If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how many pictures is a video worth? Probably 1,000 so that means that a video is worth 1,000,000 words. If a typical job posting ad is about 500 words, that would mean that a recruitment video is worth about about 2,000 job posting ads. We can quibble over the exact numbers, but I think that few would argue that a recruitment video is going to be far, far more powerful that a job posting ad. So why is it that so few employers seem to push their videos out as far and as wide as they can?

You’d think that employers who sometimes spend hundreds but far more often spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on their recruitment videos would want as many candidates to see them as possible, but some employers seem to feel that their recruitment videos should be well kept secrets. I won’t name the employer but think major contractor to the U.S. federal government. They hire hundreds of highly skilled college students and recent graduates a year. I went to their web site this weekend to see if they had recruitment videos targeted to students and graduates and they had a bunch. I tried to grab the embed code for the videos so that I could then copy that code, click over to our site, and in a minute or two have those videos running on our site. But the videos running on the employer’s web site had no sharing mechanism. You couldn’t even send a link out through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media sites.

I then hopped over to YouTube and pulled up the employer’s channel, which is where all of their videos are housed. They had dozens of videos, many of which were targeted at their customers and other such stakeholders but a number of which were targeted at potential employees. Those videos were easily shareable on social media sites but they had disabled the embed feature so you couldn’t copy the embed code and paste it onto your web page and have the videos run for free on your site. I was really shocked. Why wouldn’t they want their recruitment videos running on other sites? What’s wrong with a little free publicity?

CollegeRecruiter.com re-launched a month ago and part of the new site re-design makes it very, very easy for employers or others to upload their recruitment videos. Those videos are then accessible to everyone who uses CollegeRecruiter.com. How much do we charge? Nothing. We could charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars and it would still be worthwhile to our clients to upload their videos but we made the decision to give away a lot of nickels like this because we know that more and better videos means more and better content means more and better candidates means more and better employer clients means more and better videos.

Want a couple of examples of employers who understand that posting their videos on CollegeRecruiter.com and other sites helps their recruiting efforts? Look no further than our friends at Sodexo and Nestle Purina. Want another example? Upload your recruitment videos and then post a comment below. Hint, hint.