Great Recruitment Marketing campaigns show, rather than tell. They give candidates a picture of what it’s like on the inside of a company, and allow you to define and share your brand story, while supporting your business and hiring goals.
At TE, we identified a common thread that connects all of our employees around the world: Belonging. We’re a company that prioritizes diversity and inclusion and encourages all of our employees to find their “different” and share it proudly. TE nurtures a workforce that combines a wealth of diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we foster a culture where everyone can bring their whole selves into the workplace.
To communicate this externally and attract qualified talent, we recently launched a Recruitment Marketing campaign to position TE as an innovative employer with a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging. This has helped us build brand awareness and support our ongoing recruitment goals.
Here’s 6 tips on how we executed on our #YouBelongHere campaign to help you when launching your next D&I recruiting initiative:
Rally note: Meaghan and the TE Connectivity team won first place at the 2020 Rally® Awards for Best Recruitment Marketing Campaign for this work! Learn more about the Rally Awards and see other award winners on the Rally Awards site. Plus, sign up for 2021!
Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Recruitment Marketing Campaign Tips
1. Create content that connects emotionally
Of all the Recruitment Marketing campaigns you’ve seen, which one resonated with you the most? Likely you’re thinking of a campaign that connected with you on an emotional or personal level. Maybe it was a campaign that helped you to even see yourself within that organization!
#YouBelongHere featured TE employees from around the world sharing not what they do at TE, but rather who they are and how TE empowers them to bring their full, authentic selves to work. It explored their diverse backgrounds, unique passions and experiences. In other words, this Recruitment Marketing campaign was intended to directly communicate our company’s employer value proposition in a way that we hoped would resonate with talent from an emotive-driven standpoint.
Here’s an example from the campaign of emotive-driven video content:
#YouBelongHere features TE employees from around the world sharing not what they do at TE, but rather who they are and how TE empowers them to bring their full, authentic selves to work.
The campaign videos were intended to inspire, educate and position the company as an innovative and inclusive employer. Our goal was to spark interest and conversation with external audiences, as well as within our global workforce of 80,000 employees. The videos were designed to lead with our people first. To be more about employees’ unique lives outside of TE, and less focused on highlighting our technology and company achievements.
2. Feature a diverse range of employees in your content
Inclusive, authentic and thought-provoking campaigns can sometimes fall flat if you resort to stock imagery. Your photos and other content should properly represent the diverse individuals that make up your organization. When your campaign content is compelling and authentic, and has a strong central theme, it has the potential to expand and develop into an ongoing series that will drive more diverse leads to your organization.
But how do you find employees willing to share their photos and stories? We tapped into our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which provide a space where employees can foster meaningful connections and develop together in a supportive environment. We launched the ERGs in 2014, and today there are 5 groups with chapters in more than 40 countries, totalling nearly 5,000 members.
For the #YouBelongHere campaign, we partnered with our ERG leaders and allies to find employees willing to share their personal story and coordinated with recruiters across functional areas to identify stories that would resonate with different talent pools, pipelines and hiring goals. The result is campaign collateral that’s unique, authentically human and true to our EVP.
3. Personalize and cater to specific talent demographics
When we developed the #YouBelongHere campaign, we started broadly developing the purpose, goal and themes. But we personalized the stories and messaging to cater to specific talent demographics.
Because #YouBelongHere had such a diverse set of stories, we could target specific messaging to specific groups of people. Stories from women could be delivered directly to women. Messages from our engineering team could be delivered to engineers.
Here’s an example of a piece of campaign content geared towards women in tech:
This creates a memorable brand experience: one that feels personal, relatable and meaningful. This helps talent to picture themselves at your organization and makes them more likely to actually take action after seeing your ad.
4. Aim to reach your audience across multiple platforms
From the beginning, we knew we needed a big distribution strategy for the #YouBelongHere campaign. We wanted prospective candidates to encounter our content across multiple channels to increase the likelihood they would absorb our employer brand messaging and take action.
To do this, we circulated our Recruitment Marketing campaign across our careers landing page, owned social media channels (TE Careers Facebook, TE Careers Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube), paid social media and on our internal TE communications channel.
Our long-form videos lived on our website and on YouTube, with snackable short versions for our owned and paid social platforms. We released the short-form videos sequentially to bring our audience along different employee journeys.
The hashtag #YouBelongHere connected the content across all of our channels and integrated with our existing #LifeatTE hashtag to promote authentic engagement and conversations among TE employees and candidates.
5. Make employees the heroes of your brand!
Your employer brand is nothing without your secret sauce — the people that make up your culture and therefore shape your brand. Plus, your employees can really help you to amplify your reach as their combined networks are much larger than your corporate brand network.
With this in mind, we limited our paid activity to be cost-efficient and relied on organic content and employee engagement as much as possible to reach a wider audience. One of the ways we did this was by leveraging our global internal channels, employee advocacy platform and strong employee resource group networks. We were able to amplify our video reach through concerted employee advocacy efforts; empowering employees to advocate on behalf of our brand and even sharing their own personal #youbelonghere stories to amplify our campaign messaging.
This approach works well because good employer branding isn’t just about attracting new talent into your team, it’s also about engaging your current employees and making them the heroes of your employer brand.
Good employer branding isn’t just about attracting new talent into your team, it’s also about engaging your current employees and making them the heroes of your employer brand.
6. Prove value and gain buy-in from key stakeholders
As a small team, it can be difficult to receive funding for ambitious campaigns. Like most Recruitment Marketing campaigns, we found success in starting small, proving value and then scaling globally. In this case, we gained the internal buy-in leading to our being able to identify an affordable video vendor to support us with production and help to optimize overall costs.
Then, we tracked and measured everything related to this campaign! With every goal, we had a specific, measurable and attainable key performance indicator.
To measure awareness success, we looked at:
- reach and impressions
- views
- average engagement rate per platform
- social follows
- organic traffic
- social sentiment
To assess success in the consideration stage, we measured:
- engagement
- careers site traffic
- lead capture and form fills
- bounce rates
- social leads
- internal talent referrals
We referenced benchmark data and shared our performance success with leadership in order to secure larger budgets over the long term. If you can prove the return on the company’s investment, it may help you to ask for more budget for future campaigns!
The results?
While the #YouBelongHere campaign is ongoing, we’ve seen impressive results exceeding previous talent campaigns and industry benchmarks.
We’ve observed more than one million impressions across social platforms and engagement rates above industry averages. This has led to more than 2,500 new leads in our talent community and over 1,600 influenced internal talent referrals.
Overall, this Recruitment Marketing campaign was so effective for us because it relied on our team members’ voices and networks to open doors with a new pool of diverse talent.
As you plan your next Recruitment Marketing campaign, I hope these tips based on our experiences are helpful for you to read about and consider! Executing on this campaign and seeing the associated results has been a very rewarding experience and I’m so proud of the work our team has done.
Images and videos courtesy of TE.