OBJECTIVE

Recruit practically schooled talents or professionals for the many forklift vacancies.

PROBLEM

These days it’s hard to reach this particular audience through traditional media, let alone have an in-depth conversation about their career.

So when we had the insight that there are people that ride the forklift online in their spare time, we wanted to be there with Randstad. Because why wouldn't you make money with what you (tend) to love to do?

That's how we came up with ‘The First Person Recruiter’.

We scouted two 'real' Randstad consultants within the Randstad organization. These women were all-ready into gaming, did Twitch streams in their spare-time and loved the idea that we took gaming more than seriously. With their intrinsic love and experience within the gaming community, we had the right ingredients to pull the idea off.

On a set date, they appeared together on one of the popular Dutch servers where they approached the gamers in an authentic and casual way.

Randstad seeked to creative and les traditional ways to recruit. During the creative process they finished and published a big research (n=3763) which showed that playing games contributes to the development of skills that are very useful in your career. It proved that gamers develop the perfect technical- and soft skills that are useful for this vacancy. The research involved 3,763 gamers from 8 popular games, including Grand Theft Auto.

On top of that GWI research shows (see images) that GTA is the go-to game for our target audience in the Netherlands.

Diving into this, we found tons of videos, blogs, subreddits and more about the GTA forklift. And we found that there are a lot of active role-play (servers) where people pretend to work, for example as a forklift operator.

Factual insights we couldn't ignore...

The whole experiment needed to happen within an extreme tight budget and without media spend. Therefore we fastly created an aftermovie, which we sent to gaming- and news outlets/blogs. This secured most of the earned media and reach.

Media spent: 0k

Earned media: €105.397

Reach: 2.067.741

But a result which we think is even cooler, is the fact that most gamers really loved the idea that a global brand took gaming seriously and made an effort to come up with something that felt real, creative and credible.

By the law of reciprocity, it made the community open up for the challenges, to have a conversation about their career and even stop trolling. Most of them.

Last, but certainly not least, four gamers did plan an offline meeting at one of the Randstad offices throughout the country. Some others said to do the same in the next month.