You are an ambitious professional at the beginning of you career. You need to start at the basement of the organization and are eager to work your way through to the top using all means necessary. You know the most effective way is to use your sharp elbows and to employ the most advanced apple polishing technics. But not in real life, at least not at Quinity , a fast growing IT company based in The Netherlands.
Nowadays for many companies it´s a challenge to hire qualified and talented personnel, specially the case for the IT sector. Some companies just experience a bottle neck when it comes down to recruitment. They grow much quicker than Universities are able to deliver qualified workers. Competition is high and only the strongest (and smartest) survive.
With this challenge in mind, Quinity hired Brut Creatives, an online marketing agency based in Utrecht, to get the job done. The goal was clear: “We need to hire a lot of people and we offer a friendly, fun and stimulating working environment”.
To deliver the right solution, Brut came up with the career game. This online gaming application is the heart and soul of this recruiting frenzy and it was designed to attract talented IT professionals and have them apply for a job a Quinity through the game´s site.
In the game you are a young professional and your objective is to reach the top as quick as you can using the worst means possible. When you finally end up at the director´s room, you get told that this is not the way it works at Quinity. At Quinity you don´t have to use your elbows to reach the top. There employees get real opportunities to grow and persue personal development.
The company director then invites the player to upload his cv and to let his friends know about the career game.
Sven Willemse from Brut added: “in this very competitive IT market it turns out that using conventional methods, like regular job adverts, doesn´t really produce the intended results. The career game was developed as an alternative instrument to reach the target group at its heart.”
The results have indeed been above expectations and Quinity has received many CVs in a very short time.
Having in mind the target group´s profile, Brut lauched a viral campaign in order to get its target to visit the game site, and ultimately send an application. For that they used both online and offline instruments to spread the word focusing on students hang-outs, like university campuses and known students cafe´s all around the Netherlands.
To boost awareness, they rolled out Guerrilla campaigns at several universities. The idea was to set up crime scenes with drawings of the career game ´victims´ in bicycle parkings and other crowd gathering spots. The URL werkenmetjeellebogen.nl (the game site) was all over the place, and people where quick to check out who was behind all that frenzy.
Next to the Guerrilla campaigns, they used posters and free student postcards availible at most bars and student cafe´s, emails to student organizations as well as banners, press releases and youtube videos.
As a result the game site was washed with visitors, which kept increasing as the campaign was widely spread in the web.
This has been without a doubt a very succesfull campaign and unique in its nature. Brut employed a very interesting mix of both online and offline instruments to achieve the intended results at a very large scale.
I also give a lot of credit to Quinity to invest in recruitment branding in the fashion they did here. Not many companies realize that people are looking to work at fun, open minded environments. They also realize that if their employees are happy and fully satisfied with their work place they´ll produce more and become loyals to their organizations.
Well done, Brut!
