UPSjobs Delivers a Groundswell
by TMP Worldwide Advertising and Communications, LLC
UPS Corporate Workforce Planning partnered with its digital advertising agency
TMP Worldwide Advertising and Communications, LLC
to create and deploy a "spreadable" social media campaign. The "UPSjobs-Problem Solved" campaign created a groundswell that has attracted, and engaged 4,000,000 people to learn more about U.S. employment opportunities at UPS and ultimately driving them to apply at
UPSjobs.com
from August 20, 2008 to August 19, 2009.
UPS is a highly innovative organization that embraces technology to continually serve its clients better so that they, in turn, can serve their clients better. So, it's not surprising that UPS Corporate Workforce Planning, which handles the recruitment for all UPS positions, is always looking for ways to reduce costs and improve overall performance of their recruitment marketing efforts. UPS does a terrific job of tracking its clients' packages and TMP prides itself on tracking and optimizing the performance of all the clients' recruitment media they place.
In the United States, UPS has particularly high-volume seasonal and part-time hiring needs during its peak delivery time-frame between the Thanksgiving to Christmas holiday period. It also does significant on-going hiring throughout the rest of the year to staff many full and part-time positions throughout the U.S.
UPS Workforce Planning's "Problem Solved" recruitment campaign created in partnership with TMP Worldwide won Grand Prize at the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) Creative Excellence Awards on April 2008 along with winning five other first and second place awards. TMP co-developed the award-winning campaign concept with UPS Corporate Workforce Planning by visiting UPS hubs across the United States and interviewing recent new hires, as well as existing employees about working at UPS. Later, executions of the campaign were personally presented by TMP and reviewed by hundreds of UPSers working in those roles in the East, Midwest, and West Coast who provided valuable feedback and validated the treatments. As a result, the campaign had a very "real" quality with the messaging strongly resonating with the target audiences.
The critical acclaim the campaign received was well-earned but it only told half the story. In the spirit of "constructive dissatisfaction", a UPS term for continual process improvement, UPS and TMP looked for ways to maximize its recruitment marketing impact for the Peak 2008 UPS hiring season.
UPS Corporate Workforce Planning partnered with TMP to leverage Web 2.0 technologies, online media and social networks to make this already successful campaign even more effective. Employee videos of actual UPSers who appeared on UPSjobs.com were also integrated among all recruitment media including email marketing, employee retention marketing, college recruitment, search engine optimization, online job board postings on all the major job boards, niche job boards, banners, search engine marketing on all major search engines, content advertising on search networks, the major search engine aggregators, social media sites including MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, YouTube, radio, cable television, text messaging, mobile marketing, and even newsprint!
The video integration across all media and the encouragement of viewers to refer their friends was a huge success. The
UPS mobile marketing effort
that included video integration drove over 30,000 responses alone.
In one month during the UPS Peak 2008 hiring season from Oct 20, 2008 to November 20, 2008 over 1,000,000 people viewed the online videos and became engaged to learn more about employment opportunities at UPS. The average length of time on page was an astounding three minutes and seventeen seconds. The average video's duration was under a minute which translates to a very high level of candidate engagement of people watching multiple videos or re-watching the same one.
Below is the Google Analytics activity report of the UPSjobs videos hosted and served by MadDash - E Media during the height of the Peak 2008 hiring period.
News about the highly successful campaign spread quickly.
The Wall Street Journal published an interview with UPS and TMP
that headlined in the Management Theory & Practice section from a discussion with Mike Vangel, TMP Worldwide and Matt Lavery, UPS Corporate Workforce Planning. The article stated that UPS said it received more than 150,000 applications from the Peak 2008 campaign, at an average cost 75% to 80% cheaper than print ads. "We're cutting newsprint wherever we can and trying to move more to online media," said Matthew Lavery, Corporate Workforce Planning Manager. "Google is outperforming other online media."
In the spirit of "constructive dissatisfaction", UPSjobs continues moving forward in the social media and networking space. On June 9th, UPSjobs was commended as one of the "
Top 50 Employers Recruiting Using Twitter
".
Today, the UPSjobs groundswell continues. Even with very little paid-media support since January 2009 over 4,000,000 people have viewed UPSjobs videos from August 20, 2008 to August 19, 2009 to see and hear what it's like to work at UPS from actual UPSers, and the career opportunities awaiting them. And over 345,000 interested job seekers have submitted applications since January 2009 as a result of the UPSjobs-ProblemSolved campaign.
In the week of August 17 - August 23, 2009, a typically slow time to recruit, there were over 80,000 page views of the UPSjobs videos and there is no slowdown in sight.