TikTok Recruiting Videos… Are You Missing Out?
In our latest interview, we sat down with Jessica Miller-Merrell, also known as Jess, a leading voice in HR and talent acquisition and the Founder of Workology. Jess shared insights from her extensive experience and discussed the growing importance of TikTok recruiting videos.
Jess runs the popular HR blog, Workology, which she started in 2007. Her blog reaches about a million people monthly. Jess is dedicated to educating and supporting HR professionals through her content, online learning platform, and certification prep programs.
The Power of Recruitment Videos
Jess emphasizes the importance of creating a recruitment video for building relationships and targeting job seekers. She highlights TikTok as an underutilized yet powerful tool for recruitment marketing and great recruitment video. According to Jess, the competition for TikTok recruitment videos is minimal, making it an excellent platform for standing out and engaging with a unique audience.
Why is TikTok becoming a worthwhile tool for recruitment?
TikTok is great for both personal branding and company recruitment efforts. Jessica points out that LinkedIn, while valuable, is crowded. TikTok offers a space with less competition and more opportunities for meaningful interactions. HR leaders and TA practitioners can use TikTok to position themselves as experts and build relationships with job seekers. There are several “TikTok Recruiter” profiles on TikTok as well.
Getting Started with TikTok Hiring
Here are some of Jessica’s creative suggestions and practical advice for companies and recruitment marketing teams looking to leverage TikTok recruiting videos:
Start with simple, authentic videos.
Use day-in-the-life or behind the scenes videos, video highlights, hiring manager insights, or basic workday snippets that can show your company culture.
Organic traffic is valuable; don’t worry about overproducing content.
Engage with your prospective employees and prepare for direct interaction, including handling negative comments.
Share career growth opportunities, the company’s culture, company’s values, or examples of work life balance.
Building a Business Case for TikTok Recruiting Videos
To gain buy-in from stakeholders, Jess suggests showing examples of successful recruitment videos. Her TikTok playlist features numerous examples that have worked well. She stresses the importance of explaining how TikTok can fit into the organization and broader recruitment strategy, particularly for engaging candidates at different stages of the funnel.
How can recruiters use TikTok?
Recruiters can use TikTok to create engaging, authentic videos that highlight different aspects of their company and job opportunities. Jessica mentions, “You can rely on organic traffic and just be like a day in the life video or having your hiring manager giving a 20-second insight on what the job is or simply just typing on your computer and making a video and throwing some text on the screen. It doesn’t have to be overly produced.”
Is TikTok good for recruiting?
Yes, TikTok is good for recruiting. Jessica points out, “The competition on TikTok is, it’s really low cost for running ads and it can produce some really great results. There’s just not a lot of TA, HR leaders over there that are doing it well, sharing resources with job seekers.” She also highlights that TikTok can help recruiters stand out, “If I want to stand out from the rest, I want to be like number one. And there’s not a lot of competition and there’s a lot of space to have conversations over on TikTok.”
Why is TikTok becoming a worthwhile tool for recruitment?
TikTok is becoming a worthwhile tool for recruitment due to its high engagement and low competition. Jessica explains, “It’s busy. It’s noisy over there [on LinkedIn]. And if I want to stand out from the rest, I want to be like number one. And there’s not a lot of competition and there’s a lot of space to have conversations over on TikTok.” Additionally, she notes the platform’s popularity and reach, “The kids are on TikTok. They use TikTok the way we use YouTube. It is a great place…for low cost. Acquisition can be really low in terms of engagement.”
How to use TikTok for employer branding?
To use TikTok for recruiting, start with simple, authentic videos that highlight daily activities, job insights, or company culture. Jessica suggests, “You can rely on organic traffic and just be like a day in the life video or having your hiring manager giving a 20 second insight on what the job is or simply just typing on your computer and making a video and throwing some text on the screen.” It’s also important to engage with the audience and be prepared for direct interactions, as “TikTok, they’re a little bit real and ruthless. So negative comments or feedback is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Can TikTok be used for recruiting?
Yes, TikTok can be used for recruiting. Jessica highlights its effectiveness, stating, “Honestly, the more real, the better. One of my best videos is me opening a Hydro Flask with some text on the screen. And I think it has 250,000 views.” She also emphasizes the low cost and high engagement potential, “The competition on TikTok is, it’s really low cost for running ads and it can produce some really great results.”
What companies are using TikTok for recruiting?
Several companies are successfully using TikTok for recruiting. Jessica mentions, “Six Flags does a really good job on TikTok. There’s a lot of new restaurant openings.” Additionally, she notes, “I’ve also seen 84 Lumber do some really good videos for manager training. So like targeting assistant managers or people moving into store manager positions.”
These examples demonstrate that even simple, low-cost videos can significantly impact recruitment efforts.
The Role of TikTok in the Candidate Journey
Jess highlights a gap in the recruitment process: engaging candidates in the middle of the funnel. TikTok can be a great tool for keeping candidates interested and informed about company culture and job opportunities, especially for hourly positions. It’s an effective way to qualify candidates and ensure higher engagement in recruitment events like job fairs.
Targeting and Algorithm Tips
Jess provides tips on leveraging TikTok’s algorithm to reach your target audience:
Post frequently leading up to events.
Create content that is relevant to your audience’s interests and needs.
Use TikTok advertising to target specific groups effectively.
Conclusion
Our conversation with Jess was enlightening, revealing the untapped potential of TikTok in recruitment marketing. By embracing this platform, HR leaders and TA practitioners can reach new audiences, build stronger relationships with candidates, and enhance their overall recruitment strategy. For more insights and examples, follow Jess on TikTok at Workology blog.
Full Transcript: Jessica Miller-Merrell – TikTok Recruiting Videos
Jonathan Duarte: Hey everyone, so I’ve got one of my favorite guests in TA and HR Jessica Miller Merrill. And Jess, do you go by Jess now? I saw you change that, but
Jessica Miller Merrell: Yeah, Jess is what my friends call me, so I figure like we’re friends in HR and TA, so just call me Jess.
Jonathan Duarte: All jess, don’t remember how long ago we met, but I would gather it was about, I think good, my good, no, it was before GoHire days so 2010, I don’t know, around there.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Probably 13 years ago or ish. Yeah.
Jonathan Duarte: Yep. And in, in TA conferences and stuff. And as part, as we’ve talked about, my goal in these video interviews and whatnot is to introduce the brightest, most talented people in the space that I know.
So I want to get everyone on record with all their great knowledge and tips and tricks on how people can execute. Jess, why don’t you give you, give us a little heads up about you and what you’re up to these days?
Jessica Miller Merrell: So I’m Jess and I have a popular blog in HR Workology. I started as a HR director and I started a blog in 2007, I think, and it became my job.
And so now I spend my days educating, training, providing resources, information, and support for HR I cover a wide variety of content our website reaches about a million people every single month, and it’s a lot of fun to just talk about our space and share with the community, just information and just what I’m learning and what I’m reading.
Most recently, we’re focused a couple different areas. I have a book that came out last year and it’s called Digitizing Talent. So I’m spending my time talking about all things digital recruiting, a lot in training, and a lot of one on one engagement with TA teams. And then on the other side of things is I have an online learning platform and program for HR certification prep.
So helping support HR leaders with their SHRM or their HRCI certification and recertification. And it’s available on demand and always accessible over on Workology.
Jonathan Duarte: Awesome. Awesome. So I know you do a lot of speaking. What are your favorite topics that you’ve been talking about lately? I guess there’s a, yeah, I guess there’s a favorites and then there’s the, so are you using Tik Tok for recruiting or tell me about, and I learned how to spell it.
That’s about my abilities with Tik Tok, right?
Jessica Miller Merrell: I think it’s such a great way to build relationships and rapport and target job seekers or people who are looking, who are your customers whether you’re an HR tech company or someone like me who’s selling courses and resources there’s a lot of really great ways to engage.
Honestly The competition on TikTok is, it’s really low cost for running ads and it can produce some really great results. There’s just not a lot of TA, HR leaders over there that are doing it well, sharing resources with job seekers. I think it’s a great place for people to be able to build a brand with the power of video.
Jonathan Duarte: So would you do it for for our our audience, HR individuals and TA practitioners as well as for their companies, would you recommend them look at it for their own personal brands as well as their company?
Jessica Miller Merrell: I don’t think it, I don’t think it hurts to go into different spaces to build their brand.
Honestly, while I love LinkedIn. I think it’s a great space. There’s, it’s busy. It’s noisy over there. And if I want to stand out from the rest, I want to be like number one. And there’s not a lot of competition and there’s a lot of space to have conversations over on TikTok. So you can be the number one TA leader in retail really easily on TikTok.
Whereas you might have to compete with 25, 000 other people on LinkedIn. And so you can use it to build relationships with job seekers. To position yourself as an expert in HRTA or for sales or just resources purposes. I use it like Google or YouTube. It’s the number one search engine in the world right now is TikTok.
Jonathan Duarte: I got, I have to, this is motivating me. I’m going to ask you more about this because I, like everything, it’s all about as I mentioned, getting good knowledge in front of people and people who know how to use it too. And I know that you’ve dabbled in so many different channels of stuff over the years that if you’re in it and you’re talking about it, then it’s worth it, worth discovering.
Let me ask you this. If a company were to or maybe a recruitment marketing team member said, Hey, let’s do some TikTok videos. What would you recommend? How would you recommend they start? Or do you have some resources? Do you guys have resources on your site that they can point to?
And just, do they have, they’ll, I think a lot of times. So I want to blend this question together is, what are the resources and things and then how do they create a business case? Because a lot of times it’s oh, we’re going to do a video on TikTok and it’s you might as well go to the attorneys and sign an enterprise, deal because it’s just never going to happen.
You have to go through the checks and balances. But I think that’s loosening up. But you still have to sell it.
Jessica Miller Merrell: So I think that, and I have on my TikTok playlist is a huge list of different examples that I like of recruiting videos that I feel have done a good job. You can rely on organic traffic and just be like a day in the life video or having your hiring manager giving a 20 second insight on what the job is or.
You simply just typing on your computer and making a video and throwing some text on the screen. It doesn’t have to be overly produced. With TikTok, honestly, the more real, the better. One of my best videos is me opening a Hydro Flask with some text on the screen. And I think it has 250, 000 views. What?
It’s the it’s the best. It was it, there’s a misspelling on the text when I posted the video but it went viral in a sense. So you don’t, you can just experiment with things. I think the most important thing to remember with TikTok and video is that you can’t just put a link. And say, click here to apply for the job.
Like they actually are going to have to leave to, from your bio or, and go to your careers page, unless you’re going to pay for an advertisement and placement. So you have to think about how you can move them through to your funnel. If it’s going to be organic, but it can be a lot of fun. And again, not a lot of competition on Tik TOK.
You also do have to be prepared to actually have engagement with your audience. So it’s definitely not a one way conversation. And sometimes TikTok, they’re a little bit real and ruthless. So negative comments or feedback is not necessarily a bad thing. It starts a conversation and builds awareness. I think that’s a conversation.
If you’re going to be doing it from a corporate standpoint that you need to have with legal or your boss or whoever’s monitoring these things, because if somebody says something that is not kind. You just like it or heart it. Personally, the more trolls I have, the better, because the more people that are seeing my video.
Jonathan Duarte: Yep, yep. That’s a lot of social too. And, you have to deal with the haters, and the This is one thing I think from recruitment marketing that a lot of people miss. But I think this might actually work very well for TikTok, because I think I’ve seen it, but I wasn’t really trying to pay attention to the details of how it was presented.
But in a lot of recruitment marketing, and especially in the candidate journey when, A lot of, I believe, a lot of recruitment marketing professionals are using video early on the top of the funnel to get candidates engaged with the company. I think there’s a big missing, which is in the middle of the funnel, where they may have even applied.
They may even have a scheduled interview, but we’re not feeding that, those videos about the company and the culture. to those candidates. And I think TikTok, especially in the hourly worker space, might be a great opportunity. Say in our case, like if a candidate applies, there’s gonna be a job fair, like I was helping a client build out a job fair today that’s happening today.
They have all the candidates, like they’re saying, hey, here’s about our company, you wanna come to the job fair? You can send them a text and say, Hey, by the way, if you’re on TikTok, here’s about our company culture. You’re going to get higher engagement at the job fair. You’re going to get the people who want to be there.
And you use video to qualify people in and qualify people out. But I think TikTok, because of its it’s just proliferation is a phenomenal tool for that. Cause I think a lot of people don’t really want to deal with going to YouTube sometimes. But it, I think they live on. on TikTok way more.
Jessica Miller Merrell: The kids are on TikTok.
They use TikTok the way we use YouTube. Yeah. And it is a great place. What I do love about TikTok advertising, so let’s say that we send a text. We tell them to follow us on TikTok. We can then target that audience specifically for specific videos for low cost. Acquisition can be really low in terms of engagement.
And it’s just a subtle way to remind them, especially if maybe we’re at like we’re going on campus, it’s an engineering event or something highly specialized where we want to reach them multiple times. You can do that. The key is we have to look at this just like we look at LinkedIn and Twitter and every other search tool, it’s an algorithm.
So we have to train it and provide it insights into if we’re not going to pay for ads, of who we want to show our videos to. So if you’re going to be posting videos about your job fair for retail workers, you should be posting probably 10 days leading up to event a probably five to nine videos a day for seven days, all related to retail tips for recruiting or hiring for that audience.
So that when it sees you in the same proximity with your phone and their phone. It’ll start to serve up your video.
Jonathan Duarte: Wow. That’s super complicated in my brain, but it’s your recruitment marketing team will figure, can help you with this. And now everyone knows how to find Jessica and all her details on.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Yeah. Workology, workologyblog on tikTok. Give me a follow over there. The examples are on a playlist. It’s called Recruitment, like Recruiting, and if you have a question, just send me a DM over there. I respond or leave a comment on a video. I see all those things. It’s such a fun place to explore, even if you just have 15 minutes.
It’s a great way to just engage with your audience and learn, which is what I want to do. I want to learn the kinds of questions that my community would have, so then I can serve up more resources before they need it.
Jonathan Duarte: Yep. I, yeah, I think some of the things like now we’re getting into spring hiring for the summer water parks and entertainment and all that stuff.
I’m like, Seasonal. You got, yeah, you got to be on TikTok. If you’re trying to hire lifeguards and things like that, that’s just a perfect example. It doesn’t have to be, it’s not like you’re throwing 80 percent of your budget at this thing. It’s just have somebody who, Likes doing that stuff.
Play around and see if it works this year.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Have somebody on your team and just shoot. It doesn’t have to be overproduced with dancing or whatever. It can be simply somebody walking, drinking a drink in the theme park or at your place clocking in. And your employees can make all the videos and then somebody else can put them together.
You don’t have to be the video designer, developer, all the things they know.
Jonathan Duarte: Just the aggregator.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Yeah, let them explore and put some good content together for you. It doesn’t have to be super produced, perfect. camera ready. And honestly, the less camera ready, the better. Yep.
Jonathan Duarte: And I think what, why I also think that the TikTok in that environment might work is because people want to work with their friends and especially at an entertainment and a seasonal job like that.
If they find a TikTok video, they’ll share it with their friends and say, Hey, what are you going to do this summer? What are you going to do? And. Now you start your own, referral program. Your potential employees are sharing it around.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Six Flags does a really good job on TikTok. There’s a lot of new restaurant openings.
It’s a great thing for a lot of hourly positions. I’ve also seen 84 Lumber do some really good videos for manager training. So like targeting assistant managers or people moving into store manager positions. And again, it doesn’t have to be highly pervert, perfect or overproduced to, to be an effective ad.
Jonathan Duarte: Wow. Like I had no, this is what I love about this stuff. I had no idea we were going to be talking about TikTok, but I’m all down for it. That’s awesome. All right. Hopefully it opens up the conversation for a lot more. So thanks for always being that same person for the HR and HR tech community for us.
Jessica Miller Merrell: Of course. Happy to connect and talk more. Thanks for having me on.
Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Awesome.
