Bringing UGC to recruitment comms

It's been seen before with such campaigns as T-Mobile's Life's for sharing. Instead of going out there and producing expensive content you get your audience to engage with the brand and create their own. It's a concept that has been copied many times - sometimes successfully, e.g. the Milky Bar kid campaign and sometimes unsuccessfully e.g. the Wella upload your own swish campagin.

To my knowlege it's a concept that has never been brought over to the world of Recruitment Comms. So I'm rather pleased to have been involved in a recent project where we did just that.

The idea is simple - via internal comms we asked Claire's employees to upload videos of themselves saying why they loved working @Claire's (with a prize incentive of course). These videos are uploaded to the site, the employee's informed, and they are encouraged to share across their social networks.

The uptake by employee's has been great. I recommending checking out the site www.clairescareers.co.uk/atclaires. At the time of writing we have yet to see if the site will create the viral noise we want. I feel certain that the videos generated by the employees are more than entertaining enough to get attention. Certainly the recruitment comms organisations will be paying attention to this project. It has already acchieved many of it's initial goals - to create something unique (in recruitment) that will show off Claire's as an employer from the ground up. These people aren't directed, their thoughts are their own! Another goal - to create a pan-european experience; this is the first project Claire's have worked on which works across all of their countries. This has defintely been acchieved, we've had videos from Spain, France, UK, Ireland, Germany and more.

There were a few technical problems to overcome - such as how to get the content (a simple upload form solved this) and how to convert the videos; keeping in mind that mobiles and handy cams use a plethera of formats. YouTube provided the answers, every video we've received has been uploaded to YouTube which sorts out issues of compatibility and hosting. Hoorah! Not to mention uploading it to the Claire's YouTube channel means we've been making use of a so far largely neglected social media channel.

I look forward to seeing how the campaign unfolds this year and what noise and attention it receives.