Charlotte Beckett

The brief

Looking to set up a new technology office in Hungary, BT Global Services approached us in 2007 to create a campaign that would generate brand awareness and source experienced IT professionals.

The challenge

BT had decided to set up the new offices in Hungary’s second city, Debrecen. The majority of the candidates we needed to target were based in Budapest, which at 220 km away was not a commuting distance. We needed to convince professionals to consider relocating, which would be a tough call as Debrecen was perceived as, in the words of one of the team on the ground, “the kind of place you leave for work not move to”.  New to the country, the BT name was not known enough to be a draw in itself.  With many of the roles being technical, and requiring a level of English fluent enough to work in, there was a shortage of suitable candidates in the market.
The solution

After initial market/media research we created a bi-lingual, multi-media campaign that included:

• A careers site supported by a candidate management system
• Job listings on the leading Hungarian sites: Top Job, Profession, CV Online
• A search engine campaign on Google
• Banner advertising on job boards and lifestyle sites

The outcome

With the BT project team being London based, and the Hungarian recruitment team being new to BT,   it was imperative to not only produce regular campaign reports but also present clear analysis of these results on the weekly conference calls so that budget could be justified at all stages of the campaign .  Not an unusual situation it itself but the fact that the SEA was in Hungarian could prove a bit of a challenge to manage!  The first phase of the campaign was a tremendous success in terms of volumes of applications and branding.  And as a result, once the London BT team handed over the reins to the local team, we were retained to manage and update the careers website on an on-going basis.