By 2030 more than 12.000 German customs officers will retire. That’s about 30 % of all employees. At the same time, the German customs’ tasks do not become less and through globalization the importance to society increases. Therefore German customs are facing the challenge to recruit suitable new employees for either an apprenticeship or a dual course of study. The objective is to fill 2.000 vacancies for apprenticeships with 15 to 19 year olds. In the highly competitive apprenticeship market (#WarForTalents) it is getting increasingly difficult for German customs as a federal authority to attract young and enthusiastic recruits for a career in civil services. As in 2020 no job and vocational training fairs could take place, we had to seek a digital alternative to give applicants the chance to discover German customs as an attractive employer.

In order to give graduates the opportunity to dip a toe in the water of German customs, to obtain information about career opportunities and to meet other applicants in times of the Coronavirus pandemic, we created the first ever seen job and vocational training fair in behalf of a German authority in Minecraft. In collaboration with architects from Gemany’s biggest Minecraft community “GrieferGames” with server administrator and YouTuber “Abgegrieft” we developed an interactive theme park with work-related mini games, informative dioramas, a smuggling museum and lots of other big and small ideas around the topic apprenticeship at German customs within a few weeks. ‘Cause if the target group cannot visit our fair booth, the fair booth must come towards our target group.

In Germany 1.8 million students between the ages of 15 and 19 graduate from school each year.

30% of them don’t know what profession they want to take up. Therefore, there are hundreds of job and vocational training fairs each year across the country. However, most of these fairs have been cancelled in 2020. Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdown, Minecraft was experiencing a revival, especially among the 15 to 19 years old target group devoted to gaming. This initial situation was used to perfectly combine job fairs and gaming.

In order to gain the greatest possible reach we cooperated with Germany’s biggest Minecraft community (14-24 years) and their founder, influencer and YouTuber “Abgegrieft” (over 460 Million video views). Starting from the first idea (end of April) until the opening of the theme park on August 1st 2020, “GrieferGames” building team has built up more than 50.000.000 blocks and programmers developed games that showed a German customs officers’ daily work. A few days before opening, we announced the project on the campaign website, zoll-karriere.de and social media channels (Instagram, Facebook) by publishing a teaser video. The video was also posted on YouTube by “GrieferGames” and “Zoll Karriere”. The starting signal for the opening of the theme park was given by “Abgegrieft” during a livestream. Other players were multiplying the campaign by holding livestreams.

Project start: mid-june 2020

Construction period: 2 months

Promotion period: August 1st – September 27th 2020

social Media impressions: 2.6 Mio

link-clicks to landingpage: 15.333

overall video views: 1.8 Mio

costs per click: Ø 0.39€

118 days total video view time

1.200.000 minutes ingame played

reactions (insta story): 4.897

370.000 unique user via social media

ouTube – call rate: 25.41%

40.504 visitors/user of the themepark

39.279 users accomplished a mini-game

Ø dwelling time in-game: +30 minutes

Overall 33.980 job applications in 2020 (8.1% increase)