Summary
Lexis Public Relations was briefed by leading specialist IT recruitment website, CWJobs.co.uk, to create an integrated campaign that would boost job seeker traffic to the website and assure recruiters that CWJobs is the job board to find a community of IT professionals. To address these objectives and demonstrate its specialist sector expertise, Lexis utilised new technology to create innovative content across multiple online platforms that resonated with the often cynical yet very savvy IT audience. By creating an industry first, an augmented reality CV for a high profile technology personality, we were able to launch a competition for IT jobseekers to win the opportunity to have their own CVs converted into augmented reality. This demonstrated both CWJobs’ understanding of the sector and ability to attract the best candidates, while the competition mechanism also provided the opportunity for additional content creation to launch a second phase of the campaign. The campaign was supported throughout with new and innovative advertising techniques, and all media and social media directed IT jobseekers/competition entrants to a dedicated campaign microsite. With over 42,543 microsite views, 700 tweets, 307 blogs mentions and 432 competition entries the campaign truly engaged with jobseekers.
About CWJobs.co.uk
CWJobs.co.uk is the leading specialist IT recruitment website serving contract and permanent IT jobseekers throughout the UK and Ireland.
Strategy
Although CWJobs is currently number one in its market, engagement is transactional and so Lexis was briefed to create a campaign that would drive traffic to the website, assert its understanding of the sector, and demonstrate the extra value jobseekers can get from CWJobs to engender loyalty and displace competitors.
To drive traffic to CWJobs the campaign needed to live in the environment that the audience and client are operating in – entirely online.
Objectives of the campaign
1) Drive jobseeker traffic to CWJobs and in turn reinforce its market leading position within the recruiter community.
2) Demonstrate specialist sector expertise and understanding for jobseekers and recruiters.
The target audience
The target audience, IT jobseekers, are renowned as being cynical and highly resistant to overt marketing – both in tone and tactics. To foster greater engagement with the brand it was critical that the campaign was both relevant and authentic. Rather than claiming expertise in the sector we sought to demonstrate it through content that would resonate with and inspire the savvy tech community.
Media, channels or techniques used
At the time of campaign development, augmented reality (AR), the combination of live video with computer-generated data and visualisations, was attracting widespread attention among tech enthusiasts. Lexis believed that its ability to bring static content to life was a natural innovation to apply to the time honored written CV. CWJobs would create the world’s first augmented reality CV. To generate engagement with the campaign, Lexis ran a competition for two IT jobseekers to win the chance to have their own CVs converted into AR. The campaign was executed in two phases:
Phase one
Lexis launched the competition by creating the first ever AR CV for an industry ‘celebrity’.
The celebrity was chosen based on our understanding of the cynical IT jobseeker. The personality needed to be someone credible, authentic and suitably accomplished to inspire our audience. David Wood, the co-founder of Symbian, was chosen.
The AR CV allowed viewers to watch David’s career unfold, from his time studying at Cambridge and his rise from software engineer to being voted one of the top 100 most influential technologists. His AR CV was uploaded onto YouTube and embedded on the campaign microsite (www.arcv.co.uk) along with a ‘making of’ video narrated by Channel 5’s Gadget Show presenter, Jason Bradbury, chosen for his passion for technology as well as his status and following.
Influential technology, recruiter and AR-related blogs, Facebook groups, online media, Twitter feeds and forums were then targeted and encouraged to share links to the AR CV and video content.
The campaign was supported with new and innovative advertising techniques, including an interactive advertising widget, on carefully selected IT specific sites and advertising networks.
All media and social media directed IT jobseekers/competition entrants to a dedicated campaign microsite. This housed the AR CV, the promotional video, a live feed of CWJobs’ latest AR- related jobs which linked back to CWJobs, advice on the basic dos and don’ts of jobseeking, as well as the competition entry mechanism and data capture.
Phase two
Following a four-week period of promotional activity, the shortlisted competition entries were judged by an expert panel of recruitment and IT experts to identify one graduate and one professional winner.
Our winners had their CVs created in AR, which were then distributed by CWJobs to over 2,500 recruiters, helping ensure our winning jobseekers got their CVs to the top of the pile.
An additional round of media and social media promotion supported this stage of the campaign, including exclusive placement of ‘the making of’ video content and winners videos on ComputerWeekly.com.
All promotional activity drove viewers back to the campaign microsite, which was updated with the winners AR CVs and behind the scenes interviews with both the judging panel and the AR production team.
Timescales of the campaign
Research and planning took place between May and August 2010. The campaign kicked off in September 2010, and rolled through to February 2011.
Results
The campaign generated:
- 42,543 microsite views and 432 competition entries.
- 307 blogs mentions globally, including coverage on The Guardian’s Tech Blog, Augmented Planet and Personnel Today’s The Hire Escape.
- Over 700 tweets – 45,341 YouTube video views.
- Coverage on 115 IT and tech websites.
- A reach of 3,634 on Facebook via organic targeting of profiles/groups.
- Total coverage reach of 86,142,936.
With over 420 IT professionals entering the competition, and such a high volume of coverage in key IT and tech blogs and websites, the CWJobs AR CV campaign achieved a high level of engagement in the tech community. The campaign mutually demonstrates CWJobs understanding of the technology sector and recruitment, and positions the brand as ahead of the curve on both.
Client testimonial
Amanda Dummett, marketing manager for CWJobs.co.uk said, “In developing the Augmented Reality CV campaign, Lexis demonstrated that it truly understands CWJobs’ brand identity and the industries we operate in. The campaign highlights how online brands can leverage new and existing audiences across multiple platforms through entirely online properties. By using talked about technology to create an industry first, the campaign succeeded in sparking industry interest, while still reaching out to the everyday IT jobseeker in an accessible and engaging manner.”
