The Challenge

Think of Staples and you think… If you’ve gone beyond the implement that holds pieces of paper together, hopefully you may think of the office supplies company, which is stocked high with stationery and office-related equipment.

Or the company’s name may mean nothing to you. And for attracting staff, this was the problem in the UK. The North American firm was extremely well known on its home turf but the brand awareness in the UK and Europe was somewhat below par. Rachel Knowles, HR project manager for Staples UK, explained: “We discovered when we were interviewing candidates that once they’d heard the Staples story, they were very interested. We’ve got a great story to tell but people don’t know about us. Nobody was thinking of Staples as an employer of choice.”

New recruits heard about Staples through word of mouth, employee referrals or were told about opportunities through recruitment agencies. Nowhere on the staples.co.uk site was there anything about careers at Staples. The company needed to somehow illustrate its huge range of opportunities and the size of the organisation to jobseekers. “The challenge was to start the journey of creating a brand-awareness campaign in the UK,” Knowles told Recruiter.

Staples had been talking with recruitment marketing and employer branding experts, Bernard Hodes Group, since 2007. Andy Hyatt, head of digital at Bernard Hodes, told Recruiter that at the very heart of the brief was to identify the type of employees that Staples would like to work for them. “It was a long time in the planning, so the strategy was laid out early on and clearly outlined. It would mean finding a way of highlighting Staples’ employer brand.”

The Solution

Engaging the workforce at Staples was key to discovering the type of people that the company wished to appeal to, so Hodes, in conjunction with Knowles, set about establishing groups among the staff, from in stores, within distribution and from head office. “We asked them why they had decided to work for Staples - where had they found information about Staples,” Knowles said. The responses confirmed that there was little information out there for Staples in the UK. “But we discovered our staff really care about our organisation; they are very proud to be working for Staples.” In store, especially, the staff reflect this passion through their knowledge and expertise around the products.

Through the employee groups, a theme of uncovering the best-kept secret began to emerge and it was decided to draw people into the truth about working for Staples. Hyatt and his creative team decided to promote the company through ’teasers’, appealing to the type of person who would be naturally inquisitive and want to get to the bottom of a particular puzzle. “Discovering that the best employee type would be inquisitive and passionate, almost an ’X-Files’ loving person, we looked around to see where best to tie in to those types of characteristics,” Hyatt explained.

At the end of 2009, two months before the launch of the Staples careers site, Hodes used a number of ’touchpoints’ reflecting an ’outer worldly’ theme. These included blogs, a twitterfeed, using Staples’ ’easy’ logo like a UFO and a series of videos on YouTube, all alluding to some sort of extraterrestrial activity. None of them mentioned the name Staples - they were all designed to increase the interest and curiosity of the audience. “We didn’t release details of the campaigns though,” Hyatt explained. So not even Staples’ employees knew where to find these teasers.

“The client took a big risk,” Hyatt told Recruiter. Knowles acknowledged this. “A major challenge was getting people on board internally - the UK was the first country outside the US and Canada to branch out with its own career site,” she admitted. “The concepts were challenging - they were quite edgy for our organisation. It was hugely exciting. The Hodes creative team are just brilliant at what they do. They really know the market.”

When the ’big reveal’ came on 1 February last year, the response was positive. “There was no real backlash when, after the teasers, the reveal of who the employer was came out,” Hyatt said. Traffic from social media touchpoints, directed to the new job site (www.staplesjobs.co.uk), spent twice as much time, on twice as many pages and were twice as likely to apply. “Anecdotal feedback is that the new employees were very high quality, in fact,” Hyatt added.

And more than 15% of the monthly traffic continues to visit the Evidence page. Staples used to spend around £10,000 a year on store recruitment; now it is less than £1,000. With a recent store opening in Tunbridge Wells in Kent attracting around 600 applications for 21 job roles, it seems as if the truth really is out there.