Employee testimonials offer a different perspective from corporate presentations when it comes to showcasing company culture. Indeed, when an employee talks about their career path and their relationships with their team, the audience gets to know the company through their experience.
An employee interview involves filming employees on camera and inviting them to speak freely about their work. They can talk about their responsibilities, how they joined the company, a memorable project or the atmosphere within their department.
This way, a company can use a video about its culture to showcase its roles and strengthen its employer brand, recruitment campaigns or internal communications.
Which employees should you choose to represent your company culture?
A company might be inclined to prioritize its executives or employees who are very comfortable speaking, but these individuals alone do not reflect the full range of professional experiences within the organization.
For this reason, it is better to invite people who hold different positions and have varied backgrounds. An employee who joined a few months ago can share their first impressions, while a colleague who has been with the company for ten years can explain how their role has evolved.
Likewise, a manager can discuss how their team works together, whereas a technician or frontline employee will describe their responsibilities from a different perspective. Depending on the company’s size and activities, the shoot can also involve employees from several departments and with different levels of seniority.
Furthermore, confidence on camera should not become the main selection criterion. A more reserved employee can share an interesting story if the team explains how the interview will unfold and gives them time to find their words.
What questions should you ask during an employee interview?
To encourage meaningful answers, the interviewer should favour open-ended questions that invite the employee to describe a situation or share an experience. Conversely, a series of questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” gives the person little opportunity to expand on their story.
Here are a few questions the team can adapt to the roles and people they want to interview.
- How would you describe your job to someone who knows nothing about it?
- Which responsibilities take up most of your working day?
- Why did you decide to join this company?
- What do you enjoy most about your role?
- How would you describe the relationships within your team?
- Which project has had the biggest impact on you since you joined?
- Can you share a moment that captures the spirit of the company?
- What did you discover when you first joined this company?
Anecdotes provide useful material for editing and help viewers picture a situation. In this way, the video presents company culture through real experiences.
How can you prepare an interview without writing the answers in advance?
Preparation helps participants understand what to expect and makes the shoot less intimidating. However, if someone memorizes all their answers or reads them from a teleprompter, their testimonial may sound like a promotional speech.
Before recording, the team can therefore share the main topics of discussion and explain the stages of the shoot. They can also tell participants how long the interview will take, who will be in the room and which channels the company plans to use to share the video.
On the other hand, asking employees to write out their answers word for word limits the scope for conversation. It is better to encourage them to think about a few memories or examples they would like to share, while letting them choose their own words.
During the interview, the interviewer can ask for details or rephrase a question if the participant hesitates. Afterwards, the editor can remove repetition and lengthy passages without changing the meaning of what was said or losing the spontaneity of the conversation.
Why should you obtain employees’ permission before sharing the video?
Before publishing the video, the company must obtain the employee’s written permission. This document specifies where the footage will appear, such as on the company website or social media, as well as the purpose and duration of its use.
The same care applies to colleagues filmed in offices or workshops, even if they appear only in cutaway shots. The team must check the relevant permissions before publishing the video on the company website, on social media or through an internal communication channel.
How can employee interviews strengthen an employer brand?
When a candidate reads a job posting, they want to understand the responsibilities involved and may also wish to discover the working environment. A video interview allows them to hear employees describe their work and the relationships within the company.
For example, an employee might explain how they joined their department, what projects their team is working on and which skills they use in their role. A manager, meanwhile, can describe how work is organized or how different departments collaborate.
These testimonials complement the information in a job posting without replacing details about responsibilities, working conditions or pay. They can also introduce jobs whose responsibilities are difficult to illustrate through a written job description alone.
The company can then add the video to its careers page, a job profile or a recruitment campaign. However, to maintain the credibility of the testimonial, it should let employees speak about their experiences in their own words.
Why add B-roll footage to a video interview?
An employee interview does not have to consist of a single static shot of the person’s face throughout the video. To complement the testimonial, the team can film offices, workshops, meetings or employees at work.
Video professionals call these images B-roll or cutaway footage because they help vary the shots and illustrate what is being said. For example, when a technician explains a task, the videographer can show a few stages of their work.
Similarly, if an employee talks about a team project, footage of meetings or conversations between colleagues can help the audience understand the context. Viewers also get to see the premises and learn about the different roles.
Before keeping these sequences in the final edit, the team must also review their content. This helps avoid showing confidential documents, screens displaying sensitive information or people who have not given permission for their image to be shared.
How can you help an employee feel comfortable on camera?
Speaking in front of a camera can be intimidating for someone who has never taken part in a shoot, even if they know their job inside out. That is why the interviewer should take time to talk with them beforehand and explain that they can try an answer again if they wish.
During recording, the interviewer can keep the conversation natural by listening to the answers and asking follow-up questions. If an employee mentions a project they seem proud of, asking about the challenges they faced or the results they achieved may bring out an interesting anecdote.
The production team can also limit the number of people around the camera and allow enough time for preparation. That way, the employee can focus more on the conversation than on the filming equipment.
Finally, the videographer does not need to edit out every hesitation or smile. The priority is to preserve a clear testimonial that faithfully reflects what the employee said.
What video formats can you create for internal communications and recruitment?
A single filming day can produce several videos, provided the team plans how they will be used before recording. For example, the company can create a main video lasting two to three minutes for its careers page, then select shorter clips for social media.
On LinkedIn, a clip might highlight an employee’s career path or an anecdote about their job. For Instagram, TikTok or YouTube Shorts, the team can also edit vertical clips, adapting the framing and subtitles to each platform.
Internally, the company can share an employee profile on its intranet, in an employee newsletter or during a company event. However, these uses must match the purposes and distribution channels the participants have authorized.
To make it easier to produce multiple versions, the camera operator can plan different framing options and the interviewer can encourage the employee to give answers that make sense even without hearing the original question.
Why create a series of employee profiles?
A company does not need to include all its employees in a single film to showcase the variety of roles it offers. Instead, it can publish a series of profiles and give a different employee the opportunity to speak each month or quarter.
As the series progresses, viewers discover different career paths, responsibilities and teams. This approach can also highlight lesser-known jobs and show various opportunities for progression within the company, when employees can speak from their own experience.
To create a consistent feel across the videos, the team can use a shared graphic style, similar framing and a few recurring questions. However, each participant should be free to choose their own examples and anecdotes so that every profile tells a different story.
A successful employee interview brings out each employee’s personality and perspective on their work. By taking the time to prepare the shoot and encourage natural conversations, a company can create profiles that highlight its teams without imposing a promotional script. These videos offer a more human view of the company and encourage prospective candidates to learn more about its roles and working environment.