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Taking place on the 3rd May at Grosvenor House, the Recruiter Awards is the highlight of the year for the recruitment industry, bringing together large and small businesses alike for a night of glitz, glamour and celebration.
The Great Room, where the awards were held, is one of Europe’s largest ballrooms and is certainly very grand, with huge chandeliers and an impressive history (it used to be the ice rink that the Queen learnt to skate on!)
The evening began with a drinks reception that overlooked The Great Room, followed by a three course meal before comedian Milton Jones came out to host the awards ceremony. Milton had the whole room laughing with his jokes, crazy shirt and equally crazy hair!
There were 31 awards given out throughout the evening, with the award for ‘Most Effective Recruitment Campaign’ being third on the list so we didn’t have to wait long before we found out the result.
For this award we were up against fierce competition from specialist employer branding and candidate attraction agencies, representing brands such as Boots, Aldi, The White Company and Vodafone.
Our category was announced. The whole table was tense. Fingers were crossed…
“And the winner is…All we need is you!”………Wait, that’s us!
Everyone on our table was so heavily invested in this campaign, we were naturally ecstatic when we were announced as the winners! After a lot of screaming and high fives, it was time to walk to the stage to collect our award.
We were presented with our fabulous award (which now sits pride of place in the Guidant Global office), as the room clapped and cheered, the acknowledgement and scale of what we had been able to achieve as a team really started to sink in.
For Guidant, a recruitment outsourcing provider specialising in MSP and RPO solutions, it is a true David vs Goliath effort to win this award against entries from specialist employer brand agencies! These agencies exclusively specialise in employer branding and candidate attraction, where as we manage the entire outsourced recruitment process for our clients – with employer branding and attracting top talent being only a small (but vital) part of the bigger picture of what we strive to achieve.
We are so unbelievably proud that a small team of recruitment marketing and design professionals from a recruitment outsourcing provider can create such stand-out campaigns with award-winning results.
“This was an extremely well researched campaign – we loved the use of personas. It won, though, because of its stand-out cost-per-hire and other impressive metrics.” – Head judge
By taking the time with our clients and onsite recruitment teams to fully understand their recruitment requirements, candidate hiring trends, local jobs market and their reputation locally as an employer, we’re able to create bespoke candidate attraction and employer brand awareness campaigns which can rival specialist agencies.
"Unquestionably, the success of our fulfilment operation through the critical online retail peak period was underpinned by the innovation and creativity of the Guidant marketing campaign. A tailor made campaign that dynamically adapted to our changing needs, delivering the diverse range of skills across the multitude of operational shifts that we operate. Quite simply we couldn’t have delivered peak without them".
- James Harper, Fulfilment Director at Shop Direct
Shop Direct is one of the UK’s leading digital retailers; their brands include Very, Very Exclusive and Littlewoods and their award-winning fulfilment centres’ process over 50 million clothing, electrical, beauty and homeware products each year.
During their pre-Christmas peak recruiting period, (mid-August to November), Shop Direct have need to increase their temporary headcount in their fulfilment centres’ by in excess of 1,500 heads to cope with customer orders over Black Friday, Christmas and the January sales.
Whilst this is a challenge in itself, there are many other local employers offering similar Warehouse Operative roles over the same period, meaning we must effectively target the most suitable candidates within the local area in innovative and engaging ways so they can really relate with Shop Direct.
This authentic and highly relatable campaign was underpinned by a well-researched, planned and executed recruitment marketing strategy that enabled us to target specific types of workers rather than just simply promoting the roles in a generic manner.
We also challenged perceptions that warehouse work is not really for females by showing-casing the Shop Direct distribution centre as a diverse, warm, welcoming and modern working environment rather than a ‘dusty old warehouse’.
Was the campaign a success? In a word, YES! We successfully recruited over 1,500 temporary Warehouse Operatives for Shop Direct’s peak recruiting period, catering for initial intake quantities and also any backfill requirements.
Our candidate attraction activity helped to generate over 13,000 calls during the peak recruiting period, and a further 9,000+ online applications. Our average cost per hire over the campaign equated to £10 based on the 1,500 people recruited during the peak period.
In addition to meeting Shop Direct’s staffing requirements, we worked hard to ensure our attraction activity and all candidate engagement was a positive experience, in line with Shop Direct’s values, ethos and local reputation. A stat which demonstrated our success in this area was the responses to a survey we sent to all workers, showing that 91% were happy with their experience. This gave us a total NPS score of +59.22!
Our ‘Female Farah’ persona was a standout success, as 69% of all females hired in 2017 was during the live period of our candidate attraction campaign.
Not only that, 81% of our 2017 peak female workforce have been retained into the New Year 2018, compared to only 22% in 2016. This meant that our female population across the Shop Direct workforce had tripled as of the close of peak 2017.
Not only was our campaign successful in terms of tapping into a new target audience to increase applications, we have also further developed diversity within the workplace.
You can download the complete case study here.
In summary, this campaign provided significant value to Shop Direct and has put the importance of employer branding and effective recruitment marketing firmly on their radar. We are looking forward to building on this success in 2018 and beyond.
Our in-house Talent Marketing Team manage the candidate attraction and engagement strategy and implementation across the entire Guidant Global client portfolio. We have many exciting new projects on the horizon as well as ever-evolving advancements in advertising possibilities, so now is a great time to be working with us.
If you would like to find out more about the campaign or what our in-house Talent Marketing team can deliver for your business, drop me an email at alexa.bradbury@guidantgroup.com.
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