Industry: Government & Public Sector

Civil Service Fast Stream: Boosting Diversity with a Bold New Influencer Campaign

Posted on by akessler
Civil Service Fast Stream: Boosting Diversity with a Bold New Influencer Campaign

Civil Service Fast Stream: Boosting Diversity with a Bold New Influencer Campaign

As one of the largest employers in the UK, the Civil Service doesn’t struggle for applications for its Fast Stream graduate program. However, as the entity that supports the government in implementing policies, it fights against perceptions that it only employs people from elite backgrounds. The Civil Service Fast Stream turned to PeopleScout for a bold new recruitment marketing campaign to improve diversity amongst its early careers talent.

3,200 + Increase in Applicants from Diverse Backgrounds
18,056 Views of Influencer Video on YouTube in Less Than 48 Hours
351,304 Impressions Across Social Media via Nano-Influencers

Situation

The Fast Stream aims to be the most inclusive graduate scheme in the UK and has a goal for the diversity of its workforce to help ensure that every government department reflects all of the communities they serve. However, research they commissioned revealed a misperception, particularly amongst those within underrepresented diversity groups, that the Civil Service Fast Stream represents the elite and is not diverse.
Whilst they weren’t in need of more applicants, they needed to increase the diversity of their candidates.

They turned to PeopleScout for a Talent Advisory solution that counteracted the perceptions of the Civil Service as being “stuffy,” “outdated” or “inaccessible.” The campaign needed to show the Civil Service Fast Stream as accessible to all graduates, regardless of their background, and increase representation of applicants from specific diversity groups to better reflect communities in the UK.

Solution

Taking a Cue from Consumer Marketing

Given the high number of applications the Fast Stream receive year-on-year, and the campaign objectives to diversify them, we made the strategic decision not to proceed with a traditional graduate media campaign.

Instead, we turned to online influencers.

While widely used in consumer marketing, influencer marketing is relatively new to the recruitment space. It was certainly innovative for the Civil Service and definitely not one our target audience would expect them to use.

Finding the Right Influencer

Identifying the right influencer, with the relevant following, would help us to:

  • Increase credibility with underrepresented groups
  • Remove perceived barriers around government work and the type of people who can get involved
  • Ask the right questions—those on the minds of the target audience

We found Vee Kativhu, an author and influencer who fit these criteria. Vee started her YouTube channel after getting into Oxford University and realizing that, as a black woman, she was a minority. She uses her platform to help those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds get access to the best information and advice so that anyone can achieve their dreams, no matter their background.

Continuing our theme of telling real-life stories, Vee spent a day with three Fast Streamers and produced a “day in the life” video, which she posted to her YouTube channel with over 250,000 subscribers. She also promoted the video through her Instagram and LinkedIn profiles.

We also engaged 12 diverse nano-influencers, with targeted followings, to reshape and share the video among their networks—further expanding the reach.

Results

The campaign boosted applications from their target demographics by over 3,200, including significant increases in interest from candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, from the LGBTQ+ community as well as those with disabilities.

Vee’s video received 18,056 views in less than 48 hours. It went on to achieve over 36,000 total views with over 1,200 likes. Over the four-week social media campaign, Vee and the nano-influencers achieved a combined reach of 351,304 impressions and 2,436 engagements.

“Such an amazing video, Vee! Super informative, and I love the positive approach to a more diverse Civil Service.”

YouTube comment

By taking an innovative approach to reach their target audience, the Civil Service Fast Stream received a cost-effective campaign that delivered on their diversity recruitment goals.

“Our new attraction strategy, particularly in the innovative use of working with influencers, really captured our vision of a skilled, innovative and ambitious Civil Service equipped for the future—one that reflects the country we serve.”

Talent Acquisition Leader at the Civil Service

“I love the new look and feel of Fast Stream attraction, especially as it’s generating feedback that ‘you don’t normally see this kind of thing in the Civil Service.’ Bold, different and refreshing.”

Talent Acquisition Leader at the Civil Service

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY: The Civil Service Fast Stream
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS: Talent Advisory
  • ANNUAL HIRES: 1,000+
  • ABOUT THE CIVIL SERVICE FAST STREAM: The Fast Stream is an award-winning graduate program for the Civil Service, developing talented, high-potential people to become future Civil Service leaders. Annually, the program recruits approximately 1,000 people from around the UK across 15 different leadership and specialist development schemes.
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NCA: Reaching Investigators Through Targeted Recruitment Marketing

Posted on by jpatel
NCA: Reaching Investigators Through Targeted Recruitment Marketing

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.

15,703 Applicants Across 143 Roles
225 Job 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 organized crime. The agency’s focus is on the big threats—targeting and pursuing serious and organized 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 organizations.

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 organizations 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 recognizable, 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 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 centers
  • About NCA: The National Crime Agency (NCA) is a national law enforcement agency in the UK focused on fighting organized crime, trafficking, cybercrime and fraud.
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Building a Tech-Enabled Internal Mobility Platform

Posted on by jpatel

This government agency in Australia partnered with PeopleScout to develop and launch a platform that facilitates internal mobility for government workers who are potentially impacted by the economic downturn due to COVID-19 or looking to move within their department or other government agencies.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

  • Employees are able to self-manage profiles showcasing employee demographics, education and work history, and specific skills and competencies 
  • Employees who may have been affected by COVID-19 are given priority access and visibility to all job opportunities across the agency before they are advertised externally 
  • Employees can self-rate on key competencies 
  • AI technology matches candidates to open opportunities across the government and provides alerts to candidates on open job opportunities 
  • Increased engagement of existing staff, while reducing the use of expensive contingent labor hire resources 
  • Recruiters have a strong sense of what other positions may be a good fit for internal employees, based on hard and soft skills 

SITUATION  

As a result of COVID-19, the client was operating with a lean workforce and limited resources. They required a solution that allowed them to leverage the skills and competencies of their existing workforce so they could save the time, cost and resources it takes to access the external candidate market. 

They partnered with PeopleScout to develop and launch a platform which facilitates internal mobility for workers who are potentially impacted by the economic downturn due to COVID-19 or looking to move within their department or other government agencies. This allowed the client to engage their workforce through enhanced workforce mobility, skills development and career opportunities within the department and across the government. 

SOLUTION

PeopleScout created an internal mobility platform using our proprietary talent technology, Affinix™, to give the client insight into the scope and experience of their internal talent. By utilizing candidate profiles, hiring managers are not only able to see employee demographics, education and work history, but also specific skills and competencies.  

When an employee creates their profile, they have the opportunity to rate their own competencies and leaders within the organization can rate and leave comments about their performance as well. This gives recruiters a strong sense of what other positions may be a good fit for internal employees, based on hard and soft skills—such as strong cross-functional collaboration abilities. 

PeopleScout’s Affinix Internal Mobility platform gives the client a holistic view of candidates, and when a requisition is posted within the platform, Affinix automatically looks for employees who may be a good fit and proactively recommends candidates based on their profile. 

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Kent County Council: Promoting a Career in Care

Posted on by edyson

Support workers make a genuine difference to real lives and Kent County Council (KCC) was 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 realize they had the skills and attributes to become care workers and show them they could have a meaningful career, just by “being you.”

Scope & Scale

Kent County Council, along with over 1,400 partner organizations, 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.

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 criticized area for all local authorities.

Situation

With job openings 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 aimed 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.

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 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 through video, 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 video’s visuals were maximized, we used social media to push the video out to the target audience using geographic and behavioral targeting methods.

Results

The social media campaign ran for just over two weeks and in that time delivered over 51,000 impressions, converting to over 1,000 click-throughs – an impressive rate of 2.1% Equally impressive, YouTube delivered almost 172,000 impressions and over 75,000 views.

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