Virgin Atlantic ad aims to turn customers into candidates
Virgin Atlantic’s in-flight entertainment now features recruitment ads aimed at encouraging people to come and work for the airline.
The move was revealed by Adele King, the airline’s HR manager for corporate recruitment, speaking at the National Online Recruitment Academy’s RECex event at London’s Leicester Square theatre yesterday.
King told delegates how the airline had developed a behavioural framework that it recruits candidates against, based on its customers’ experiences.
To develop the framework, she explained, a project team was assembled made up of representatives from the firm’s HR team, hiring managers, trainers and external consultants.
The team was then sent in to observe the airline’s customers’ experiences as they travel, with customers quizzed on their journey and the sort of experience they wanted and expected, while good and bad in-flight staff behaviours were observed and noted by the team. All of this data was then fed into the behavioural framework the airline uses and recruits against today.
Alongside the development of the behavioural framework, the airline has also raised awareness of its employer brand across social media, refreshed its career site in the last six months, as well as combining recruitment marketing efforts with that of consumer marketing, King added.
King explained the airline’s customer experience and candidate experience is so important, as the airline’s customers are its candidates and vice versa. So King revealed that on board its aircraft, for the first time its in-flight entertainment channels now feature a Virgin Atlantic recruitment ad.
“The reasoning we took for that is first of all we almost have a captive audience in the sky. They’re on board for several hours watching our in-flight entertainment but if they are enjoying flying in with Virgin Atlantic, they may well enjoy working for Virgin Atlantic in time to come.
“If we can sew the seed in their minds that they may want to come and work for us in the future… It’s all about the customer service. As a recruitment team, we work really hard to ensure our customers have a great customer experience. For us, our customers are candidates.”
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