There is one UGC brief that does not come out of the marketing budget, and most brands have never written it.
It is bought by whoever is trying to fill a role, it is judged on whether anybody good applies, and it is the only content in the company whose audience is not customers. In a country where several sectors compete for the same small pool of people, it is also the brief with the shortest path between a video and a measurable result.
Why job ads cannot answer the real questions
A job ad is a legal and administrative document that has been asked to do a persuasive job, and it fails at it structurally rather than through bad writing.
The three things a candidate actually wants to know
Not the responsibilities, which they can guess. Not the requirements, which they will apply against anyway.
They want to know who they will actually work with, because that is what makes a job bearable or not. They want to see the room, because an office, a workshop or a kitchen tells you more in four seconds than a paragraph does. And they want to know what the first week feels like, because the fear is not the job, it is the fortnight of not knowing where anything is and being the person who asks.
None of those three appear in a job ad, and all three are decisive.
Why the careers page fails at all three
Because it is written by the company about the company, and every candidate discounts it automatically.
A careers page saying the team is friendly is worth nothing, in the same way that a brand saying its product is excellent is worth nothing, and for exactly the same reason. The claim comes from the interested party. That is the whole insight behind UGC on the commercial side, and it transfers to hiring without modification.
What has value is somebody who works there, filmed in the actual room, saying something specific enough that it could not have been scripted by a communications team.
| What the candidate wants to know | What the job ad says | What a video can show |
|---|---|---|
| Who will I sit with | A team of dedicated professionals | Three actual people, talking |
| What does the place look like | Modern offices in a dynamic environment | The room, as it is, on a Tuesday |
| What is the first week like | Full onboarding provided | Somebody saying what confused them |
| Is the manager reasonable | Nothing at all | The manager, being interrupted |
| What language will I work in | Usually nothing | Two colleagues, in the actual language |
The last two rows are the ones nobody films, and they are the two that decide applications.
The Belgian question nobody asks out loud
Here is the country specific part, and it is more consequential than anything above.
The language of the floor
Every Belgian job has an official language requirement in the ad and a real language that is spoken in the room, and those two things are frequently not the same.
A candidate cannot ask about it comfortably. Raising it in an interview feels like declaring a limitation, or worse, like making it a political question, so people either avoid applying or find out in week one. Both outcomes cost you: the first loses you candidates who would have been fine, the second produces a hire who quietly starts looking again.
A video settles it in seconds and settles it neutrally. Two colleagues talking to each other in whatever they actually speak, a manager giving an instruction, somebody answering the phone: nobody has made an announcement, and every viewer now knows exactly what the room sounds like.
If the honest answer is that the floor is mixed and switches constantly, that is worth showing too. Plenty of candidates find that appealing and cannot tell from an advert whether it is true.
Who to film, and who not to
The casting rules here are almost the inverse of commercial UGC.
Not the founder
The founder is the least useful person in a recruitment video, for the same reason the CEO is the least useful person in a customer testimonial. Their enthusiasm is expected and therefore worthless as evidence.
Film the person who joined eighteen months ago and is now competent. They remember what was confusing, they have no institutional reflex to defend anything, and they are close enough to the candidate's position to be believed. Ask them what surprised them, what they had to learn, and what they would tell somebody starting Monday.
Film the immediate manager too, briefly and unrehearsed, because the manager is the single largest variable in whether a job is good and candidates know it. Thirty seconds of somebody being normal answers a question the interview cannot.
Do not film the whole team lined up smiling. It reads as an advert, it tells the viewer nothing, and it is the exact thing that makes candidates assume the rest is also staged.
What to do with it
Put it in the job ad itself, not on a careers page nobody visits. Put it in the reply to applicants, where it does the work of the interview you have not scheduled yet. Send it to the person you are trying to poach, where it is the only piece of content that is genuinely useful to them.
And keep it when the role is filled. Roles reopen, and a video of the room from last year is more honest than a new one made in a hurry.
Keep reading
- The Sale You Lost Is Not in Your Analytics
- For a Restaurant, Reach Is a Cost
- Belgium Runs on Two Calendars
- Nobody Has Decided Not to Pay You
- The complete UGC guide for Belgium
Frequently asked questions
Who should own this internally?
Whoever is hiring, with the marketing team lending the process rather than the budget. Content owned by marketing tends to drift back toward employer branding, which is the thing that does not work.
Should we use a professional creator or film it ourselves?
A creator for the framing and the edit, your own people on camera. What you are buying is somebody who knows how to make an untrained person sound natural, which is the entire skill.
Is it worth it for one role?
For a hard role, yes, and the comparison is not with other content, it is with the cost of the role staying open or of a hire leaving in month three.
What if the honest picture is not flattering?
Then show it anyway, narrowly. A small chaotic company that films itself being small and chaotic attracts people who want that, and repels people who would have left. Both are wins, and the second is the expensive one to get wrong.