The number of visitors to the Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ's) recruitment website increased by more than 500% during its month-long in-game recruitment advertising campaign by recruitment and communications agency TMP Worldwide.

Traffic increased from 500-600 people per day to between 4,000 and 7,000, and Kate Clemens, head of GCHQ's digital strategy at TMP Worldwide, told Recruiter that similar levels have been maintained since the campaign finished.

"The campaign succeeded as a general profile raising exercise," said Clemens. She added: "It also underlined the importance of targeting a passive audience and using a lifestyle medium for recruitment purposes rather than just job boards."

For the campaign, a virtual billboard featuring the www.gchq-careers.co.uk url was placed in computer games such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six Vegas. Visitors keying in this web address were then taken to the www.careersinbritishintelligence.co.uk site.

Alan Thompson, spokesman for GCHQ, told Recruiter that it was still too early to say how the campaign would translate into hires at GCHQ, but said that it attracted the web-savvy potential employees that it set out to target, as well as demonstrated the organisation was at the cutting edge of recruitment technology.

"There is no doubt that the gaming idea and subsequent media publicity has significantly increased awareness of GCHQ as a potential employer," he said. "We will be working with TMP to find other fresh ideas to appeal to those entering the job market. In particular, we would like to encourage more women to enter careers in engineering and technology."

TMP's tracking system enabled it to record daily results for the campaign, as well as showing the breadth of interest from those visiting. Visitors looked at a wide variety of job roles such as weapons systems analysts, linguists and technologists.

Last week, TMP was honoured for the campaign with an award for innovation in the 2008 Recruitment Advertising Awards.

www.tmpw.co.uk

www.careersinbritishintelligence.co.uk