Jobs in Pods Blog

There are now 2 new reasons to put your recruitment videos on Youtube.

1. YouTube has announced that they have launched an API that allows website owners to broadcast video content free of charge, through their own sites – a move essentially putting the company in the free hosting bracket.  

Companies will be able to make their players “branded” as their own, and through the use of skins, appear proprietary. According to the Google website, YouTube’s API enables users to “upload new videos, edit video metadata such as comments and favorites and modify user settings”. In addition, the client application “can request a list of videos that match specific search criteria, get access to the most popular YouTube videos or retrieve and maintain YouTube user information such as playlists, subscriptions or contacts”. 

This means your corporate career site can now host the video on Youtube and expose the video to your audience and Youtube’s in one fell swoop.

2. Integration with TiVo.  This makes Youtube videos open to a wider audience.

TiVo Inc., largely responsible for the creation and popularization of digital video recorders (DVRs), will be adding direct access to YouTube videos via TiVo later this year. TiVo users will be able to search, browse, and watch videos on their television sets through their broadband connected TiVo DVRs.

“TiVo’s strategy is to bridge the gap between Web video and television and make as much content available as possible for our subscribers,” Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager for content services for TiVo, told  the NY Times.

Setting up your YouTube recruitment channel is easy as pie with a few customizations thrown in. The first step is creating your account. Your username should be your company name so don’t enter any kind of personal information. Company name only will suffice. Once your account is created YouTube will assign you a unique URL. For example, the Jobs in Pods channel is www.youtube.com/JobsinPods.

Now lets move on to the customization part. Whats great about creating a channel on YouTube is you can actually make a number of modifications to brand it according to your company’s logo and color scheme’s. The first thing you should do is go to your My Account page. This is the “control panel” for all your settings.

1. Click the “Channel Info” link. Enter your company description. Be brief, but tell people who you are in 1 or 2 short paragraphs. In order to keep the page as simple as possible disable the ‘Channel bulletins”. You also have the option of enabling comments. You can decide if anyone can comment or only ‘friends’ you approve.

2. Click the Channel Design link. This is the page where colors and layouts are set. You can select a preset color theme but we suggest overriding those colors in favor of your company colors which you can set in the boxes below. In the Layout Properties section check off ‘Featured Video‘ and ‘My Latest Video‘. Enable ‘Subscriptions‘ and put them in the left column. Then uncheck ‘Contests‘ and ‘Bulletins‘ as they are unnecessary. Make sure the ‘Playlist‘ box is checked.

Make the ‘Videos Box’ a grid and check off Subscribers, Friends and Comments.

In the Advanced Design Customization section you can set your color scheme and upload a background graphic. Use the same colors for each of the boxes on the page. We recommend a darker color for the border and a lighter color for the background. Pick 2 colors from company log to ensure proper branding (and so your marketing dept wont get mad). Make the Background color white (#ffffff) and link to your background image which must be hosted on another server. Make it about 400×400 pixels and give it a light gray color so it doesn’t stand out too much. Choose ‘Repeat Background Image‘ so it tiles on the page.

3. Click the Personal Profile link. Leave most of this page blank except for your website URL. It’s probably a good idea to link directly to your ‘careers’ section. Then upload your company logo in the ‘Profile Picture‘ section.

4. Click the Location Information link. Enter in your company’s HQ current city and zip code.

That’s it, your done. Start uploading your videos and watch the numbers grow.

Monday we’ll have a few more tips for making your company’s videos more popular.

Too few companies realize how powerful sites like YouTube can be for marketing themselves. We’ve written about companies like Sodexho using it before. But we cant stress enough the fact that YouTube is a tremendous opportunity for employers if they use it correctly. It represents social media recruiting at its best.

There are 2 main reasons to incorporate the popular video site into your recruiting efforts.

• Employment branding
• Promoting your jobs

Once you set up a channel and add content you get FREE exposure to YouTube’s millions of users. We’re still amazed at how many companies still don’t post their recruitment videos to the site even though they are on their corporate site. Doing so could double, perhaps triple the number of views that video gets by uploading it.

Beginning tomorrow we will be showing you step by step how to setup your Youtube channel to maximize its usefulness.

Stay tuned.