Working at McDonalds has always had a stigma attached to it. The stigma even has a name – McJob – that has even transcended the restaurant itself and now refers to any low paying retail or fast food type job. In addition to that (or perhaps because of it), fewer young people are choosing to work than ever before, making hiring difficult. Burdened with negative perceptions in a very tight employment market, we desperately needed to make working at McDonald’s seem more appealing to young people.

With millennials more inclined to share and be influenced by their peers, we struck on the idea that applying, interviewing, and hiring might just be a lot more appealing if they could do it with a friend. Because when you like who you work with, it’s easy to like where you work. So we changed our entire hiring operations process, starting with the hiring form itself, carrying that through to the interview process, and then of course communicating this hiring process transformation through a targeted online social media campaign.

An ad campaign alone would not be enough alone to solve this. We had to look at this as an operations problem as well as communications one. According to a 2018 Forbes study, millennials are 13% more likely than Gen Xers to share their purchases on social media. This provides them with a forum to share their opinions – good or bad – as well as a place to hear from others they trust. In a 2015 Canadian study by Share This, Canadian millennials are 3x more likely to share content with their social networks than average, and they are more influenced by their peers since they are 2x more likely to click back on content shared by others in their network. So we changed the application, interview, and hiring process so that friends could apply for a job together.

The highly targeted campaign included a series of online videos running across social media, in-restaurant collateral including posters, ordering kiosk ads, tray liners with two applications, crew stickers, an updated online application form, and a virtual hiring fair, all prompting a set of friends to apply and interview together. The campaign ran nationally across Canada from April 2, 2019 to April 29th, 2019.

The business results were quite staggering. After the first month, the campaign generated 75,000 applicants – an increase of 7.5%. But more importantly, job interest among our target increased 42%.