As the RAD Awards approach in January 2023, we profile the companies and agencies shortlisted for the Events and Experiential Award.
Accenture Live 2021 – ThirtyThree
In 2020 and 2021, students had spent many months off campus and attending courses or events via Zoom. Accenture is one of the biggest employer names on campus and needed to reimagine how it would reach out to students. It decided to put power back in students’ hands and allow them to curate their own digital campus experience.
It wanted to reach candidates of African-Caribbean heritage, female candidates and those from lower social mobility, many of whom count themselves out of applying for consulting roles. It also aimed to build candidates’ confidence in their own abilities after the disruption of the pandemic, reimagining campus events and making them more diverse. Accenture Live 2021 spanned across 11 events over three weeks. Students could choose events from a series on their calendar depending on their interests. The events focused on what they would need to know about the industry based on previous years’ feedback, and included topics such as life at Accenture, applying for a role and how to approach technical issues.
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Winners will be announced on 26 January at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
Events were interactive, with engaging speakers and minimal slides. There were clear outcomes from every session and links to further reading. Students could adapt their experience to their own taste. There were 4,300 total attendees (up 25% on 2020), 3,840 unique attendees (up 45% on 2020) and more than 2,000 comments. The number of female candidates went up by 8% to 46% of all applications, 14% were from Black heritage and 43% likely to be from a lower socio-economic background.
EY Excellence in Talent Attraction at RecFest – EY
EY’s talent acquisition (TA) team had been going through a transformation and needed to expand and evolve its team. It decided to sponsor RecFest, the biggest talent acquisition event in the recruitment industry, with a stage dedicated to “Excellence in TA”. This would be a space where up and coming TA leaders could discuss their experiences, many of them for the first time ever. It was crucial to ensure that speakers felt supported and safe to stand up and share their experiences.
Some of the inspiring talks included “Harnessing empowerment from experiencing the unexpected” and “Dyslexia my superpower”. Broadcaster Reggie Yates talked about transferable skills and provided a DJ set on the Excellence in TA stage, which helped to build positive brand recognition for EY. Attendees could also hear talks from senior diversity and inclusion leaders, ways to adapt their sourcing models in the current labour market, and how to recruit across a global TA team.
The Excellence in TA stage was described as being like a TEDX stage where practitioners could share their stories, and attracted more than 4,500 reactions on LinkedIn. More than 1,000 TA professionals joined the Excellence in TA community, which continues to offer practitioners the chance to collaborate and be inspired.
NHS England Healthcare Support Workers – TMP Worldwide / Indeed
In 2021, NHS England was suffering with acute shortages of healthcare support workers thanks to a number of factors including the pandemic and growth in the size of providers. By September 2021, the number of nationwide vacancies had risen to 16,500.
Indeed and TMP Worldwide set up a number of virtual and in-person hiring events as part of a wider, integrated recruitment and attraction campaign. They undertook comprehensive target audience research, put together workshops for hiring managers and developed a number of creative assets and recruitment videos. It was the hiring events that proved the most effective way of engaging with the audience, however. These were advertised via social media outreach and NHS channels, as well as targeted adverts on Indeed’s career platform. Jobseekers were pre-screened and then invited to events at seven key locations across the country.
Almost 5,000 attended, and mass interviews were held with attendees over days, reducing the cost and time per hire. Between March and May 2022, there were 3,740 job offers, an 82% attendance to offer ratio, with 1,200 made in Manchester alone. Alongside these in-person events were 89 virtual events that attracted more than 6,000 attendees and 1,151 projected offers. The recruitment drive has hugely increased NHS England’s available talent pool and reinforced its commitment that everyone should have an opportunity to apply for a role, regardless of circumstances.
Ripple Effect x Decode/Code Challenge – Blu Ivy Group
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Like many tech companies, Canadian crypto company Ripple wanted to reach out to new engineering talent. After two years when many candidates had been attending virtual events, in Summer 2022 it hosted one of Canada’s largest in-person tech events since the pandemic. It aimed to be a networking event with a puzzle-solving contest that attracted a $20,000 prize.
The Decode/Code challenged invited attendees to translate a custom cryptic signature font to solve challenges. The company also asked Bryan Espiritu, founder of Toronto streetwear brand Legends League, to create his own custom font and add energy to the event. The event, held at Toronto’s Hotel X, was Ripple branded from top to bottom and featured two custom art installations. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced the challenge to guests.
Through the event itself and coverage via digital channels, Ripple received over 500 registrations for the contest and there were 32,000 engagements across social media. Close to 1,000 email addresses were captured for the recruitment team, which could then be used to create a pipeline for 50 open engineering roles.
