The automotive industry is a male-dominated field. That is especially true for car sales: only 4% of salespeople in the Dutch Opel dealership network were women.

That didn’t reflect society and it felt like a big opportunity for Opel – one of Netherlands’ leading car manufacturers. They wanted more diversity, especially more women in the showrooms. From a cultural standpoint, but also for practical reasons; 50% of cars were bought by women.

The problem was women did not respond well to our job openings. Women felt intimidated at the prospect of joining a workplace where most professionals were male.

We knew they possessed the skills to succeed but they needed a way to overcome the perceptions that stood in the way.

Simply advertising vacancies wasn’t enough to attract women to Opel’s shop floor. We needed to use media creatively to break this bias.

We created a new brand to highlight the opportunities for women to work at Opel.

‘Jade’ – a fictional Lifestyle and Design company – would become the face of an experimental recruitment campaign to get women to apply to work at Opel dealerships.

We wanted to compare the application response between our fictional company, ‘Jade’, and Opel, so we advertised the same identical vacancy under the (correct) Opel brand.

Not only was the role the same but even Opel’s logo was turned upside down to spell ‘Jade’!

Through this side-by-side test we could see whether women were purposefully avoiding the automotive industry – due to the fact that most of their colleagues would be men.

We’d use the results to demonstrate to women that Opel was dedicated to change through conversation.

Our goal was to show women they were in fact interested in the types of role available at Opel, but their pre-conceived notions about car dealerships were stopping them applying.

We needed women to change these perceptions of the automotive industry and of Opel.

But to get greater gender diversity on the dealership floor we needed an idea that went above and beyond the traditional recruitment campaign.

We would create two identical job adverts, one for ‘Opel’ and the other for ‘Jade’. We’d film the interviews for the ‘Jade’ role and demonstrate that women were interested in jobs at Opel.

These films would become content, with our ‘reveal’ sparking conversation and encouraging more potential female employees to apply to Opel.

Our goal was to triple the number of women in sales roles.

We kicked off by advertising the ‘Jade’ vacancy in Netherlands’ largest free daily print title, attracting more than 70% of applications from women.

The identical Opel vacancy was placed in the same paper with, unsurprisingly, just 10% of applications came from women.

When our female applicants arrived at ‘Jade’ ready to be interviewed for a role identical to those at Opel, we filmed their reaction when they found out ‘Jade’ was actually Opel in disguise. The truth was highlighted when we rotated the ‘Jade’ logo so that Opel appeared!

Their reactions were unanimously positive and provided us with genuine and authentic video content.

Our video was first released via Twitter, DCM Instream, LinkedIn Video, YouTube True View and YouTube Discovery, rapidly going viral.

Earned PR boosted our message worldwide and encouraged more women to tackle the stereotypes.

We started a nationwide debate about the lack of women in the automotive industry.

Our recruitment campaign reached more than 30 million people globally, earned €700,000 in publicity value – including primetime coverage by the country’s most important news broadcaster, NOS Journaal.

The reaction video was watched more than 1.2 million times – that’s almost one in ten Dutch people.

Our paid media investment was just €54k. But, best of all, as a result of the campaign, more than 600 female candidates applied – triple our target of 200 – for a challenging sales job at Opel.

The recruitment process resulted in a 14:1 interview to hire ratio, enabling us to hit our target of tripling the number of female car salespeople, with more appointments to come.

Opel has now set up the Opel Talent Academy to offer bespoke training programs for women starting as sales representatives in their dealerships.