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Attracting the very best talent for your early careers schemes is more competitive than ever. Businesses must take a structured, data-driven approach to their attraction strategy to stand out in a crowded market. From understanding labour market trends to refining campaign spend and pre-application engagement, every element plays a crucial role in ensuring the right candidates are attracted and motivated to apply.
We explore the key stages of an effective early careers attraction strategy: Discovery, Research, Implementation and Review. This structured approach means businesses can build an engaging results-driven strategy that attracts, engages, and converts the best talent.
Discovery: Understanding Your Hiring Needs and Market Position
A successful attraction strategy starts with a deep understanding of your hiring needs and market position. Once you understand exactly what you’re looking for, you can build out a strategy that gives you what you need. This phase should include:
- Identifying key hiring goals: Understanding exactly what you need to achieve with your campaign. What roles are you recruiting for? What skills and attributes do your ideal candidates need? Are there any previous hiring challenges in these roles?
- Assessing internal data: Reviewing past hiring data to identify strong sources, weak sources, new opportunities, to give you the foundations for building a successful new campaign.
- Competitor benchmarking: Understanding how competitors attract talent and what sets your employer brand apart. This gives you leverage when building your attraction strategy to do what you know works and activities other employers aren’t doing or aren’t doing very well.
- Diversity & Inclusion considerations: Ensuring attraction efforts align with business-wide DE&I objectives and resonate with underrepresented groups, is key. You’ll want to plan ahead when it comes to diversity and inclusion to ensure you’ve a strategy and the appropriate tactics to reach these goals.
Virgin Media O2, a UK-based telecommunications company, came to Amberjack seeking end-to-end management of their Attraction process, aiming to secure a diverse pipeline of high-quality candidates for their Graduate, Intern and Apprentice roles. They had a particular focus on improving female representation in their technical roles and increasing ethnic diversity across all schemes.
We developed a tailored early careers Attraction strategy with a focus on improving the results for these key objectives. This included a custom university matrix, focused events, targeted emails, retargeted advertising, social media and more. During the discovery phase of this campaign, we understood that Virgin Media O2’s overall objective was to align with their 50/50 gender representation target across the entire business. Our recommendations heavily focused on both gender and ethnicity to ensure we did everything we could to achieve this.
As a direct impact of the work carried out across the Attraction campaign, Virgin Media O2 saw a 12% increase in female applications across Apprentice schemes, and an 11% increase in female offers across Graduate and Intern schemes. They saw a 25.9% increase in ethnic apprenticeship applications, with an 8.7% increase for Graduates and Interns. These results highlight the effectiveness of our understanding during the discovery phase to build a highly targeted attraction strategy.
Research: Using Data to Inform Attraction Strategies
Data-driven decision-making ensures your attraction strategy is both targeted and effective. Backing up your recommendations with data will support any internal conversations – there’s nothing quite like cold, hard proof! This phase should include:
- Labour market analytics: Labour market analytics are essential for shaping a data-driven, targeted attraction strategy that meets hiring needs. Understanding supply and demand for key roles, salary benchmarks, candidate expectations, etc… can shape your strategy in ways you’d have never imagined.
- Audience segmentation: Data is invaluable when it comes to identifying where potential candidates are looking for opportunities, from job boards to social media. Employers want to put their money in places they know work, so researching where audiences are is the first step to maximising ROI.
- Evaluating media sources: Not all media sources will work for the same roles, same employers, same industries, etc. Assessing the effectiveness of different job platforms, university engagement, and advertising opportunities, will give you the opportunity to identify the best places for your hiring needs.
- Competitor analysis: Employers want to stand out, not do the same as everyone else. Reviewing employer brand presence across different channels to identify gaps and opportunities is essential in making sure brands don’t fade into the rest.
Octopus Energy, the largest energy supplier in the UK, came to Amberjack looking to decrease dependency on, and spend with, traditional recruitment agencies, improving candidate calibre and experience, whilst operating a more geo-specific campaign approach. They were looking to recruit 3,000 Plumbers, Smart Meter Engineers, Electricians, Heating Engineers, Sales and Customer Service Specialists, and Apprentices nationwide.
We had to be sure to understand regional variations within the labour market to identify the best forms of advertising for these specialist roles. Using labour market analytics, we explored market trends for candidates with relevant skills and experience for each of the desired roles.
A series of reports containing insights, analysis and recommendations, guided both Amberjack’s management of the attraction campaign, and Octopus Energy Services’ top-level decisions. These reports guided a 3-year recruitment strategy for the bus
“I cannot explain how world-changing it is to have this view!”
Implementation: Bringing Your Attraction Strategy to Life
Once you’ve gathered insights, the next step is executing your strategy, setting it into motion! From media briefing and pre-application campaigns through to targeted inventory and content creation, the implementation phase is one of the most important. This phase should cover:
Media Advertising & Digital Outreach
- Job board selection: What media partners will you advertise your roles with? Choosing advertising platforms based on your role types, requirements and diversity goals is important to ensuring you maximise ROI.
- Push vs pull inventory: Utilising a range of push and pull inventory gives you the agility to influence your pipeline of candidates before and during your campaign. Employers should always invest in a good level of push and pull inventory. Push inventory is great for reaching out to candidates for more immediate conversion, targeting candidates that are actively job-seeking through targeted emails and hot jobs etc. Pull inventory is used to engage with candidates over the longer-term, so employer profiles give role insights, employer brand campaigns and websites.
- Pre-application campaigns: Employers often run a set campaign length, with advertising only occurring during these timelines. Running a targeted pre-application social media campaign before applications open can capture candidate interest even outside of typical recruitment timelines. This approach is ideal for building an engaged talent pool ahead of time, getting you ready for campaign launch ahead of your competitors
University & School Engagement
- Career fairs and events: Having a strong employer brand presence is crucial to capturing top early careers talent. During the implementation phase, employers should maximise impact by attending careers fairs and events that align with their hiring needs and diversity objectives.
- Virtual engagement: Don’t have the time or resources to travel around to universities? Virtual engagement through webinars allows you to reach a wider audience without the need for travel, maximizing your outreach with minimal resources.
- Diversity-focused partnerships: Connect with organisations that support underrepresented talent through universities and schools. Society engagement is a brilliant example of this, with every university having a huge selection of student groups that could meet your needs.
Organic Social Media
- Content strategy: Social media is where the current generation spend most of their time, so a strong content strategy is key to engaging and converting candidates. Sharing realistic insights, behind-the-scenes content, and application tips are all great examples of content that students want to see from employers.
- Creating a community: There are hundreds of accounts on social media sharing recruitment related content. Employers should aim to create a community of engaged individuals that are interested in their roles or spreading the message to build trust with their target audience.
- Employee storytelling: Candidates want realistic insights, and what better way to give them that than with your own employees! Employees can offer authentic and valuable insights into your company culture. Sharing real career journeys helps candidates see their potential future within your organisation.
Copywriting & Creative Assets
- Bias-free job adverts: Make sure your job adverts are inclusive and engaging to reach your target audience. There are plenty of online tools that will help achieve this (and we’re not talking about relying on ChatGPT!).
- Employer branded videos & imagery: Candidates want to see people like them in the roles they’re interested in. Using high-quality visuals of real employees can increase engagement with your audience. Make sure you’re capturing your business in a genuine, authentic way.
Review: Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement
A strong attraction strategy isn’t static, it evolves based on performance insights. Reviewing key metrics throughout the campaign is crucial to pivoting your strategy as required. This phase includes:
- Tracking key metrics: During the discovery and research phases of the attraction campaign, you’ll want to identify key metrics that show success within your campaign. These typically include application volumes, diversity data, and candidate quality. We recommend tracking these weekly to give you the opportunity to spot any trends and changes that need to be made.
- Conversion analysis: Attraction isn’t just about getting candidates at the very top of the pipeline. At Amberjack, we work with our Assessment and Candidate Management teams to understand where candidates drop off in the process to make sure you get the candidates you need. Significant drop off trends can spark changes within your campaign, so it’s important to review this regularly.
- Optimising investments: Budgets can be tight, we understand that, but it’s important that everything you do within your attraction campaign maximises ROI. Although you set budgets in the discovery phase, it’s important to realise you may need to adjust budget allocations during the campaign. If a particular source isn’t performing, if requirements change, if a source is over performing, these are all things that could lead to optimising your investment.
Attraction Audits: Strengthening Your Strategy with Expert Insights
Many businesses unknowingly have gaps in their attraction strategy that could be limiting success. Amberjack’s Attraction Audit reviews current attraction methods, performance, and spend efficiency. We assess where you’re allocating resources and offer recommendations for improving diversity outreach and refining your employer branding. An Attraction Audit provides a comprehensive review of:
- Current attraction methods: Amberjack will review the current channels employers use within their Attraction strategy. This includes reviewing activities on these channels, performance and return from each and more. This gives us a broad overview of what’s currently working, what could work better and opportunities you may not be utilising.
- Spend efficiency: It’s important that spend aligns with hiring goals. If you have low hiring numbers, a high attraction spend may not be beneficial, or necessary. We’ll review your current budgets, including where you’re putting your money, to ensure it’s being used as efficiently as possible for what you need.
- Diversity effectiveness: Diversity is important, and employers need to be doing everything they can to reach underrepresented candidates. Amberjack will review your current diversity outreach and identify way to improve your brand awareness with minority groups.
- Employer branding reviews: Within the Attraction Audit, Amberjack will review the content and messaging you use within your current campaign. Our Gen Z panel can provide key insights and candidate perceptions on how your brand is viewed within the market.
Businesses that invest in an attraction audit receive a full report with recommendations, ensuring they have everything to make sure their strategy is optimised for success.
Future-Proofing Your Attraction Strategy
With the evolving job market and shifting candidate expectations, staying ahead in early careers recruitment requires agility. By continuously refining your attraction strategy using data insights, targeted outreach, and creative engagement tactics, businesses can build a robust talent pipeline.
If you need expert support in assessing and improving your early careers attraction strategy, get in touch to find out more about our Attraction Audit and how we can give you tailored recommendations to enhance your recruitment success.
