The Brief
The mission statement to become the leading New Talent recruiter in their sector by 2021 is something Severn Trent are very serious about and after a competitive tender process Adgen were procured to provide HR marketing, strategy and media support for the team.
The New Talent team are responsible for recruiting over 100 apprentice, undergraduate and graduate students annually, across a huge variety of business areas and the challenge was to hit these recruitment targets, whilst also ensuring we were enhancing their status as the leading employer in the water utilities sector.
Key focus areas were attracting civil and electrical engineers to their placement programmes (particularly women) and to ensure BAME targets were achieved. Due to the apprenticeship levy, there would also be a number of ad-hoc roles that would need recruiting in to throughout the campaign.
What we did
On taking over from the incumbent agency, Adgen undertook a full review of historic advertising activities and the clients web analytics to get a precise picture of their current position. This helped guide next steps in terms of taking their employer proposition to market.
Workshops were run with the team to define campaign messaging and a creative look and feel. A detailed campaign plan was then produced, covering a variety of media from PPC, social, specific graduate and apprentice portals, job boards, mobile display and local press. Once this plan had been signed off on, the studio team produced all the campaign assets to the clients’ brand guidelines and supplied these direct to media.
Best practices were applied to enable effective campaign tracking to ensure every marketing penny spent could be monitored and analysed via our highly intelligent in-house reporting system REVS (Real-time Evaluation & Visualisation System), with bespoke dashboards built specifically to the client specifications. Tracking also enabled Adgen to run effective retargeting campaigns.
Once the campaign was launched, weekly conference calls were held with key stakeholders to discuss progress. Fortnightly executive REVS reports providing commentary on what our teams had done to optimise marketing activities were also supplied. Additional data such as recruitment data from their ATS provider Capp and web analytics were also layered in to reports to provide a more complete report of the success of the campaign.
Results
After completing the first year of this contract the results have been extremely encouraging, with a £500 lower cost per acquisition for STW vs sector average. We have also seen an increase of 64.9% in quality of candidates reaching assessment centres for 17/18. The client has also seen a marked increase in candidate pass rate through assessment centres.