Cisco’s recruiting video delivers 1,000 clicks to its career site

Cisco Systems’ Talent Brand team has employed the “Be You. With Us.” theme for several years. The challenge was reaching the talent the company needs—technical specialists working in software, security and cloud who aren’t looking for new jobs.

The Talent Brand team wanted to extract a Super Bowl-quality video out of a minimal budget and ensure the video was discoverable by the target audience. “We wanted to create a mini-movie—not just a video—as the cornerstone of a set of videos,” according to Cisco, which has won first place in the “Recruitment or Employee Branding Video” category of PR Daily’s Video & Visual Awards.

A set of vignette videos would connect thematically to the main video, featuring real employees sharing their sentiment for Cisco in key hiring pools. Working with a talent brand consultancy, Cisco settled on the theme, “Don’t Follow the Herd.”

That led to the adoption of the “technicolor” tactic—all visuals in black-and-white except for Cisco-related elements, which appear in color. The team also inserted several Easter eggs—code for candidates to find and solve and security “bug” icons to discover.

The video features no dialogue (accommodating the audio-off default of many social feeds). The team also created two versions of the video, a long one for featuring with job descriptions and a shorter version for social media and other channels that people would be more likely to watch to its completion.

It was shot on Cisco’s San Jose campus with employees serving as the stars (and 120 as extras). The video was rolled out first on LinkedIn, where the team ran an A/B test confirming the vignettes would be more hyper-targeted to talent and that the cornerstone video would help achieve the broader awareness goals. In addition to performing well in terms of views, the videos generated more than 1,000 clicks to the company’s career site.

Congratulations to the team of Marcy Andrews, Carmen Collins and Raymond Leung.