The challenge
Imagine this. You have 2 months to recruit a whole IT team in a city your company has never recruited in before, with practically zero employer brand awareness AND a non-existent network within the IT community there.
Most TA professionals would resort to working with agencies when facing a similar challenge. But not Scott Johnson, VP of Talent Discovery at Redington. He tasked his CTO, Adam Jones with recruiting five software developers, including a team lead, for their new office in Bristol.
Instead of relying on agencies, grinding through CV databases, and racking up cold outreaches to candidates, he decided to organize a local tech meetup and promote the event online, instead.
2006
+250 employees
Finance and banking
Investment Consulting, ALM, Risk Budgeting, Investment Strategy, Manager Research & Selection, pensions, finance, ESG, DC Investment und DB Investment
London, Bristol, Beijing
The Outcomes
£ 20.000
saved compared to using agencies, and invaluable employer brand exposure for Redington within the Bristol tech community
1,4 Millionen
online impressions
5862
video views
4930
clicks
95
event registrations
55
attendees
20
candidates added to the pipeline
15
candidates interviewed
5
hires (including a lead developer)
The solution
1. Leading with the brand & purpose, instead of the jobs
To combat their main recruitment challenges – poor reputation and lack of brand awareness – Scott and the team at Redington decided to elevate their employer brand:
‘We needed to change this narrative by being more creative, so we did some work on energising our brand and telling our story.’, explains Kav Patel, Head of People.
They came up with the idea to organize a meetup, where they could showcase their company purpose of making 100 million people financially secure.
2. Creating compelling messages and delivering them to the right audience
To promote the event, Scott worked with Redington’s Head of Brand & Creative Marketing, Nick Martin, to create content that communicated Redington’s purpose and invited people to the event.
They then got the content in front of the right audiences at the right time by activating the power highly-targeted media. In this case that meant Social media (YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), online communities (Reddit and StackOverflow), and ad networks (Google Display and Google Search).
3. A focus on conversations instead of applications
Everyone who registered for the event was contacted by Scott right away. Rather than diving straight into recruitment conversations, Scott thanked people for registering and asked them what motivated them to do so. This led to meaningful exchanges, some of which naturally led to employment-related topics.
Shortly after the event Scott managed to fill all five of his tech vacancies while also building a strong candidate pipeline.
