Your talent attraction video shows the wrong thing

I’ve watched a lot of talent attraction videos. More than most people, and probably more than is healthy.

After a while they blur together. Drone shots over a downtown core. A montage of smiling people at a farmers market. A voiceover about “vibrant communities” and “world-class amenities.” Stock footage of mountains, or prairie, or coastline, depending on the region. A logo and a tagline at the end.

These videos are everywhere. They’re expensive to make. And with rare exceptions, they don’t work.

Not because they’re poorly produced. Most are technically competent. They don’t work because they’re showing the wrong thing.

What the wrong thing looks like

The wrong thing is the city.

Skylines. Trails. Restaurants. Arenas. Cultural institutions. Not irrelevant, but not what moves a person to uproot their life and relocate their family either.

When someone’s considering a move, they’re not looking at your city. They’re trying to picture themselves in it. That’s a fundamentally different question, and it needs a fundamentally different answer.

A skyline shot answers: what does this place look like?

It doesn’t answer: can I imagine my life here? Will my kids be okay? Will I find my people? Is this somewhere I could actually stay?

Those are the questions that drive relocation decisions. And drone footage can’t answer them.

What actually moves people

A few years ago I was working on a talent attraction project for an economic development organization in southern Alberta. We spent the first few weeks doing what these projects usually do: location scouting, b-roll lists, voiceover drafts.

Then we talked to some people who’d actually moved there. Not long-time residents. Recent arrivals, within the last two or three years. People who’d made exactly the decision the video was trying to prompt.

The things they talked about had nothing to do with amenities.

One woman talked about her neighbour, who showed up with food the week she moved in and became one of her closest friends. A man talked about the hockey league he’d joined, mostly full of people who’d also moved from somewhere else, and how it became his community faster than anywhere he’d lived before. Someone else talked about the twenty-minute commute, not as a data point, but as a specific description of what it felt like to have her time back.

These weren’t polished testimonials. They were specific, personal, and occasionally imperfect. And they were the most compelling talent attraction content I’ve ever been involved in making.

The decision someone is actually making

Talent attraction isn’t a real estate transaction. It isn’t a tourism campaign. It’s an invitation to a life change, and it needs to be treated like one.

The decision to relocate involves a spouse or partner, often children, always a network of relationships being left behind. It involves career risk and financial uncertainty. It involves the particular anxiety of starting over somewhere unfamiliar, not knowing whether you’ll find your people or spend three years feeling like an outsider.

Content that speaks to that decision has to be honest about what it’s asking. It has to show the texture of daily life, not the highlight reel. It has to feature real people telling true stories about how the move actually went, including the parts that were harder than expected.

This kind of content is more vulnerable than a produced brand video. It means finding the right people, earning their trust, and knowing how to capture something real on camera. It can’t be scripted in advance. It takes the discipline to stay out of the way when something genuine is happening.

But it works in a way that produced content simply doesn’t. The person watching can feel the difference between a testimonial and a story. And they’re making the most important life decision your video will ever be asked to support.

The brief nobody is writing

Most talent attraction briefs I receive are written around deliverables. A two-minute hero video. A thirty-second social cut. A series of lifestyle stills.

The better brief starts with a question: who’s the specific person we’re trying to reach, what decision are they wrestling with, and what would they need to see or hear to take the next step?

That question produces a completely different project. It pushes the work toward specificity rather than aspiration. It locates the story in real people rather than scenic geography. It asks the production to do something harder than capturing a good-looking place, which is capturing the feeling of belonging to one.

I’ve never met someone who moved to a new city because of a drone shot.

I’ve met people who moved because they watched someone they recognized tell a true story about a life they wanted.

That’s the video worth making.