NCA: Reaching Investigators Through Targeted Recruitment Marketing
The National Crime Agency (NCA) turned to PeopleScout for a recruitment marketing campaign to help them stand out in their search for crime fighting investigators.
15,703Applicants Across 143 Roles
225Job Offers Extended
800+Candidates in a Talent Pool for Future Openings
The National Crime Agency is responsible for leading the UK’s fight to cut serious and organised crime. The agency’s focus is on the big threats—targeting and pursuing serious and organised crime and criminals who pose the greatest risk to the UK. The work is hugely complex, high-level and large scale. Officers operate at the forefront of law enforcement, building intelligence, pursuing the most serious and dangerous offenders and developing and delivering specialist capabilities for partner organisations.
It could have been an impressive proposition for the 1,500 investigators and other professionals the NCA wanted to recruit. But the NCA was competing with MI5, MI6, GCHQ and police forces for this talent. The intelligence organisations could be considered “sexier” brands. The police forces are better known and understood.
The NCA had been flying under the radar and needed to arrive on the scene with a bang. They turned to PeopleScout for a confident, attention-grabbing campaign to put their employer brand front-of-mind for their target audience.
Key Research
We conducted wide-ranging qualitative interviews and focus groups with key people across the agency in order to really get under the skin of the human experience of working there.
The key insights were:
When NCA investigators succeed the impact is huge and far-reaching. The criminal activity they stop covers everything from child sexual abuse to illegal firearms trafficking, cyber crime, kidnapping and extortion. The police, by contrast, have to deal with everything from shoplifting upwards.
A lot of the criminals the NCA targets feel they are untouchable. It’s very exciting to prove they are not.
The work is exciting, and we shouldn’t underplay that.
Investigators are often serving police officers or have strong links to policing. They rarely engage with usual recruitment channels, so we needed to think differently.
The agency saw location as key—they were keen to recruit candidates close to the locations of their regional offices.
The Core Message
To work in crowded streets and packed transit stations, our campaign needed to have immediate visual impact. The NCA hunts the big fish of the criminal world. So, we chose the shark as a perfect visual metaphor to illustrate the level of criminality the agency handles; it’s the ultimate hidden predator with a fin that creates an emotional reaction.
Our visuals show a huge shark fin bursting through the ground, towering over well-known landmarks and wreaking havoc in recognisable, urban UK locations in London and Manchester. Each visual represented the scale of damage caused by high-level crime, while storm clouds provided a suitable dark and menacing backdrop. These visuals were complemented with a simple message: No predator too big.
Media Strategy
We focused the recruitment campaign on outdoor media to reach the widest possible audience in our target areas. We identified outdoor locations that serve police officers on their daily commute—for example, Manchester Piccadilly station and the Metro line to Greater Manchester Police HQ—in addition to specialist online media.
The Results
We rolled out the campaign for digital, data, tech and specialist firearms audiences. The results were very impressive:
29,684 candidates to the NCA landing page. 15,703 applications across 143 roles. 2,228 candidates invited to interview. 225 job offers. 825 held in talent pool awaiting job offers.
This was a hugely successful campaign which drove brand awareness and a large number of applications. We exceeded NCA’s expectations, raised awareness of the NCA as an alternative employer for serving police officers and improved perceptions of the NCA as an employer with a unique offering.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY National Crime Agency (NCA)
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Talent Advisory
LOCATIONS Regional offices in the UK’s urban centres
About NCA The National Crime Agency (NCA) is a national law enforcement agency in the UK focused on fighting organised crime, trafficking, cybercrime and fraud.
Across Europe, Amazon were experiencing large levels of growth across their customer base. This had a significant impact on their worldwide operations business i.e. the area of the organisation that is responsible for delivering packages and products to the customer’s door.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
EUROPEAN SOLUTION COVERING GERMANY, FRANCE, UK, SPAIN, CZECH REPUBLIC AND POLAND
MULTILINGUAL RECRUITMENT CONSULTANTS
BESPOKE NATIVE LANGUAGE ADVERTS
ALL COMMUNICATION IN THE CANDIDATES OWN LANGUAGE
SCOPE AND SCALE
Amazon’s heavy investment in new Fulfilment, Sortation and Delivery Centres across Europe, especially in the UK, Germany and France, resulted in a significant increase in headcount across management positions in these centres. These ranged from Graduates to experienced managers running the centres themselves. With Amazon, speed of delivery and their obsession with data feeds into everything they do and their approach to recruitment is no different. The need to deliver a nimble service is paramount, as they can execute new super centres at a flick of a switch, with their templated approach to building them creating hiring spikes that must be met in a small window of time.
SITUATION
Engaging a large volume of candidates across multiple countries speaking different languages and operating under different employment laws presented a unique challenge. Amazon have a large internal Talent Acquisition team who do speak multiple languages, however the sheer volume of roles meant they did not have the time to truly engage the market and candidates in the manner they wanted to. Giving a great candidate experience is paramount for Amazon and realising they did not have the capacity to ensure this for every candidate, the urgency of the roles and complex nature of the situation, they engaged PeopleScout to assist and partner with them to meet these demands.
SOLUTION
PeopleScout have two established delivery centres in Bristol (UK) and Krakow (Poland). These centres have multilingual recruitment consultants who are experts in sourcing and engaging candidates on our client’s behalf. Having understood the immediate and urgent need from Amazon we quickly mobilised a team of German, French, Spanish, Polish and English speakers across the two centres. Amazon arranged briefings with us for the various roles and again expressed the urgency required due to the operational go live dates of these centres. Using our experience of recruiting across Europe, plus the understanding of the roles, Amazon’s culture and their process we gained through the briefing, we were able to quickly build strategies to engage talent pools.
RESULTS
Our multi-national set of stakeholders are clearly happy with our delivery from a quantity and quality level. Our activity from resulted in delivering the following;
• 576 candidates submitted • 443 invited to interview • 112 offered • 8% reduction in Time to hire
Until about 10 years ago, simply posting a job opening to a career site like Indeed or Glassdoor may have been enough to get you the right talent to fulfill your hiring needs. That’s because in economic climates where job-seekers are abundant, active candidates would search open positions, see your job posting, read the description and decide whether they wanted to apply. Often, that job posting might have been the first time a candidate engaged with or even heard of your brand.
Today, candidates can see and engage with your brand at hundreds of touchpoints before ever seeing a job posting or visiting your career page. And millions more people are looking for lasting employment now due to the pandemic. Whereas traditional in-person interviews declined, the importance of virtual hiring and an organisation’s online presence have drastically risen. While this may sound daunting at first, digital recruitment marketing and the rise of social media mean organisations today can spread their message and establish a strong knowledge of their employer brand with prospective candidates – often before those candidates even think about looking for a job.
Regardless of the economic climate and whether we are at the lowest unemployment rates experienced in decades or the highest, a strong social media presence is imperative to an employer’s recruitment media mix. Now, more than ever, we are all tuned in to what our networks are saying, sharing and recommending online.
In fact, according to a report by LinkedIn, 72% of recruiting leaders worldwide agree that employer brand has a significant impact on hiring. Moreover Jobvite research showed that 59% of candidates followed companies on social media to gain insight into their company culture – myself included! When I was considering joining PeopleScout, social media was one of the main ways I researched what it would be like to work here.
Specifically, I kept an eye out for engaging content, interesting comments and overall employee engagement. PeopleScout’s active social pages with relevant content and employees passionately sharing their work achievements were one of the deciding factors when I chose to come on board. After all, if an omnichannel recruitment marketing strategy were what I would advise to my clients, I had to work for a company that led with the best examples.
Building Your Brand
When it comes down to the critical moments throughout the candidate’s journey, what an employer presents online could be the deciding factor for whether a candidate joins an organisation. Truly, if a candidate is debating between two employers and one has a nearly nonexistent online brand presence while the other showcases personality, culture and industry-related insights, it’s clear who will win the talent.
And, it doesn’t just come down to one quick, last-minute Google search. To improve your employer brand in a candidate’s mind takes a persistent effort. For example, say you’re looking to hire a nurse, but the ideal prospect is located outside of your region. Attracting that candidate will be a huge undertaking that isn’t going to happen overnight.
It’s unlikely that the candidate will apply for a job at your hospital out of the blue, especially if they’ve never heard of you before. But, what if that candidate saw one of your Twitter posts about the “10 Things You Should Know as a New Nurse”? Or, maybe a friend sent them your Instagram post of an uplifting quote about providing patient care?
By reaching prospective candidates at multiple touchpoints throughout the hiring cycle with a consistent brand presence, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of establishing a positive impression of your brand. Then, when it comes time to apply, and eventually accept a position, the persona you portray online will have a huge impact on those decisions.
But, while your ideal nurse might be active on Instagram, not all candidates will be. For instance, if you’re looking for a C-level executive, you’ll have better luck on LinkedIn. Conversely, if you’re hiring an elementary school teacher, you might reach them best on Facebook. Determine which social media platforms make the most sense to engage your prospective candidates and focus your strategies there.
If You Want to Improve Your Employer Brand, Go Beyond “We’re Hiring”
Regardless of the platform, simply posting job openings isn’t going to cut it. Instead, think about how you can best show prospects what it’s truly like to work for your organisation – whether that means showcasing how your people engage virtually or what life is like when you’re all in the office. In addition to insightful thought leadership, share employee activities, first-person stories, and anything that shows a candidate how they can contribute and connect to your company in ways beyond their skills.
Let’s look a little deeper into how you can improve your employer brand presence on each of the four largest social media channels and how you can utilise each of their unique features to your benefit.
LinkedIn
As the largest professional network, LinkedIn is unlike most other social media platforms. With more than 660 million registered users, almost half of whom are active on a monthly basis, it’s the number one platform to reach both passive and active prospective candidates.
Reach more candidates by:
Posting career advice
Promoting posts to employees
Targeting your posts
Optimizing your company page with keywords
Instagram
With more than 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram has seen a 43% increase in users since 2017. What’s more intriguing is the fact that 90% of users follow a business on the platform – users are likely to keep up with brands and see what people are saying about them. Plus, according to Sprout Social, Instagram is the leading platform when it comes to engagement, with a median engagement of 1.6% across all industries.
What does that mean for you? Essentially, Instagram is a great way to utilize employee brand advocates and visuals to showcase company culture.
Engage employees and candidates with:
Instagram stories
Story highlights
Creative grids
Instagram Live
Instagram TV
Comments and direct messages
Twitter
Twitter has about 330 million active users worldwide, and 79% of them like to discover what’s new. This fast-paced social network encourages the real-time sharing of engaging and relevant content, so post often and with timely responses to showcase your expertise.
Utilize:
Interest-based targeting
Twitter Ads
Twitter Polls
Retweets with comments
Tweet replies
Facebook
Facebook has 2.5 million monthly active users, and 66% of them say they “like” or “follow” a brand on the platform.
To showcase your industry expertise as well as your company culture, take advantage of:
Facebook Insights
Facebook Pixel for retargeting advertising
Page invites
Boosting posts
Social Media as a Recruitment Tool
By taking efforts to improve your employer brand on social media and taking advantage of what all the different platforms have to offer, candidates should already have a good understanding of your brand and what it represents by the time they’re on the job hunt. Ideally, they’ll have connected with some of your posts and already have a positive feeling about your company culture.
Then, when it comes time to create a targeted recruitment campaign, your social media presence will have done some of the work for you. To capitalise on this momentum and start generating a stream of qualified candidates, a trusted talent advisor can help.
When Vodafone came to PeopleScout in the UK, they asked us to: help position Vodafone with prospective employees at key universities as a youth employer of choice; change the perception of their target audience; and promote Vodafone as a technology company.
After researching the behaviour and interests of Vodafone’s target audience, we learned how Gen Z and Millennials want to engage with employers (through short and succinct videos) and what values drive their decisions. We found that they want to work for companies that focus on making the world a better place, as well as promote a social and fun work environment.
This led to Generation Possible – a social media campaign that speaks to Vodafone’s campus and graduate audience, as well as their desire to have a positive influence in the world. The Generation Possible campaign celebrates everyone’s individuality and empowers them to speak from the heart about how to make change for the better.
Vodafone Generation Possible Campaign Creative
Conclusion
It’s no secret that candidates are going to research your organisation prior to applying for any of your positions or even considering you as a potential employer. By balancing postings on job boards with social media and other touchpoints along the hiring process, you can create a well-respected online presence that accurately represents your employer brand and company culture. So, the next time a candidate researches your company, reads reviews or looks at what current employees are saying online, rest assured that a strong social media presence and strategic recruitment campaign will give you all you need to create a lasting impact in a candidate’s mind.
We worked on TfL’s entry-level talent employer brand and attraction activity to recruit a higher proportion of female and BAME applicants.
TfL values the importance of diversity and inclusion. Being representative of London is something their success is measured on, and the same standards apply to their apprenticeship and graduate schemes.
These schemes had proven successful in the volume of applications received but weren’t reaching talent from all walks of life – TfL needed a diverse pipeline that truly represented modern London. It was time to rethink their entire student attraction activity.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
CREATED A NEW DIVERSITY-CENTRED EMPLOYMENT BRAND.
DEVISED NEW OUTREACH PROGRAMMES TO APPEAL TO WIDER DEMOGRAPHICS.
REDESIGNED RECRUITMENT AND ASSESSMENT PROCESSES TO HELP FEMALE AND BAME CANDIDATES BETTER SHOW WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY’RE CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING.
SCOPE AND SCALE
London’s population is projected to reach 10.5 million by 2041, and naturally TfL play a major role in contributing to London’s growth. Supporting this growth means recruiting, retaining, and developing a next-generation workforce but also giving Londoners a chance to take part in the design of their city.
SITUATION
TfL needed to recruit 32 graduate roles, five placements, and 109 apprenticeships. Our primary objective was to champion these fantastic opportunities to a broader apprentice and graduate talent pool in order to increase female and BAME applicants. To achieve this, we needed to challenge stereotypes and overcome negative perceptions. That meant not only changing TfL’s attraction and assessment processes but overhauling their entry-level employer brand as well.
SOLUTION
A NEW BRAND TO MAKE BETTER CONNECTIONS Together, we transformed the way TfL recruit diverse talent. Ensuring skilled people from all walks of life have a chance to shine in the application and assessment process, our creative team used their audience knowledge to build a dynamic unexpected youth brand, ‘The Next Move’, designed to better connect with female and BAME applicants. We then shaped a comprehensive outreach programme and a completely new assessment process with the aim of helping these candidates show TfL who they are and what they’re truly made of.
ENABLING CANDIDATES TO SUCCEED IN ASSESSMENT CENTRES From experience, we know that young people often need to build their confidence by filling gaps in their knowledge. To address this, we created ‘Route-into-Work’, a pre-employment programme for all candidates, that would help them succeed in assessment centres – and the results were astounding.
A MORE TARGETED APPROACH We also targeted universities with higher rates of female and BAME students, rather than promoting opportunities at all UK universities.
RESULTS
We achieved amazing results with the graduate recruitment campaign, comfortably filling all of the roles.
DOUBLE THE PERCENTAGE OF BAME GRADUATE HIRES Most importantly we doubled the percentage of BAME graduates from 27% to 54%, and we substantially grew the proportion of female hires from 18% to 29%.
GROWING FEMALE APPRENTICE HIRES BY 16% Similarly strong results were achieved in the apprentice pool, as we dramatically grew the proportion of female hires from 20% to 36%,
The Route-into-Work programme delivered 9% of the apprenticeship hires (12 individuals), of which 33% were female and 67% were BAME.
How we overhauled TfL’s entry-level talent brand and attraction activity.
TfL values the importance of social mobility. Being representative of London is something their success is measured on, and the same standards apply to their apprenticeship and graduate schemes.
TfL’s entry-level talent activities had proven successful in the volume of applications received but weren’t reaching talent from all sectors of society – TfL needed a diverse workforce from every social background that truly represented modern London. It was time to rethink their entire student attraction activity.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
REDESIGNED RECRUITMENT AND ASSESSMENT PR
PROCESSES TO HELP CANDIDATES FROM A WIDE VARIETY OF BACKGROUNDS EXCEL.
DEVISED NEW OUTREACH PROGRAMMES TO CONNECT WITH YOUNG PEOPLE IN AREAS OF HIGH DEPRIVATION, THEREBY APPEALING TO A WIDER DEMOGRAPHIC.
CREATED A NEW SOCIAL MOBILITY-CENTRED EMPLOYMENT BRAND.
SCOPE AND SCALE
London’s growing population of 16-18-year olds is set against a backdrop of rising youth unemployment and some of the most deprived areas in the country. Naturally TfL play a major role in contributing to London’s growth, and so opening doors for people from disadvantaged areas was absolutely vital.
SITUATION
Our primary objective was to make TfL more relevant and accessible for our target audience. This meant removing barriers to recruitment, challenging stereotypes, and overcoming negative perceptions. We needed to change TfL’s attraction process so that people from every pocket of society would be interested in the unique opportunities available. And we needed to re-position their entry-level employer brand as a progressive organisation in which everyone – regardless of background or financial situation – could excel.
SOLUTION
A NEW AND VIBRANT YOUNG TALENT BRAND We started by transforming the way TfL recruited, ensuring talented people from all walks of life got a chance to apply. This resulted in a dynamic, unexpected youth brand – ‘The Next Move’ – which was designed to look different from other TfL communications, using vibrant, colourful graphics.
A CONFIDENCE-BOOSTING PRE-EMPLOYMENT COURSE We then created a programme called ‘Route-into-Work’, a pre-employment course helping 16-25 year-old NEETs fill gaps in their knowledge and get the tools, insight, and confidence to be successful at assessment centres.
A NEW SCHOOL’S OUTREACH PROGRAMME STRATEGY For their Apprenticeships, we designed a new strategy for our schools’ outreach programme, ‘Moving Forward’. We identified 251 of the poorest secondary state schools and ran over 50 events, with additional events in three of the most deprived boroughs in London: Newham, Tower Hamlets and Haringey.
RESULTS
We achieved amazing results in the recruitment campaign, comfortably meeting the social mobility criteria we had set out to achieve.
As a result of our targeted activities, we filled 32 graduate roles, five placements and 109 apprenticeships.
With online grocery shopping becoming increasingly popular, Sainsbury’s looked to PeopleScout to maximise the number of delivery slots that they could offer to customers. In a saturated market place, it wasn’t enough just to target existing drivers, we also needed to find those with transferable skills and encourage them to apply.
The resulting strategy enabled Sainsbury’s to go to market with a number of highly targeted and location-specific attraction campaigns. The project was a huge success and exceeded targets.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
• MARKET INTELLIGENCE & SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS • PERSONA DEVELOPMENT • PROCESS DESIGN • CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT • INTEGRATED MEDIA CAMPAIGN
SCOPE AND SCALE
Sainsbury’s business strategy is to respond to the changing needs of their customers, enabling them to shop whenever and wherever they want. Seven days a week, Sainsbury’s deliver fresh food, groceries, general merchandise and clothing from suppliers around the world, via 33 distribution centres to their store and online customers, meeting their requirements for flexible, convenient shopping. Drivers are a vital part of this strategy, ensuring that Sainsbury’s can make deliveries to millions of customers at a time that suits them.
SITUATION
The Grocery Online department is a fast-growing business for Sainsbury’s. When we started this project, one in five employees worked in the department but with changing consumer habits, this was soon to become one in three. Despite being one of the company’s largest employee populations, it experienced high turnover in line with the challenging wider driver recruitment market. Some locations, for example inner-city areas and affluent suburban locations, found it particularly hard to recruit. The level of attrition made it hard for the department to grow, and driver availability became the limiting factor when it came to processing orders. It was vital for the business to hire more drivers immediately but also have a robust strategy for the future too.
THE SOLUTION
We used interviews and focus groups to understand the recruitment proposition for drivers at Sainsbury’s
We used market mapping techniques to understand the labour force, reporting on salary benchmarks, competitor activity, and the socio-demographics of hard-to-fill locations.
By overlaying these two strands we developed distinct driver personas, each with its own messaging framework and channel strategy. We used these to develop highly targeted comms for each group, responding to their motivations and behaviours.
Secondary messaging included; flexible shifts where we knew there was a high student population and non-monetary benefits such as child-care vouchers in areas that had a high density of families.
After speaking to hiring managers, existing employees, and those working for competitor organisations, we found that the majority of people eligible to be a Sainsbury’s delivery driver, didn’t realise that they already had the skills to do the job. In fact, the role required skills like good customer service, time management, and self-motivation which we found to crossover with a number of different sectors. This led us to design a creative route that focussed on the core messaging of “All you need is a licence” and “Where will your licence take you?”, educating the audience around the training and development new joiners received.
This sat in contrast to another creative route which we used in locations that had high competitor activity where we led with the messaging around the fact that Sainsbury’s offered guaranteed hours where other organisations did not. Before the campaign, Sainsbury’s were engaging with candidates across multiple channels with different communications, which meant they ended up talking to the same audience in different ways, about different things.
By taking this insight-driven segmented approach, Sainsbury’s could instead talk confidently about the things that mattered to candidates, using the channels that they were most likely to respond to.
RESULTS
The campaign was so successful that the majority of roles were filled within the first 5 weeks of the 12-week campaign, meaning that Sainsbury’s could cut back on their marketing spend. More impressively, seven locations needed to pause their recruitment due to high application numbers including two of the locations that were identified as ‘hard to fill’ areas.
“ The success of the campaign so far has been unprecedented and as such after 5 weeks we are already in a place where most of our stores in the trial have filled all driver hours required. In total, we have received over 2,000 applications. 131 offers have been extended, 106 of which have been accepted so far.”
Support workers make a genuine difference to real lives and Kent County Council (KCC) were finding it hard to attract the right people to fill their vacancies. They approached PeopleScout to develop a campaign to reach an audience that may not realise they had the skills and attributes to become care workers and show them they could have a meaningful career, just by ‘being you’.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
• RAISING AWARENESS OF MISUNDERSTOOD ROLES • REACHING AN UNAWARE TARGET AUDIENCE • CREATING STAND-OUT FROM THE CROWD
Kent County Council, along with over 1,400 partner organisations, are committed to providing essential care and support, working with some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Their need to recruit was based on the requirement to alleviate pressure on nursing homes and hospitals by providing care in the clients’ own homes, therefore freeing up valuable beds elsewhere. Enabling clients to remain at home (when it is suitable) has been proven to be a good solution in healthcare pathways.
It was also important to demonstrate to the wider Kent population that KCC was taking positive and supportive action in what was a high profile and often criticised area for all local authorities.
SITUATION
With vacancies that aren’t clearly defined by specific skills or experience, it’s often challenging to convince potential recruits that a role is right for them. With ‘unskilled’ (in terms of qualifications) positions such as these, the lure of other opportunities, including retail, is often more appealing and the lack of visibility or explanation of support roles alongside a misunderstanding of what is entailed, compounds this issue. In addition to this, there was a lack of clarity about the genuine career potential that these jobs could offer potential candidates. KCC’saim was to raise the profile of the work they do in an area that is both sensitive and one that touches most people at some stage in their lives.
THE SOLUTION
To fully understand why existing support workers do what they do, we ran a focus group to investigate the motivators and to hear real life stories. Our creative team then set to work to produce a personal and appropriate creative identity; one that would put the empathy and natural caring skills needed for these roles, at the very heart of the campaign. We concluded the best way to communicate this was by film, showing everyday situations where people made a difference, doing everyday things and how this translated into a care workers job.
This was driven by the central campaign message of “You’d be surprised how qualified you are to be a support worker – just by being you’’. With a small promotion budget and to ensure that the power of the film’s visuals were maximised, we used our Social Media product, SNAP, to push the film out to the target audience; using geographic and behavioural targeting methods.
RESULTS
The SNAP campaign ran for just over 2 weeks and in that time delivered over 51,000 impressions, converting to over 1,000 ‘clickthroughs’ – an impressive rate of 2.1%. Equally impressive, YouTube delivered almost 172,000 impressions and over 75,000 views.
When facing a tight and highly competitive talent market, employers find it even more difficult to hire for hard to fill jobs. What’s more, the dearth of highly skilled talent in critical industries can lower an organisation’s productivity, which, if left unabated, could have a major effect on the global economy.
According to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) report, vacancies for jobs requiring highly skilled workers or in-demand skills are among the most difficult to fill. The talent acquisition professionals surveyed in the report said the following job categories are most difficult to recruit:
In this article, we’ll cover how organisations can identify, source and hire highly skilled talent more effectively.
Creating Candidate Personas for Hard to Fill Jobs
Before you source, recruit and hire highly skilled talent, you must first outline the skills, attributes, experience, and tendencies of your ideal candidate by creating a candidate persona. A candidate persona is a semi-fictional illustration of a candidate who exemplifies what you are looking for in a specific role. An accurate candidate persona will help your talent team tailor its strategies and approach to best suit the talent you are looking to hire. This is especially important when recruiting highly skilled candidates who have diverse and unique requirements, drivers and employment expectations.
Your candidate persona needs to answer key questions. Begin by answering these questions using existing data from your applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) databases on candidates and employees. You can also interview current employees – especially those who align with your ideal candidate – for their feedback. Below is an example of a candidate persona template:
Make sure your personas are representative of actual human beings – rather than a portrait of an overly idealised, fictional candidate. Also, be cautious when creating candidate personas; giving your personas names and pictures to make them seem more realistic and multi-dimensional is great, but it may also lead to bias. Instead, keep personal identifiers to a minimum to avoid discrimination and maximise diversity.
Sourcing Highly Skilled Candidates
Leveraging Social Media
LinkedIn is a favorite social media recruiting tool for talented professionals. However, oversaturation is the predominant reason that many hiring managers claim that recruiting on LinkedIn has become less effective. Despite being inundated with competitors, LinkedIn is still one of the most important tools in a recruiter’s toolbox. However, sourcing talent on other social media is also a vital part of a modern recruiting strategy.
Twitter: Use Twitter’s advanced search function to hunt for user profiles that use industry-related keywords and hashtags. Then, refine your search based on location and other important criteria. For example, if you’re looking to fill a developer position, search Twitter for specific software and developer-related keywords within your organisation’s target market. This search can uncover developers in your area with the experience you’re looking for.
Facebook: Facebook’s targeted search capabilities enable you to find high-quality, skilled workers who align with specific criteria. For example, if you search “copywriters with packaging marketing experience,” Facebook will return a result with matching profiles. Reach out to these candidates to see if they would be interested in interviewing with your organisation.
The power in using your social media accounts goes beyond sourcing candidates for hard to fill jobs; you can also showcase your organisation’s employer brand and culture to entice and engage talent.
Employee Referrals
To gain a competitive edge, look to your employees. An employee referral programme can help your organisation expand its network with a ready-made talent pool. Employees have contacts with former classmates and co-workers, and their referrals are more likely to be qualified and a good fit with the company culture.
Additionally, consider
posting open positions in office areas, announcing openings at company meetings
and sharing them in company-wide communications to help employees keep
referrals top of mind. Also, regularly remind employees about the rewards for
referrals, such as financial compensation or other perks. Even if a referred
candidate is not a good fit for a particular position, you can still consider
them for different roles, which can help supplement a robust talent pipeline.
Leverage Recruiting Automation & AI
Tools to Source Candidates
Innovations in
talent technology have transformed every phase of the recruiting process. One
phase that has seen enormous change due to technology is candidate sourcing.
Candidate sourcing is the most important phase in recruiting highly skilled
talent because the talent pool is more constricted.
Today, talent tools powered by artificial intelligence can locate passive candidates for hard to fill jobs much faster and more efficiently than ever before. AI technology crawls the internet to collect and analyse a wide variety of candidate data – from résumés to social media activity. Based on this data, AI-based tools can help make predictions about which candidates will be open to switching jobs, making it easier for recruiters to prioritise those candidates.
Selling Your Hard to Fill Jobs
When it comes time for the interview, you’re not just interviewing highly skilled candidates; they’re interviewing you, as well. To effectively “sell” your opportunities, outline and communicate the benefits of working for your organisation. Effective communication on the front end can save your company significant time and effort.
Understand What It’s Like to Work for Your Organisation
To properly sell the role, make sure that you have an accurate view of your organisation from the perspective of your employees – both current and former. Consider deploying surveys to obtain feedback from current employees and make sure to conduct exit interviews with departing talent. Take the feedback you receive and craft an objective report of your employee experience. When you understand the day-to-day experiences of your current and former employees, you can better sell an accurate and positive depiction of what it’s like to work for your organisation.
Understand Your Employer Value Proposition
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is what you are selling to the candidate. Recruiters and hiring managers need to know – and be comfortable articulating – the value proposition of your organisation. In other words, you need to answer the question, “Why would someone want to work for you in this position?” Your employer value proposition includes a range of tangible and intangible benefits of working at your organisation, such as work/life balance, flexibility, culture, values, compensation, and benefits. Know the benefits of working for your company, and make sure that you effectively “sell” it to highly skilled candidates.
For instance, PeopleScout helps a client to maximise its employer brand to attract a healthy pipeline of top talent. The client, which has a global presence in the construction industry, works with PeopleScout to highlight its unique culture to potential employees. During the hiring process, hiring managers communicate the client’s mission of minimising environmental impact and maximising sustainability; creating innovative approaches to complex industry problems; and promoting the well-being of its employees.
As an example, the client offers three days of “well-being” PTO that can be taken in addition to the traditional leave offered by the client. These days are seen as necessary for employees working in a physically and mentally taxing industry, and illustrate the client’s commitment to the well-being of its staff. What’s more, the client also offers multiple flexible work arrangements to increase work-life balance – a prudent, yet uncommon, benefit in the industry. By helping our client weave in its mission, culture, and brand into the recruiting process, the team has been able to establish the company as an employer of choice for highly skilled talent.
Be Careful Not to Oversell
In addition to the perks, it’s also important for candidates to have an objective understanding of the challenges that may come with working at your organisation. You don’t have to paint an unflattering picture of your hard to fill jobs, but it is important to provide accurate information upfront. Overselling or omitting information will start the employment relationship off on the wrong foot should they accept your offer, and could lead to higher turnover. It won’t take a new hire long to figure out that what they were told before they were hired is not the reality of the role. For example, if your role requires irregular or long hours, communicate that to the candidate. This allows the candidate to make a fully informed decision and mitigate the risk of immediate disengagement.
What Candidates Want to Know
Just like you want to know about a candidate’s background and experience, highly skilled candidates also want to know what they can expect from employment at your organisation. In particular, during the recruiting process, they may be interested in:
The candidate’s potential for growth: Highly skilled candidates want to know how leaping to a new organisation is going to benefit them – especially in relation to the growth and overall well-being of their careers.
The role’s potential for growth: Candidates may want to go beyond the position in its current form and discuss what the position could be and how the role ties into the organisation’s plans for the future.
Your organisation’s potential for growth: Highly skilled candidates want to be part of a winning team, so show them how your organisation is driving success.
Your organisation’s culture: Candidates want to know that the position is going to be a good fit, and that includes how they fit into your organisation’s culture.
The evolving landscape of talent acquisition requires a more proactive, multi-touch approach to attracting highly skilled talent and converting them into applicants and, ultimately, hires. As the global economy continues to grow and the demand and competition for highly skilled talent rises as a result, organisations need to stay abreast of the scope of talent available in the market.
The Department for International Trade (DIT) commissioned PeopleScout to help them with a key resourcing challenge. In preparation for the UK’s departure from the European Union, DIT needed to find a large volume of high-quality candidates to staff a new trade authority. Their dilemma lay in the fact that these roles hadn’t been seen in the UK for over 45 years, so candidates might struggle to understand whether they were qualified to do the jobs. Through the creation of an ‘match me’ innovative tool and targeted approach to supporting candidates, PeopleScout supported DIT in recruiting 75 exceptional individuals.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
Dedicated account team
Creative candidate engagement
Bespoke tools
Exceptional candidates and enhanced diversity
SCOPE & SCALE
In preparation for Brexit, The Department for International Trade (DIT) needed to create a Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) that would govern and monitor the UK’s future trade deals with the rest of the world. This newly created function needed around 75 exceptional Lawyers, Investigators and Economists to join them in their new Reading office.
SITUATION
We faced a complex challenge. Firstly, many candidates might not know which role they were best suited to, as these opportunities would be new concepts to them. Secondly, we had to populate a department that could operate post-Brexit.Thirdly, we faced an extremely tight deadline. PeopleScout and DIT agreed that a bespoke solution was needed.
SOLUTION
DEDICATED ACCOUNT TEAM
We provided a dedicated account team that was responsible for every element of the process including: an attraction campaign, application management, assessment and selection material, a microsite, candidate management, interviewing making the offer and onboarding process including BPSS security checks. Crucially, we trained the team in how to deliver the right message, explaining what they could and could not say in case journalists tried to ‘apply’ for the roles to find out more about this high-profile organisation
CREATIVE CANDIDATE ENGAGEMENT
Our approach was two-fold. We combined free and paid-for advertising with a strong social media campaign. At the same time, we undertook a market mapping and candidate identification activity whereby we engaged with key candidates directly. All activities ultimately directed candidates to our carefully crafted microsite which detailed the uniqueness of the roles.
BESPOKE TOOLS
As these roles were brand new in the UK, we developed a ‘Match Me’ tool that helped candidates understand the role that would best suit their ability, skillset and experience. We also devised a tailormade application process that included killer questions, an online SHL ability test (Numerical, Verbal and Inductive reasoning), a telephone or video interview, and a face-to-face assessment. Throughout the campaign, we provided DIT with weekly updates, reviewing the success of the campaign on a monthly basis.
RESULTS
OVERWHELMING INTEREST
From the start of the campaign in May 2018 to its completion in January 2019, we witnessed a staggering 47,522 visitors to the microsite, with 1,597 applications being made. Candidates remained engaged throughout the process, with an impressive 92% assessment centre attendance.
EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES
43% of candidates passed the assessment centre process, meaning that DIT were spoilt for choice. They eventually made 93 offers, with 75 of those being accepted. As a result, they now have 75 high-calibre members of staff who are committed to governing and monitoring the UK’s future trade deals.
ENHANCED DIVERSITY
Diversity was very high on the priority list for both DIT and PeopleScout, and while we didn’t have specific targets, we did track applications. To everyone’s delight our diversity statistics were extremely positive, with 38% of applicants being female, and 48% being BAME.
Thousands more careers site visitors. Hundreds more applications. And how did we do it? With 64 fake spiders, 15 litres of custard and 1 tube of wasabi paste – amongst other things. This is the story of how we created a fun, conversation-sparking event that captured the essence of the AA employer brand, raised awareness of their contact centre roles, and helped them make the successful hires they needed.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
Raising awareness of roles
Reflecting a fun and friendly culture
Boosting social media activity
Increasing careers site visitors
Record-breaking application figures
SCOPE & SCALE
The AA has two big contact centres in Oldbury (near Birmingham) and Newcastle. With ambitious hiring targets to meet they’d used a range of attraction methods, from job boards and paid social media, to taxi wraps and cinema. They weren’t getting the results they needed, so it was time for something bigger and bolder.
SITUATION
We discussed and planned the objectives carefully with the Talent Attraction team and local stakeholders. We wanted to raise general awareness of the organisation in local audiences and encourage them to spread the word, so we needed a way of reaching a large number of individuals easily, effectively and creatively. The AA also wanted us to showcase their fun and friendly culture, and so our event was a great fit with this.
A BRAND MESSAGING-ALIGNED EVENT
The Ready for ANYTHING? strapline is the central message in all of the AA’s recruitment communications activity, so it made sense to take this message and see just who was Ready for ANYTHING? amongst local audiences.
FUN TO TAKE PART IN. FUN TO WATCH.
With a big prize on offer to incentivise contestants, the event was built around getting volunteers on stage to take part in a mystery challenge. We built ‘The Random Challenge Generator’ – a big screen flashing through a series of silly, messy tasks. The contestant pushes a big yellow button to stop the screen, which brings up their challenge. We also engaged a celebrity host, to help draw the crowds, engage with the audience, and keep the fun moving. We ran two of these shopping centre-based outdoor events – one in Newcastle, the other in Birmingham.
PROMOTING THE OPPORTUNITIES
Maximising social media activity before, during and after the event, we also live-streamed the challenges. Filming on the day enabled us to create short videos for follow-up content to promote the AA’s contact centre roles. On the event days, we gave out flyers encouraging people to get involved and driving to the AA careers site, while the digital screen and on-stage announcements also highlighted the AA’s local career opportunities.
“Both events were a massive success and surpassed our expectations in terms of the level of engagement, prior, during & post the events.” Craig Morgans Head of Talent Acquisition, HR Shared Services, Learning & Development
RESULTS
UNPRECEDENTED CAREERS SITE VISIT FIGURES
Social media and event build-up activity drove c60,000 careers visits across the weeks of the events. Typically, 1,500 – 2,000 people visit the AA careers site each day. For the Newcastle event, this increased to 5,000 in just one day, with a record high of 7,100 in one day for Birmingham.
RECORD NUMBERS OF APPLICATIONS
While the AA saw a huge increase in applications for their contact centre in Oldbury, they had record-breaking figures for Newcastle. With a month-on-month increase from 576 to 1026, this was 436 more than their previous application record of 590!
SUCCESSFUL HIRES MADE
So far, both the Newcastle and Oldbury contact centres have made 12 hires each as a result of the events.
