How Nationwide attracted the right talent using recruitment marketing

Nationwide Building Society is the world’s largest mutual. They have 15.3 million members in the UK and Northern Ireland and provide 1 in 12 mortgages to that market. Their emerging talent strategy is critical to business success at Nationwide.

One of the biggest recruitment challenges at Nationwide was the quality of candidates they were receiving for their graduate recruitment efforts. They needed to encourage and attract a pipeline of talent into their business to remain relevant and competitive. Watch the full story here? (3 min watch)

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One of the biggest recruitment challenges at Nationwide was the quality of candidates they were receiving for their graduate recruitment efforts. Before using VONQ’s Job Marketing they were very reactive in their recruitment rather than being proactive.

Ellen Millard, Emerging Talent Resourcing Manager at Nationwide, explains, “We would advertise all of our graduate recruitment through very generic job boards in the traditional graduate recruitment way.” 

For this campaign, their objectives were really clear. They wanted to;

• Improve the diversity and reach a new audience base
• Increase awareness of their scheme
• Increase the quality as well as the number of applications

It was really important to take their graduate audience from awareness to education stage and they did this by producing really rich content – videos, imagery, and compelling landing pages.

Using the VONQ platform, they were able to distribute their content to a relevant audience.

“We used their historical data so we knew the channels that we were targeting were the right ones and using that information we used targeted advertising in the form of programmatic social media and google advertising to great effect,” says Tom Portingale, Senior Employer Brand Manager at Nationwide. 

Running these targeted recruitment campaigns through VONQ’s platform allowed them to talk to graduates who really want to work for Nationwide. It’s also allowed them to be in the market at the right time.

The campaign was a huge success! Resulting in;

• Impressions: 1,043,000
• Interactions: 12,000
• Clicks: 9,500
• Applications: 601

The candidates that came through were higher quality and they also attracted a much more diverse candidate pool. As a result, they closed their campaign 6 weeks earlier compared to the previous year.

“After the success of the graduate programme with VONQ, we’re now in planning stage for our 2020 apprenticeship programme and guess what we’re applying the same methodology because it’s tried and it’s tested and it’s worked,” Tom concludes.