Employer Branding Video: What It Is and How One Gets Made

An employer branding video shows candidates what it is like to work at your company, told by the people who already do. It answers the question every serious applicant weighs before applying: what would my working days here actually look like? Done well, it is the closest thing to a trial day a candidate gets without setting foot in the building.

Below: what the format does, the seven formats companies actually shoot, and the decisions that determine what your shoot day yields. The decisions get the most space, because that part is settled before anyone touches a camera.

What Is an Employer Branding Video?

An employer branding video is a short film in which your employees show potential candidates the reality of working at your company: the daily work, how the team operates, and the development on offer. It runs on your career page, in job ads and on your social media channels. Its audience is people deciding where to work.

It is the recruiting counterpart to the company brand film. A brand film shapes the company's reputation with customers, partners and investors; the employer branding video stays with the employee experience. Both formats put people on camera, but the job differs: in a brand film, employees appear as proof of competence, and here they appear as proof of what the workplace is like.

Work Environment: Applicants Ask a Different Question Than Customers Do

A customer asks whether your work delivers. A candidate asks how teams treat each other on a difficult day, what a typical Tuesday holds, and which development is realistic in year two. A general brand message answers none of those questions, which is why it reads hollow to an applicant audience.

So the video focuses on working day, team culture and room to grow, and products and services move to the background. The right candidate should finish the video able to picture the seat they would sit in.

Which Video Formats Do Companies Shoot for Employer Branding?

Companies shoot seven main formats for employer branding: employee interviews, day-in-the-life films, team portraits, culture and values films, career-path interviews, office tours, and behind-the-scenes footage. The listings ranking for this topic fold them into a wider employer branding strategy and sell the same promise about how to create them, in their own words: authentic stories from real employees, aimed at top talent.

• Employee interviews: one person, their role, and how they came to it. The workhorse of the genre.
• Day in the life: the camera follows one employee from arrival to handover, so the company's culture shows up as routine.
• Team portrait: several voices from one team inside the organization, usually around a shared project.
• Culture and values film: the company's values stated on camera, then backed with scenes that show them in practice.
• Career-path interviews: an employee traces the route from their first role to their current one; career growth with a name and a face.
• Office or site tour: the spaces and work environment a candidate would join, at walking pace.
• Behind the scenes: unpolished project moments that give a sense of how collaboration actually runs.

Pick whichever format fits the story you actually have. What decides credibility is whether the statements inside it hold up to checking.

A Claim Candidates Could Disprove Is Worth Filming

The test for every statement that makes the cut: could a candidate check it, and would it survive the check? "We are a great team" fails before it starts: every company says it and no candidate can verify it. In an employer branding video, a concrete and easily disprovable statement stays credible, because publishing it means being ready to be taken at your word.

Flexible working hours, stated plainly, is brochure language. The same claim shown through one employee's real week — which meetings move, which hours shift — is something a candidate can test in their first month.

Potential candidates have seen a great many employer branding videos and recognize interchangeable statements on sight. Statements that survive that scrutiny build a strong employer brand.

Who Should Appear on Camera?

An employer branding video should feature employees from different roles and seniority levels, not only the leadership team. Potential hires weighing an engineering role give more weight to the engineer two desks from the open seat than to a message from the executive floor.

The same rule governs how people appear: as they are, at their actual work, without the staged testimonial. Showcasing real employees at their work is the entire value of the format. Script the performance, and you have converted your best evidence back into advertising.

What Has to Be Decided Before the Shoot Day?

More than most guides admit, and earlier than most companies expect. Page one of this topic is a wall of ideas for what to film; in our production experience, the results are set by decisions made before the shoot. It is the part of the process we spend the most time on at Blank Media, a video production studio in Zurich: the same pre-production discipline that carried our corporate video work for BCG, IBM, KPMG, ZHAW and Bestsmile.

One Shoot Day Can Produce Two Working Videos For Your Company Brand

One shoot day can produce both an employer branding video and a client-facing film if the same employees sit for two separate interview rounds: one on competence and client work, one on the working day and team culture. Each video then does one job properly.

Deciding Late Costs You the Footage

The modular route only exists if it is planned before the shoot. Interview footage shot for a client film cannot be recycled into an employer branding video afterwards: the questions were different, so the answers are about the wrong things.

For a project with ZHAW, the assignment was positioning the university as an employer for early-career academics. The interviews stayed almost entirely on the working day, supervision and development opportunities, and away from the institution as a whole. That focus is the difference between a video that reads as interchangeable and one that helps a candidate decide.

Settle These Before the Call Sheet Goes Out

Seven decisions, all cheaper to make in a meeting room than on set. They are the same seven we settle with clients when planning a corporate video production. You can see where that discipline ends up in the case studies on our site.

• Audience: which candidate group the video serves, and which vacancies it supports.
• Deliverables: how many finished videos the shoot day yields, and for which purposes.
• Casting: who is interviewed, from which roles and seniority levels.
• Question rounds: which questions each interview round covers, kept separate per deliverable.
• Cuts and lengths: which versions are needed, for which destinations.
• Approval: who signs off the edited cut. The edit is what gets approved, not the raw footage.
• Language versions: which subtitle and language versions the rollout needs.

The Destination Decides the Cut Length

An employer branding video runs 60 to 90 seconds for social media and job ads, with a longer version of two to three minutes for the career page. The lengths follow from the destinations, and the destination list is longer than most companies use.

An employer branding video seldom runs in only one place. The listings name the same destinations, on and off your website:

• Career page: the long cut, for visitors who chose to spend time.
• Job ads and portals: the short cut, next to a specific vacancy, where potential employees first meet you.
• Social media: the short cut, where your video content competes with everything else in the feed.
• Onboarding and internal channels: the same material still working after the hire.

The Career Page Version Runs Longer

Two to three minutes is deliberate: a visitor there has chosen to invest time, so the longer cut can hold full interview passages, more voices and more of the working day. The short cuts stay compressed because a feed gives you seconds; a visitor who opened your careers section gives you minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Five questions, phrased the way people search them. Each answer stands on its own and can go straight into an internal memo.

What is an employer branding video?

An employer branding video is a short film in which employees show candidates what working at a company is really like: the daily work, the team, and the development on offer. It runs where candidates look, on the career page, in job ads and on social channels, and its job is to give applicants enough reality to decide whether they fit.

How long should an employer branding video be?

An employer branding video runs 60 to 90 seconds for social media and job ads, plus a longer version of two to three minutes for the career page. Visitors there have chosen to invest time, so the longer cut earns it with full passages instead of fragments.

Who should appear in an employer branding video?

It should feature real employees from different roles and seniority levels, not only the leadership team. Candidates put more trust in voices close to the position they would hold than in leadership communication alone.

How do you know whether an employer branding video worked?

Check what you can already observe: whether candidates mention the video in interviews or applications, whether incoming applications fit the advertised roles better, and the engagement on your own channels: how far viewers actually get in the video. If new hires arrive already knowing how the team works, the video is doing its job.

Is an employer branding video worth it for a smaller company?

Yes, especially where the competition for skilled people in your industry is strong. The production does not need to be elaborate: an authentic answer to "what is it like to work here" counts for more than polish.