The Power of Employee-Generated Video: Axon's Success Story
Axon is a technology company with a very specialized area of focus. They make public safety technology like body cams and SaaS software designed specifically to help communities, law enforcement, military personnel, EMS workers and firefighters, do their jobs more effectively and get home safely at the end of every day. And right now, Axon is the tech company everyone is watching.
Creating a More Authentic and Personal Employer Brand
On their homepage, Axon’s CEO, Rick Smith, states that his company’s goal is to “...make the bullet obsolete.” It’s a worthy and highly in-demand objective at a time when modernizing the tools of the truth-and-justice trade can mean keeping more people safe.
Their explosive growth is requiring them to fill an influx of open positions in offices all over the US and around the world. And for a company on the leading edge with such a hiring demand, they needed to sharpen their tactics on the recruitment advertising front. The old way of attracting interest was just not cutting it. That’s where Cinebody came in.
Axon tapped Rachael Shayne and Jeff Donaldson, Co-Founders of ad agency FocusedBrands, to help them with their public employer brand and hiring velocity with a new, more authentic and personal plan to give potential applicants a peek under the hood at Axon. They wanted employee recruitment videos that showed what it’s like working at a mission critical company that’s moving with a sense of urgency and purpose.
Axon,#thisisaxon
Enlisting Axon Employees to Capture Life at the Company
FocusedBrands utilized Cinebody to simplify its recruitment video production strategy. They enlisted select Axon employees worldwide to capture life at the company from their perspective, including their take on the Axon mission statement, work-life balance, and their roles. The customized Cinebody shot list guided the employees throughout the process.
“It would’ve been impossible, unsafe during the age of COVID, and expensive, to film all of these unique perspectives, personalities, and authentic stories that make up the workforce of Axon,” Shayne said. “But with Cinebody, we were able to capture the true essence of the brand, giving real-life aspects to our recruitment strategy.”
Since all footage captured within the Cinebody app automatically uploads to the cloud, FocusedBrands could immediately start editing as filming wrapped.
Producing Compelling Video Content to Attract Top Talent
FocusedBrands used the collected footage to create a host of video assets, including a mission-statement video highlighting multiple employee perspectives, key employee vignettes, as well as a video to appeal to potential interns. All the assets were featured on a recruitment section of the Axon site, which highlighted their abundant career opportunities all over the globe.
The agency also produced 15-second cutdowns of select employee vignettes for targeted ad buys to help promote the job openings and drive back traffic to the recruitment site.
The Results: Crushing KPIs and Filling Open Positions
More positions were filled and their pipeline for potential applicants flooded with an embarrassment of riches. The landing page and social assets with video as compared to those without video also blew the doors off those without (no surprise there.)
With Cinebody at-the-ready, Axon wins and FocusedBrands allows their clients to focus on what’s important. Welcome to recruitment, 2020-style. And certainly 2021-style. And probably from here on out.
