mars

Last year, Mars created a world-first in student engagement with its magical tweet-activated vending machine. This year it took things to a whole other level with Mars Hide and Tweet.

TweetShop was creative, massively effective and totally ground-breaking (in the recruitment world at least). Over 21 days, it went out to eight campuses and nearly 2,000 people grabbed the chance to tweet for treats.

This year Mars wanted to increase that reach but budget meant we couldn’t transport TweetShop to more locations. So we created an online hide and seek game using Google Maps technology.

#MarsHideAndTweet happened in two distinct phases. First, a week-long online competition that was open to universities across the UK. We hid the TweetShop in five different European cities on our custom map over a period of five days. And every day students raced to hunt it down following a series of cryptic clues that were tweeted over the course of the day.

We went out onto 9 campuses to build excitement face-to-face with students and promote the competition with motion-sensitive plasma TV screens that projected a series of different messages as people walked past them. In the week running up to the competition we began sparking twitter conversations with a series of innovative vines.

Emails, posters and flyers, as well as posts to the Marsgradsuk Facebook and Twitter pages, were used to explain what #MarsHideAndTweet was all about and to promote the competition.

Did it work? Absolutely.

More than 350 people registered to play. And within minutes of the competition going live on Monday 3rd February the guesses began coming in, even before the first clue had been tweeted. The race was on because the first person each day to find and tweet TweetShop’s location to @marsgradsuk won a free weekend break for two people to that day’s city.
A dedicated team responded to those guesses with hundreds of personal tweets back to players. The conversations and the excitement grew and grew.

On top of daily competitions there was the main event, the opportunity for one university to win TweetShop, fully-loaded with Mars freebies, for its campus for a week.

The winner would be the university whose students made the most tweets over the course of the week. The competition was fierce and so close that in the end there was nothing between Coventry and Reading so a decision was made to send TweetShop out to both universities. Win, win – in true Mars make it mean more style.

We’re big fans of the focus that employers place on hiring future talent. And why wouldn’t we be? We work with some of the world’s best-known employers to build their employer reputations. Graduate recruitment marketing – especially in the UK – is amongst the most competitive, most innovative, most dynamic and fun areas of employer marketing to be involved with.

Good news then that research released this week by HighFliers points to a resurgent graduate employment market in 2014. Hundreds if not thousands more roles will be open to those coming out of UK universities looking to start work in the autumn.

More good news. This time for those new graduates who just invested in paying tuition fees and living costs for the past few years and need to begin paying off that debt.

Some interesting changes have happened over the last few years however, suggesting that all may not be returning to the status quo as the economy improves.

The same research suggested that more than one in three of those vacancies will be filled by candidates who’ve already completed a placement of some sorts with their future employer. Good news again for the proactive, career minded student. Not so good if you’re less inclined toward planning your career and more inclined towards studying for your degree.

Just think. One third of all vacancies that are not open to application. What does that mean for graduate recruitment? And, what does it mean for those of us tasked with recruiting graduates? It’s clear that the future leaders we’re aiming to hire and develop (that’s why we hire graduates rather than those from earlier in education right?), are as keen as we are as employers to try out the working relationship before making a commitment.

So it seems that graduate recruitment through the milkround is not as tied to the concept of finding the next generation of leaders as it once was. And, if the annual autumn milkround circus is less important in finding the people that end up getting hired, what is all that marketing for? Come to think of it, if the decision to hire is made way before degrees are awarded, what is the purpose of recruiting graduates? Why not just hire earlier?

As one of our clients said to us recently it’s a bit more complicated than that. Graduate recruitment (and the associated marketing effort), serves many purposes.

It is partly about filling actual vacancies of course. Those people hired may or may not choose to stay with that employer for the whole of their career, if they do it’s a good investment to pay more in attracting, training, paying a higher salary and associated benefits. Unfortunately, statistically they’re more likely to move in a few years time. In which case it’s not. The investment simply serves to get people ready for their next job – perhaps in a competitor organisation.

However, as a means of providing early insight into the reasons to join a business, the process of the marketing of graduate vacancies is difficult to beat. If we are seen as a great place to work in those formative years then this memory of our offer will stay with the people we need for the whole of their career- irrespective of whether they join us or not immediately.

The future leaders we hire are influenced by their first impressions and do remember the good and the bad. I’m certain that we all can recall from our own experience who we’d work for if we had the chance. How would you respond if that company approached you now? Do you feel any more positive or negative about them?

Graduate recruitment is changing. We have to think both ahead of the curve and for the long- term if we are to maximise our ROI. Very little of our energy should be focused on being part of the final year application fest that happens each autumn. We won’t hire the best people that way.

We’re going to start exploring the traditional and contemporary models of graduate recruitment over the next few weeks – which is better and why. We hope you’ll enjoy the blog series over the next few weeks and hearing what you have to say.

Don’t forget to follow our blog to keep up to date with the latest thinking and pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com to get in touch.

+Tonic Agency Ltd