Video for recruitment: the vacancy gets a face before it gets applicants

The decision moved. Salary and title get a candidate to your posting. What gets them to apply is whether they can picture the people, and a bulleted list has no people in it.

Candidate research keeps finding the same ranking: employees' faces are trusted, leadership is half-trusted, and the corporate montage with drone shots is discounted as advertising, because that is what it is.

Recruiters already know this, which is why a phone call still beats a mail merge. Video is the phone call made once, working on every candidate who watches, including the passive ones who would never have picked up.

The blocker was never filming. It is that editing sixty seconds of talking used to cost an afternoon or an invoice, and a vacancy cannot wait for either.

Somewhere in your building sits a hiring manager who can talk about this role for sixty seconds without notes. What the team is building, who they need, what a good first month looks like.

That take is the vacancy video. Not a culture film, not a brand asset. One person, one role, one minute, filmed on a phone at their desk.

Do it for every role and something compounds: the careers page and the feed fill with real people, which is exactly the evidence candidates go looking for before they apply.

For an agency desk the same mechanic sells your own pipeline. One role walkthrough a week, in your own voice, and within a quarter you are the recruiter whose face the niche recognises. Recognition is why your message gets answered and the other forty do not.

Film the hiring manager on a phone, up to 3 minutes. One take, no script, at their desk. Upload it.

Cutroom transcribes every word, writes the hook, tightens the pauses, drops the ums, and places footage on exactly the words that describe something. Office clips you already have land where the manager mentions the team; millions of free clips from the stock search cover everything you did not film.

Captions burn in, in one of six styles, because feeds play silent. The finished 9:16 MP4 comes back in about a minute.

You direct on the transcript, never on a timeline. If the manager rambled in the middle, delete that line and the cut rebuilds around it. If legal wants a sentence gone, that is one deletion, not a re-edit round.

A batch is 100 credits: the transcript, the director pass and the b-roll search. Export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a one-minute vacancy video is about 120 credits and a 30 second cutdown about 110.

Try it first. 3 finished videos are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card. Free exports carry a Cutroom mark across the middle.

Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 10 one-minute videos, and it takes the mark off. Cancelling is one click under Settings.

Basic is $39.99 for 2,500 credits and adds avatars and generated music. Premium is $79.99 for 5,000 credits. An in-house team covering a role a week fits on Lite. An agency desk running several clients' vacancies outgrows it.

Every talent team has one. Three routes, in order of preference.

Shrink the ask. Do not request a video; ask them one question and film the answer. Sixty seconds of answering beats three minutes of presenting, and the second attempt always sounds like them.

Front it yourself. A recruiter explaining a role on camera is normal now, on agency desks and in-house alike, and your delivery improves faster than any manager's because you do it weekly.

Or render a presenter. On Basic, $39.99 a month, an avatar delivers the script instead: a photo and an audio track in, a talking head out, at 350 credits a minute of render on top of the batch and export, with generated voice at 70 credits a minute if nobody records the audio. It solves the empty-chair problem, and a real employee still out-converts it, because the employee is the evidence.

The take caps at 3 minutes and exports are 9:16 MP4 only. That is right for LinkedIn, Reels, TikTok and Shorts, and wrong for a widescreen careers-site header. There is no landscape master to download.

There is no subtitle file export and no translation, so a multilingual employer brand needs a separate take per language.

The cinematic culture film, with a crew, a colour grade and the CEO, is not this. That is a production job, worth commissioning about once a year, and worth its invoice. This is the weekly cadence between those films, the layer that keeps the brand alive while the big film ages.

And if you post one video a quarter, Lite is more than you need. A raw phone take posted native to LinkedIn costs nothing, and at that pace it is the honest recommendation.