ASIS needed to simultaneously recruit and communicate that what they wanted WASN’T the next James Bond, rather someone with refined interpersonal skills. Our target audience was psychographic, not demographic. Most desirable, high profile jobs at places like Google or Facebook all have crazy stories about how hard or quirky the job interview process is. We took our cue from this cultural insight decided to make our candidates come to us. To recruit young, diverse and emotionally intelligent Australians we decided to create The Most Interesting Job Interview – an interactive digital experience. This experience would attracting the curious browser, but since the experience was a digital interview it would also educate and help filter candidates for us. Perfectly combining advertising with recruitment. Our digital strategy focused on popular news environments that globally minded and intelligent people read i.e. The Guardian and major Australian Mastheads.

The Most Interesting Job Interview interactive experience was housed on a microsite, with digital display advertising, SEM and PR activity driving potential candidates to the experience. There are three distinct scenes in the experience, included to communicate both the variety of environments Intelligence Officers may be required to work in, but also provided us with a creative platform to conduct diverse challenges to test candidates’ emotional intelligence, perception and judgement. The experience was delivered through AGILE methodology over 3 months; this approach enabled us to conduct regular user testing and iterate as required. User testing was conducted with both Intelligence Officers and regular citizens alike to ensure that the challenges and scoring mechanism were sufficiently challenging to filter out poor candidates and encourage strong candidates to apply. UI and UX decisions were made to heighten user's curiosity and exploration throughout the experience, and were validated through user testing.

Australians might not have heard of ASIS before, but it didn’t take long for the entire country to suit up for The Most Interesting Job Interview. In total, the microsite achieved 420,000 sessions across the entire campaign with an overall average overall time on site of 5:40. Google Analytics estimates that average website session lasts just under 55 seconds, meaning our website eclipsed the industry benchmark. The experience also generated 2,698 clicks to “Apply Now” (clearly filtering out only the higher candidates). The total numbers of successful applicants, as well as conversion data, is classified. The interview generated over $2 million dollars of earned media, appearing on Australia's two largest morning shows, and making it as far as news broadcasts in France, Germany and CBS New York. The Australian Minister For Foreign Affairs and Trade, Julie Bishop, also joined our PR push, appearing on live television to talk about ASIS.

For most brands, being invisible would present a significant business problem. But for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, being invisible IS their business. While secrecy is important from an operational standpoint, there is one aspect of the ASIS organisation that has been impacted by a lack of public awareness: recruitment. Our brief from ASIS was to help them recruit young, diverse and intelligent Australians to work as Intelligence Officers – a demanding role that requires extraordinary levels of emotional intelligence, charisma and courage. But of course, it’s hard enough to recruit people to any role. Let alone to a role they don't know exists. We therefore had three objectives.

-To educate the world about ASIS without exposing any classified information.

-To encourage as many people as possible to apply

-To actively filter out inappropriate candidates