Why Work at Plaid?

Plaid's people team needed a recruiting video that candidates would actually believe, with Plaid employees explaining in their own words what it's like to work there.

They brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in San Francisco, to produce it. The project included two videos: this one, and a companion piece on Plaid's seven values, both filmed in a single day of interviews with the same group of employees.

The Challenge

Candidates watch a lot of recruiting videos. By the time someone is seriously looking, they've seen enough to have a good sense of what's staged and what isn't, which sets a high bar for anything that's going to be believed. Earning trust in under three minutes is the whole job.

Plaid added a second consideration. The company works across several global offices and getting footage from all of them in time for this project wasn't possible. And showing footage of just one or two offices would give a candidate a narrower picture of Plaid than what's real.

Our Approach

We pitched the idea to create the entire video out of interviews, cutting b-roll entirely. That keeps a viewer's attention on the person talking, and it means no single office stands in for a company that doesn't work out of one.

We filmed on green screen, which let us get more people on camera in a single day of filming at their office in San Francisco. We scheduled filming for a day when employees from all over the world were in the San Francisco office.

We filmed the interviews using a setup that lets the person being interviewed hold eye contact with the interviewer and the camera at the same time, so a candidate watching feels spoken to rather than watching someone else's conversation. We filmed in 8K, which gave our editors several usable framings out of every setup, which saved time during production.

The Outcome

Recruiting isn't one conversation. A candidate at the top of the funnel and a candidate weighing an offer are asking different questions, and one video covering both has to compromise somewhere.

From a single day of filming in their San Francisco office, Plaid's people team came away with two videos they could use in different places, both built from employees talking directly to candidates, instantly earning the trust they needed.