very persuasive. But if it’s fake, everyone can tell because it just smells wrong. Lucky for us, then, Caremark has a culture of care that extends to their employees and has a good number of care assistants keen to feature in a recruitment video.
If you’ve seen the video, you might wonder how we achieved such a structured and compact message in just 2 minutes. Here’s a little explainer.
The ingredients
First, we searched for subjects. We knew what people profiles we were looking to appeal to, so we sought candidates to represent as many of these factors as possible in just 5 interviewees. As producers, we were responsible for screening a shortlist of people to evaluate their suitability. But Caremark has been so adroit in their choices that we only had to reject very few people. All were strong candidates, but unfortunately, not all could make it into the film.
The design
Although the film is composed of spontaneous speech, a video like this is scripted. But what does that mean? Well, it certainly doesn’t mean we put words into people’s mouths. Instead, it means we know what subjects we want our interviewees to discuss and structure these in a design. Simply put, first, we’ll talk about their previous employment and what it lacked for them compared to their current position. Then, we’ll talk about the various aspects of the job and of the organisation that we know care assistants value. Finally, we ask if they’d recommend the job to others.
This structure is presented in a script with notional quotes so we can imagine how things might flow. We also added a list of all the shots we would include to illustrate the content.
The interviews
Finally, before we film, we come up with questions to provoke the kind of answers we are looking for.
To ensure we can create a punchy 2-minute film, we need to record around 2 hours of interviews. During this time, we stick to our core subjects but explore them deeply, sometimes returning to the same question to get a different form of words. There’s no pressure to make people give any particular answer, but a short film can’t easily be constructed from long, rambling responses, so we look for genuine and spontaneous soundbites to make up the pieces of our jigsaw.
The edit
Next, sticking to the structure of our script, we cut together the most pertinent answers, continually featuring a cross-section of interviewees. The first cut is deliberately too long, so we can trim it down with input from the client. When we have this about right, we add the illustrative footage. And that, along with a bit of magic polishing, is how we make a recruitment video. Easy if you know how. It’s really easy when you have a supportive and enthusiastic client. Thanks, Caremark!
The proof
Finally, Caremark’s Marketing Coordinator, Laura Gregory, was kind enough to give us her testimonial:
“Working with Nice Media was brilliant! The whole process from start to finish was smooth and professional and also a lot of fun!”
Altogether, it was a very successful project.
