The 2023 RAD Awards will take place in January, celebrating the best of the best in the recruitment advertising industry. Here we profile the employers and agencies shortlisted for the Early Careers Attraction Award, sponsored by The Guardian Jobs.
Specsavers New Talent Programme – ThirtyThree
Specsavers has been a well-known high-street brand for almost 40 years. However, the pandemic significantly narrowed the number of developmental roles and experiences on offer to those in the early stages of their careers. In 2021, Specsavers introduced the New Talent Programme, where candidates would take on two placements in different areas of the business and be given dedicated support, development and mentoring to enhance their progress.
It wanted to further improve the programme in 2022, and as part of that wanted to tailor its message to its broad audience of potential talent: from recent school leavers to apprentices looking for their first role, or existing employees looking to develop their skills. Specsavers used data to tailor messaging to each subset of the audience across social media, job boards, print press and Google Ads. Instagram’s carousel function was deployed to show past participants of the programme and how they were able to progress as a result.
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Winners will be announced on 26 January at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
A competition called ‘What could you make possible?’ was Specsavers’ first ever social media competition, asking users to submit short videos of their personal goals with the favourites receiving prizes up to the value of £1,000. A branded landing page supported a smooth and simple candidate journey with everything they needed to know about the programme.
More than 1 million impressions were made across the company’s social media, there were 15,210 visits to the Specsavers careers sites and almost 5,000 click throughs to the New Talent Programme. The company recruited 40 high-calibre candidates from almost 600 completed applications. 59% of cabinets were female and 28% came from an underrepresented group in society.
JLR The Future of Movement – Creed Comms
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) had long offered ‘traditional’ graduate routes that never struggled to attract candidates. However, the past five years has seen more change in the automotive industry than the last 50 combined. A new campaign needed to reflect a more modern company (while a new CEO joined the business during development).
JLR needed to recruit a higher volume of apprentices following the fallow years of the pandemic, with a requirement for 198% more. The strategy was centred around a video campaign that would change the perception of what the early careers programmes would offer. It needed to be effective across a range of target audiences including school work experience applicants; parents, carers and educators; apprentices and undergraduate interns.
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JLR spoke with D&I networks to recruit volunteers from key audience groups, hosted focus groups to establish key messages; and held photo/video shoot days to create fresh and bespoke content. The message needed to show that JLR was re-imagining modern luxury but having a positive societal impact, while graduates would be positioned as “the future of movement”. The campaign comprised a “hero” video as the launch to the campaign, followed by less formal, conversational videos showcasing current early careers talent, as well as short videos for social media showing the programmes on offer.
The campaign prompted a 32% increase in followers on Instagram and there were 1.5 million views across YouTube and Socially Recruited. It led to 22,000 apprenticeship applications, with 250 hires made. One of the recruits won apprentice of the year award at the Women in Tech awards.
