Case Study: DreamJobbing for TOMS Recruitment Campaign

Once in a while you encounter something that literally stops you in your tracks. Is recruitment campaign envy a legitimate emotional condition?

For me it meant a cup of tea paused mid-air, between my desk and my lips, as I gawped at DreamJobbing™ partnership with TOMS® to launch their Dream Job: TOM...

The recruitment campaign is closed but you can still experience the great content yourself.  In this post I also include some screen grabs from the live campaign.

The Anatomy a Recruitment Campaign that Rocks

There are so many steal-worthy, snackable bites from which to choose. Each one guaranteed to give a Recruiter/HR Marketer much food for thought and plenty to chew over.

Here are my top 8 brainpokes which will be finding their way into my HR Marketer “Swipe File”.

I am sure when you delve deeper you will find even more ingenious swag-ideas to stash in your own “Swipe File”.

1. Leverage Your Unfair Advantage: It starts with your brand. Outrageously compelling and successful recruitment marketing and hiring processes are built on consumer and employer brands with high brand equity value.

TOMS’ ultra-cool brand style and values credentials are already well-established.  This is the perfect leverage. The stage is now set for wildly ingenious recruitment marketing experience and creative HR hiring process, infused with the TOMS’ distinctive brand style and values.

2. Power Up your Call to Action with Show and Tell: Use multiple (social) media channels to appeal to as many of the senses as you possibly can.

Where appropriate get your leader in front of the camera, show images of real employees doing real work and provide snippets of what it is like to work in your organisation or on the project. 

Listen and watch the video presented by Blake Mycoskie himself – TOMS Founder and Chief Shoe Giver.  What do you think of his job title or better yet, tribe leader name?

Here are a few snippets from my study notes. 

i) You need to have a story about who you are and the future you want to build.

ii) At the heart of the story there must be a quest that your audience (candidates) will believe in.

iii) At the centre of the quest there must be an audacious big idea that they believe will make a change for the better. It is a call to action to make a difference, crafted specially for the individuals to whom such a quest will appeal.

3. Flip Your Point of View: Most recruitment marketing messages has the company as the star of the show. WRONG! The customer must be the hero of the story.

Here’s the recruitment riff on “The Amazingly Simple Anatomy of a Meaningful Marketing Story” infographic by Demian Farnworth over at Copyblogger.

The candidate is the hero of the story. Period!

“[She] is the hero who transforms as her journey unfolds. She goes from ordinary to extraordinary.”

Don’t just pay lip service; ensure they feel like a hero at every stage of your hiring process.

4. Be Emotively Tactile: No one wants to commune with a zombie brand; people want to communicate with living human beings.

Important HR-related information packed full with staid and unappealing HR-speak and employment 'legalese' leaves your candidates cold.

Go all out to banish Marketing ‘fromage’ and HR jargon. Ensure feeling seeps through the pores of your recruitment messages and reinforce your organisation’s genuine values through the images and copy.

Have a closer look at the “DREAMJOB DESCRIPTION” section. The copy is inspiring, engaging and personalised. The information is written in a straightforward and easy-to-digest style. The candidate knows exactly what to expect and what to do next.

5. Transparency is Mandatory: High praise for showing the benefits the chosen applicant will receive. But I love the countdown – “5 days left”.  It does double duty of keeping the candidates and visitors to the site informed about critical deadlines and it adds a frisson of anticipation – like that for big event.

Boost your candidates’ excitement with a visible countdown.  Need convincing?  Think of the effect of a space shuttle launch or the annual global countdown to the New Year.

6. Involve your Tribe: Most HR and Marketers will be familiar with employee/customer referrals. This a simple yet under-utilised tool in these times of scarce talent and values match. Who better to help you overcome the values match hurdle but the people who are already aligned with your brand values and culture – your tribe?

“Know someone who would be great for this DreamJob? Share now:” The key to a successful referral programme is to make it super easy for someone to refer the right candidate – check out the social media share buttons – and ensure you have a robust internal process to respond to the referrals.

7.Millennial-Minded Selection Process: The pièce de résistance!  WOAH!!  Is this the most ingeniously democratic tribe-led candidate selection process ever?

It cleverly combines all the ideas mentioned in the previous 6 points. There is no need to state the obvious HR shortlisting/selection criteria of values and competencies.  But it is there – discreetly at every candidate call to action.

 “Apply now by uploading a video application (1 minute or less) telling us your story, what the One for One® mission means to you, and why you would be the perfect person to be the next TOMS Global Giver!

 TOMS will be choosing the applicant who lands this DreamJob based on the creativity of the applicant video, applicant background and the voice of the community (votes, likes, tweets, social comments and sharing).”

8.  The campaign has closed but it's not over.  The campaign project team continued to engage and communicate with their audience. The DreamJob 'winner' was announced and in the spirit of complete transparency, their name was posted on the campaign site page.

Is this the end of recruitment campaigns as we know them?  Is this the dawn of a new era of multi-platform / multi-sensory recruitment campaigns?

I can’t say for sure.  But I will say this much. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Candidates will continue turn their nose up at staid and unappealing HR recruitment marketing activities and cold and uninviting hiring processes.

Candidates will expect, (make that ‘demand’), intelligent, transparent communication that engages their brains, heart and values.

Sleepy complacency and sheep-like compliance with the traditional recruitment marketing efforts and candidate selection processes is your one-way ticket to joining the tribe of The Left-behinds.

Savvy Recruiter / HR Marketer, what will your next recruitment campaign look like?

Staid and dull as dishwater?

OR Irresistibly Magnetic and Rocking?

This article has been tweaked and refreshed for this Recruiting Blogs post. It was originally posted in the blog The HR Rabbit Hole on 12th July 2015.

Nicole is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Aquarius Human Resources Consulting Ltd. Passionate about HR as Art, she is an advocate of Creative HR. Connect via Twitter @AquariusHRLtd.