So your brand or organization has decided to hire a video production team rather than continuing to outsource video to agencies or freelancers. It’s an exciting time, building out a brand new team and expanding the capabilities of what video can do for your company. But it can also be hard to navigate. What video production team roles do you hire for first? How do you set your production team up for success?
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to choose your first hire, the qualities that hire should have, and how to set them up for success as you establish your in-house team.
For more in-depth information, including a full recommended equipment list based on budget and templates for organizing video projects, download The complete guide to building an in-house video production team for free.
Hiring your first video team member
Any time that you’re setting up a brand new arm of an organization, getting the first hire right is a crucial step in making sure you have a solid foundation to build from.
Understanding production team roles
Depending on how large you’re planning on making your team, there’s a number of different video production roles you could consider for your first hire. From colorists to editors, video careers are very specialized, sometimes down to the industry level. Someone who edits feature-length movies will have a different set of skills than someone who edits short-form social media content.
Determining what your organization needs
But rather than focusing on what role you should hire, you need to have a clear idea of what kinds of videos you want to create to determine what skills are necessary for your hire to have. Once you know the skills you want, then you can figure out the right role.
As Kyle Miller, the Video Production Manager here at Storyblocks explained, “If you’re doing high-end commercial work, you want someone who has a cinematography background to produce those really high end, well designed sets. If you’re just doing a ton of social content that’s shot on a phone, go for someone who has experience creating that content and knows the ins and outs of running a YouTube channel or TikTok or Instagram page.”
For small in-house teams, our best recommendation is first hiring someone who has experience in multiple areas of video production and editing. For smaller productions or teams, having a video generalist who can take on all of the main elements of creating a video from start to finish will allow you to start up quickly.
Nolan Nichols, Manager of Video Production at the U.S. Travel Association, likens a generalist to a cross-country runner. “For an in-house videographer, you’re really hiring a cross country runner, somebody that is going to be able to take it the distance and navigate different terrains, but can take it from the start to the finish because there’s nobody in-between to handle it.”
I’m personally a little biased, as this is where I started with Storyblocks’ in-house video team, but a producer is a great place to start. A producer with hands-on experience, someone who’s organized, and can work on the strategic side as well. Those are the skills I came into Storyblocks with, and it gave us a strong foundation to build off of.
Choosing where your team sits
Another choice you’ll need to make with building out your new team is deciding what department they’ll sit under. Whether it’s creative, design, marketing, communications, or another area, where you put your team should be where you primarily plan to utilize video content.
If you want your team to create videos for social media or paid ads, then putting them under the marketing team would make the most sense. But regardless of where your team sits, you should put them in a department that allows them to be flexible. After all, as your video hire ramps up, it’s likely that they’ll get requests from other departments as well.
As Nichols puts it, “As an in-house videographer, you want to set up the position to where it can be nimble. On paper, you need to live within some department. Like in my case, I’m within the marketing department. But you really need to be nimble – there’s times where I’m hopping over to communications or public affairs, filming one of their events. So you want to make sure you keep that flexibility and adaptability within your organization. Because if you make it too rigid, well then, what was the point of having an in-house videographer?”
Where to post your job
Once you know what skills you’re looking for and have your job description written up, it’s time to post the open role. While HR can give you direction on this, it’s worth considering niche sites that are specifically targeted for people in the video industry. Our curated list of the top 12 job sites for video jobs has some of these that are worth adding to your usual choices.
Onboarding your new team member
Once you’ve interviewed and finalized your new hire, the next step is making sure that they have a solid onboarding process to set them up for success. No matter how you structure onboarding, there’s two essential components to keep in mind as your new video hire gets settled in.
1. Provide space to learn and ramp up
It should go without saying that starting up a brand new video arm internally will take time. Even the most seasoned professionals aren’t going to be able to start churning out video on day 1.
Nichols agrees stating, “You can’t go from zero to a hundred right away. At the beginning, you’re ramping up, learning the brand, learning the workarounds and how to use places like Storyblocks.”
2. Give them time to test and build internal processes
As you start giving your new hire assignments, this is the best time to stress-test and improve your internal processes. There will be lots of questions from your new hire and other departments, which will give you a great opportunity to understand what is and isn’t working. From how video requests are submitted to feedback and approvals, regularly check in with your new hire for feedback.
“Don’t put too much on your videographer’s plate at the beginning, just give them a project that allows them to get the brain down. So the supervisor then gets the experience of, okay, what’s this feedback process like? How long does it take? What do the proper steps and channels need to be? Don’t load everything on at once. Start small and pick up some early wins, then scale up,” Nichols explains.
How to run your video production team efficiently
Once your new hire is past the onboarding process and starting to create videos regularly, there’s a few best practices you can follow to ensure production runs like a well-oiled machine.
Set expectations early
When you have a brand new function like video added to your organization, chances are every department is going to have ideas they want to request. But the last thing your new hire needs is an avalanche of projects coming in all at once.
Nichols experienced this himself when he started a new position. “The tricky thing at the beginning was okay, what are the proper expectations of how much video we can get done? I remember there was one project at the beginning, when I didn’t know the brand yet. And there was a lot at once, like multiple videos in a single week. And we weren’t able to get those projects to the finish line,” he remembers.
Be sure to set expectations across your organization of what video projects your team will be taking on to start with, along with expectations with your video team about how many videos they should be doing at once.
Ensure you have a gatekeeper
Along with setting expectations, your new hire should also have a gatekeeper. This person will stand between the incoming video requests and your video team. This ensures that requests don’t overwhelm and overload your team, and that you prioritize them correctly. The new hire’s manager or another designated gatekeeper should have final say on which videos the team makes.
Nichols uses his own supervisor as a gatekeeper, explaining, “An in-house videographer can do more than an external agency, but they can’t do everything. You need to communicate well with your supervisor and be able to say, ‘What do we need to do?’ So if people come to me directly for projects, I make sure to funnel it up to the supervisor. And if the supervisor gets word of a project, they’ll reach out to me and ask if the deliverable is doable by a specific date.”
Build in buffer time
Finally, creating video takes time. So building in buffers between due dates is always a good idea, especially in the beginning. Tons of different issues can crop up during production, from scheduling conflicts, editing delays, and more. Having buffer time included as a default gives your team any extra time they might need, reducing stress and giving them a long runway to work from.
In the best case scenario without delays, your team will be able to under promise and overdeliver. But in the worst case, they have allocated time to handle anything that pops up. Nichols does this himself, saying, “I give myself more time than I think I need – a day or two – then I overdeliver if I get it done quicker. There’s the bonus that sometimes the extra time helps me do things differently. You need time and space to be able to think creatively.”
Final thoughts
The complete guide to building an in-house video production team is here to help you hire and set your new video team up for success. In it, you get everything you need to help you build an agile and flexible video team in today’s economy, from how to choose your first hire to what equipment you should invest in based on your budget. You’ll also get expert advice from our own team here at Storyblocks along with members running their own successful video production teams.
