Reaching candidates before they start looking.
How video-first performance media doubled link click-through, delivered 1.4 million impressions at £0.11 a click, and built SSEN a framework for the audiences it was missing entirely.
The Challenge
SSEN needed Linespersons and Cable Jointers across its South and South-West licence area: skilled, safety-critical roles with a small qualified candidate pool and no natural search demand. Nobody wakes up and googles "cable jointer".
Worse, the search data showed the brand itself was working against the brief. The keywords converting were "National Grid jobs", "electricity pylon jobs", "electricity grid jobs" - candidates knew the infrastructure but not who ran it. And the budget was tight enough that every channel had to earn its place.
A recruitment audience that isn't searching has to be reached before it starts.
Our Approach
We built a deliberately narrow, dual-platform performance model: Meta to create demand against people who were not yet looking, and Google Search as a multiplier rather than a source, retargeting broad-match keywords at those who had already engaged with the social creative, catching them at the moment intent appeared, even when they were looking outside the sector.
Timing was treated as a channel in its own right. The burst was split either side of Christmas; live to 6 December, dark over the holiday, then back on 26 December to meet the new-year job-seeking spike head-on.
Using YouGov, GWI and Experian datasets we profiled four gap audiences; 15–24s across Swindon, Southampton, West London, Reading and Oxford; Asian, Asian British, Chinese and mixed-ethnicity populations across Reading, Oxford, Thames Valley, Southampton and Swindon; a female uplift audience; and older audiences in a region indexing above the national average for disability.
The research turned into a scalable media framework. Each gap audience gets its own ad group and representative creative, mapped across Aware / Connect / Alert: reach and frequency at the top, audience-behaviour targeting in the middle, and a conversion loop of job-seeking and retargeting at the bottom. Contextual page-level AI places impressions against what someone is reading at that exact moment, and a live Diversity Dashboard reports demographic make-up during delivery rather than after it.
The Results
The burst also produced a strategic finding worth more than the click data whilst achieving high quality applicants: candidates were searching for the infrastructure, not the operator. Brand reinforcement went onto the roadmap, and the framework was built to fix it - turning a recruitment campaign into a standing employer brand model with representation measured live, not retrospectively.