Recruitment Content in Professional and Managed Services
- Hugh Whitehouse
- May 20
- 4 min read
Client: Data#3 Limited
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Built on a foundation of highly-skilled resources, vendor expertise and proven success, Data#3’s Services provide the building blocks for the solutions they deliver to customers. So when producing content for recruitment in professional and managed services, how do you make it authentic to the day-to-day experience and attract the best talent?
Data#3 has a long and well established history. They're an ASX 200 company with over 40 years of operations in information technology. They started out with typewriters and have ridden the wave of technological evolution through each and every era (hardware and software, networking and LAN, mobility and EUC, now cloud) an have retained stellar reputation for delivering customer success.
But everyone who's anyone in Queensland IT has probably worked for them at some point (oh hai!). So how do you differentiate and promote the business in recruitment campaigns for Managed and Professional services? By focussing on the people.
I've previously talked about how I produced a long-form project developing engaging and effective internal communications for D3. The key metrics that drove success with that project were:
High production values, and
people/benefit led storytelling
When planning the production of this series I took a similar approach. I knew the main thrust of the content would be generated from interviews with key people within the Professional and Managed Services teams. I did not know how they would respond to questions... But I knew I wanted the ability to cross cut any response from Interview 1 with any other response from Interview 2/3/4 etc.
To do this successfully I would need to film in multicam with at least three different angles for all available interviews. This would allow me to cut from Interview 1 (A Cam) to Interview 2 (B Cam) to Interview 3 (C Cam) without creating any jarring or offputting jumpcuts (as you'd get cutting Interview 1 (A Cam) to Interview 2 (A Cam) for example).
I also wanted the lighting and mood of the videos to be upbeat, warm and high-key. No-one wants to work in a dark or aggresively under-lit office. And I knew I wanted to feature as much of the actual office environment as I could get access to, staging b-roll shots and sequences with a diverse range of talents across as many spaces as possible. The idea was that if you'd watched the videos, walking in to the office for the first time should feel familiar. It should feel like home.
Shooting b-roll sequences in an office or public location is all about coverage. You start wide, expose for the talent in the scene, then grab 15-30 seconds of each shot while rotating around and slowly pushing in to traditional shot/reverse angles. I never record audio when I'm creating this type of b-roll and I tell the talent this to help them relax. They can converse about their family, work, or whever shared interest they may have while I run around them getting all the shots I need for the sequence.
An example of sequence coverage is below. Notice how each shot gets closer and more intimate.
Personally, i've never liked camera sliders. I find them to be an uncooperative encumbrance that's always got the camera in the wrong place - at the wrong part of the movement - whenever you want to cut to that camera. So I don't use them anymore. But I do still love the effect. So I do it all in post.
If you didn't know, Adjustment Layers are having a real moment in 2025. They're the secret sauce that often facilitates camera movement, animations, even LUT based colour grading (though, gross. Get Davinci Resolve and act like an adult).
I use them primarilly in talking heads to either:
push zoom 10% in on a wide (A Cam), or
track an offset medium close up (B Cam) to emulate a slider action.
It's small touches like this that bring a piece to life.
Deliverables:
For the Recruitment Content in Professional and Managed Services project I interviewed 5 people and shot b-roll sequences (like the one listed above) across two days on-site. I knew that each interview would approximately yeild:
1x 2-3 min video (16x9),
3x 1 min social videos (9x16)(16x9), and
20-30 stills and frame grabs.
The 16x9 content you see here was mostly disctibuted via YouTube where it could be embedded in to job advertisments or recruitment opportunities where the messaging or theme were most relevant. This has been tremendously successful at encouraging and fostering more engement for Professional and Managed Services job opportunities at Data#3.
The 9x16 content has flourished on LinkedIn (of all places) as that platform continues to look at whatever other platforms are having success with and "I'll have what she's having" their way to innovation.
The stills have been added to the broader repository of Data#3 assets to be used in internal communications and marketing opportunities. They also add art to the sister series of blogs developed and released in conjuction with these videos.
Lumix S5iix (x2)
Rigid PRO Cinerig
Lumix S9
PolarPro VND (1-5) (x2)
Hoya IR Cut (x3)
Samyang 35-150mm f2/2.8
Lumix 24-105mm f4
Sigma 50mm F1.8 (EF)
Sigma 85mm f1.8 (EF)
Blackmagic Design 12G 5" Monitor (x2)
Blackmagic Design 12G 12" Monitor
Blackmagic Design ATEM Extreme ISO
Aputure 150d (x3)
Aputure Light Dome
Aputure Fresnel
Aputure Chinaball
Rode WirelessGO 2 (x2)
Sirui SVS75 Tripod (x3)
Pre-Production (off site): 6-12 hrs
Production (on site): 6-10 hrs
Post Production (Data management): 4 hrs
Post Production (Assembly): 24-48 hrs
Post Prodution (Colour Grade): 8 hrs
Post Production (Audio Mix/Master): 4 hrs
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