Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks
Cost per hire down 33%. Targets met.
How SSEN filled linesperson, cable jointer and travelling jointer roles across the South and South West, and held a 33% lower cost per application for three months after the media stopped running.
33%
Lower cost per application, during activity and for three months after it
Targets met
SSEN's technical hiring targets for the South and South West, delivered
25.24%
Click-through rate on paid search. A quarter of everyone who saw it, clicked
The Challenge
A qualified cable jointer is not sitting at home browsing careers sites. They are in work, reasonably content, and not searching for you.
These are the roles that keep the lights on across the South and South West, and they are among the hardest in the country to fill. The brief was to drive interest, engagement and ultimately applications for technical roles across SSEN's areas of operation, with the South and South West licence area weighted hardest.
This was burst two. It had to beat burst one on a budget that had not grown, which ruled out broadcast and put every pound on performance media.
And the calendar was hostile. The second activation ran from Boxing Day to the end of January, straddling the fortnight when almost every employer stops advertising and most candidates stop looking.
Nobody was searching for SSEN.
So we made SSEN the answer.
The demand was there. It just was not arriving in branded form. People wanting this career were searching the category, not the company: electricity grid careers, electricity pylon jobs, jobs on the network. Waiting for branded search volume that did not yet exist would have meant waiting a long time.
So we went and got it. Meta's job was to interrupt: role-specific paid social putting a named job, in a named place, in front of people who were not looking. Paid search then caught the ones already leaning in, retargeting Meta engagers on broad match+ so SSEN appeared at the top of the page wherever they looked at careers next.
What We Did
Entirely digital, entirely accountable. Two platforms, one job each.
Meta carried the reach and the discovery. Facebook and Instagram ran activity split by role and by licence area, so creative, copy and landing page always matched the job being advertised. Facebook Feed alone delivered 1.11 million impressions, the single largest source of delivery in the campaign.
Video went in for burst two. Alongside the static executions we introduced video built around real employees describing the work, the training and the culture. Thirty seconds of someone doing the job explains more than any headline about it.
Paid search ran as a conversion layer, not a prospecting one. Broad match+ keywords aimed at people already engaged with the social activity, so SSEN appeared at the top of the page the moment they went looking. It held 84.61% top-of-page share and 42.65% absolute top of page.
Delivery was managed to the pound. The campaign finished at 104.55% budget delivery, with frequency held at 4.71 across the run. Enough to be remembered, short of the point where a recruitment message starts to irritate.
The Results
Hiring outcomes first, because that is what the campaign was bought to deliver. The media numbers are the evidence underneath them.
Hiring. SSEN's technical hiring targets were met across the South and South West licence area, on roles that had previously been slow to fill and on a media budget that had not increased.
Cost per application. Recruitment cost per application fell 33% during the campaign, and stayed there. Three months of post-campaign monitoring showed the reduction holding after paid activity had stopped, which means the campaign did not just buy applications. It lowered the price of them.
Reach and efficiency. 1,405,845 impressions against 297,000 people reached, at a cost per thousand of £3.29. Average cost per click landed at £0.11, and fell to £0.10 in burst two.
Engagement. 191,000 engagements across likes, shares, clicks and comments, with 42,767 clicks in total and a link click-through rate of 3.25%. That figure is double what burst one achieved.
Creative. Introducing video was the single biggest lever in the campaign. Against burst one, burst two delivered 78% more impressions and 74% more clicks, while cost per click fell rather than rose. Average view-through was a third of each video.
Search multiplier. 7,998 impressions produced 2,019 clicks: a 25.24% click-through rate at £0.27 per click. A quarter of everyone who saw the ad clicked it, which is what happens when the audience arrives pre-warmed rather than bought cold.