Supercharge Your Employer Branding through Virtual Reality
Virtual reality can provide authentic transparency into your business, bolster your employer branding, cut recruiting costs, and help you attract — and keep — more qualified job candidates.
What is Employer Branding?
Employer branding is the process of building your company’s image and voice in the eyes of your employees and job candidates. Great employer branding can bring top talent to your company and help you retain that talent. However, a business with weak employer branding or one that simply ignores this important aspect of its corporate persona can lose its most talented workers — and find them hard to replace.
Not surprisingly, business leaders everywhere are waking up to the reality that their employer branding needs to be as high a priority as their consumer brand, if not higher. And one of the best ways to create great employer branding is to offer transparency into the culture, people, products, and spaces of the business. “The number one obstacle that candidates experience when searching for a job is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organization,” confirms a recent LinkedIn report.
Ignoring Employer Branding Can Kill Your Recruiting Efforts
Even aside from the humiliation of rejection, job hunting can be a frustrating experience. Applying to a variety of different positions is an exhausting and confusing process, as most career pages, job fairs, and recruiter interactions don’t show candidates what to expect if they join the business — or get them excited about applying. And the worst career pages only allow candidates to search for jobs, providing little other information about the company. How can they have any idea whether the job is right for them? And with the advanced technologies available today, how is it that most recruiters are only given brochures and trinkets to bring to an event? How many candidates leave those events with 50 pieces of paper — never to look at them again?
Are you personally excited when a recruiter reaches out to you with “an amazing job,” but has no material to show you, no videos for you to watch, and no way for you to experience what makes the opportunity or the company great?
The Benefit of Proper Employer Branding: Hire Faster and For Less
At a time when finding good talent can be difficult, strong employer branding has been shown to attract 50% more qualified applicants, according to NextWave Hire, and this number increases in highly competitive sectors that require niche skillsets. How much faster could you hire if you had 50% more qualified candidates applying for each open position?
When companies have strong employer branding, they’re also able to decrease recruiting costs by an average 43%, says LinkedIn, in part due to a higher-quality applicant pool, but also because they don’t have to spend as much on marketing the role, on paying recruiters, and on trying to convince candidates of their value as an employer.
Why VR and Employer Branding are a Match Made in Heaven
Create Authentic Transparency
One of the challenges of creating strong employer branding is giving job candidates authentic views into your company. Even a visit to the company’s offices and a handshake from a potential manager provide little insight into the day-to-day of working in a business.
In contrast, virtual reality (VR), also known as interactive 360° video, allows prospective job candidates to see what they can expect of the company, the office environment, and even their potential colleagues prior to joining. By watching a 360° video filmed for the purpose, candidates can see the entire office or offices — whether local or a thousand miles away; overseas factories; the CEO speaking at the latest corporate retreat; and employees interacting on a typical day.
No hiding behind a 2D camera.
Transparency is not only the key to getting the right employees to apply to your open positions; it’s also the key to keeping them. One of the main reasons that people leave a new role is that they find a disconnect between their expectations and the realities of the role. Don’t waste your new employees’ time and yours by creating inauthentic experiences.
Stand Out in the Crowd
It is, quite simply, good employer branding that will differentiate your company from others when you’re marketing to the same candidates. Successful employer branding positions your company to become the employer of choice to the group of qualified individuals you want to attract.
By using an interactive VR experience in the recruiting process, you can allow prospective employees to see for themselves what your company’s culture looks like. You can therefore stand out in a crowd by bringing Oculus Go VR headsets to a job fair, showcasing VR experiences online on your career pages, or sending them out to candidates with each offer letter. Companies that provide these experiences boost candidate engagement and look much more innovative than the competition.
Target the Right Talent
Imagine, as you’re trying to decide if a new job is the right fit for you, being able to have a realistic 360° work experience. You get insight into your responsibilities, you see the employees and managers you’ll be working with, and you gain some understanding of the culture. Do you think you’d have a better understanding of whether this position is the right fit for you? As a company, the cost savings alone from retaining just one or two new employees because they fully understood the job before taking it could reach the tens of thousands of dollars.
Real World Impact
Imagine a rapidly growing startup with a number of offices in mid-sized cities where talent is limited or historically works in other industries. But job candidates are skeptical to move to these cities to work for a “startup” because they believe it means taking on too much risk. In addition, they don’t want to visit the company’s offices because they’re not in major cities. However, candidates who do visit realize the size and growth of the company and are five times more likely to apply.
In response, the company creates an interactive 360° tour of the business that highlights the size and benefits of the offices, shows the diversity of the work force, and features its exciting and engaging culture. It uses the experience on its careers page to attract more inbound applicants and brings VR headsets to campus recruiting events to engage new grads.
The result? Candidates spend over 10 minutes on average exploring the interactive office experience — five times the amount spent on other videos. Jobs are filling at a rate 15% faster than they were before VR was introduced, and some have filled up to 66% faster. The overall response from candidates is remarkable, with most shocked to see the company using VR to build the employer brand, some calling it “truly awesome,” and others saying, “every company should do this.”
The company is so pleased with its success that it’s now ready to expand the experience to multiple locations, including its offices in major cities. And this is just one of many examples of companies using VR successfully, from businesses with 250 employees to those with 100,000 employees and more, across all industries and stages of growth.
What You Can Do Today
The interactions you have with prospective employees should inspire them to join the company. Showing them your business inside and out will be essential, as any information they can learn about your work culture may sway them into applying and accepting your offer — or discourage them early if they are not the right fit. VR/360° experiences offer an incredible opportunity to do just that, strengthening your employer branding and getting better candidates to apply to, and remain with, your organization.
If you’re struggling to attract the talent you want, give candidates insight into your culture, or demonstrate what makes your business unique, look at the potential offered by 360° videos and VR to create authentic transparency and distinguish yourself from the competition. To learn more or see examples of other companies succeeding through this technology, reach out to eevo at sales@eevo.com.
