Care homes, hospitals, home-care services and disability support organisations across Belgium share the same problem: they cannot hire enough people, and the ones they hire do not always stay.
Video is a genuinely useful tool here, and it is also the tool most often used in the way that makes the problem worse. A polished film about passion and teamwork attracts candidates who imagined a different job, and they leave after the first difficult month.
The candidate has already had this job somewhere else
Most people applying to a care employer are not new to care. They have worked a night shift, they know what short staffing feels like, and they can tell in ten seconds whether a video was made by someone who has been on a ward.
What they spot immediately
Empty corridors. Staff who are all smiling and none of whom are doing anything. A manager talking about values while nobody is visible behind them. Music that belongs to a bank advertisement.
What they are looking for instead is mundane and specific: how many people are on that floor, what the handover looks like, whether the equipment is modern, whether anyone seems rushed, and who they would actually be working beside.
What decides an application
| What the employer talks about | What the candidate is deciding on |
|---|---|
| Our values and our mission | Whether the team on this floor seems calm |
| A modern building | Whether there is enough staff at night |
| Career development | Whether the schedule is predictable |
| A friendly atmosphere | Whether someone will help when it goes wrong |
| Competitive conditions | The commute, the hours, the roster |
The right column is not cynical, it is practical. A person choosing between two employers with similar conditions decides on the things that shape a Tuesday, and video is the only format that can show a Tuesday.
Filming where people live is different
A care setting is somebody's home and somebody's medical situation at the same time. That comes before the shot list, always.
Consent is not a form
Residents, patients and families must know what is being filmed, why, where it will appear, and that saying no changes nothing about their care. Get it in advance, in writing, and ask again on the day, because a person who agreed last week may not want it today.
Anyone who cannot give informed consent should not be identifiable, and no clever framing makes that acceptable. The staff also deserve to be asked properly rather than told during a shift.
What you do not film
Care itself, in almost every case. Personal hygiene, medical procedures, distress, anything that would embarrass a person who saw it later. There is a version of this footage that looks powerful and is a violation, and the fact that consent was signed does not make it right.
The good news is that the useful footage is elsewhere: the handover meeting, the corridor at shift change, two colleagues laughing in the staff room, hands making coffee, a nurse explaining what the first hour of a shift is like.
Video does not do everything, it shortens the doubt
A recruitment video will not fix a shortage on its own, and expecting it to is how budgets get wasted and then cut.
What it does well is remove uncertainty before an application. A candidate who has seen the building, met two future colleagues on screen and heard an honest description of the roster arrives at the interview already half decided, and the interview stops being an audition and starts being a conversation.
That effect is measurable in a way that most content is not: applications that mention the video, interviews that need less explaining, and above all people who are still there at six months because nothing surprised them.
