I spent well over an hour on video hosting company Wistia’s Learning Center which is dedicated to sharing great tips and tricks for video capture. Not only was the time well spent (Yoh is getting ready to do a lot more with Video – more on that in a future post!) but I also found it to be an incredible example how to best deliver art and generosity. What Wistia does on their learning center underscores what we have been talking about here since August - the process of talent acquisition absolutely positivity has to be executed with both art and generosity.

Every day it becomes more critical for a company to take serious inventory over how prepared they are in their approach towards talent acquisition from an artfully generous perspective, and to determine exactly how much will be invested in such an approach. Because the future of talent acquisition will be much more about what an employer gives to their targeted talent communities, the first movers in a selfless talent acquisition approach will have a distinct advantage over those that delay in deploying such tactics. What does this have to do with a video hosting company that you have probably never heard of? Example time! Take the next one minute and thirty six seconds to view this how-to video from Wistia about using an iPhone to capture high quality video.

1. A marketing manager somewhere is told by her boss that she needs to figure out how to put video up on the website, that they can’t look bad and that she is not permitted to buy a bunch of equipment or outsource the video production.
2. The marketing manager searches for ‘shoot great video from iPhone’ and the third video in the list is from Wistia, a complete how-to that immediately educates her. She’s off!
3. Fast forward 6 months later. The marketing manager wants more control and analytics on her videos. She doesn’t mind Youtube but would rather have greater control of where the video is hosted. Who does she turn to?

Talent acquisition must be as generous and creative as this video from Wistia (watch it again – it is sincerely creative, shoot the ‘capture audio’ tip alone is genius). The question is what is your organization doing to engage the talent community ahead of the demand? What value are you prepared to offer them that has absolutely nothing, in the immediacy, to do with your company? What and how will you produce content that this community will find valuable? And how willing are you to invest in edifying the community for no other reason than to help the members of the community advance their career goals?

Reinvent your talent acquisition approach.

Be creative. Be generous.