Steve McNally, co-founder of WriteRecruit, shares his real-world experience as a recruitment copywriter, helping employers connect with the talent they need, in diverse candidate markets across the globe.
The small futuristic town otherwise known as the Airbus site in Toulouse holds warm memories for me, in more ways than one.
In 2005, I spent many months onsite as Global Creative Director of what is now Havas People. I worked with the Airbus recruitment and employer brand teams, helping to define and refine the key messages capable of engaging with the predominantly technical talent that made up a 130,000 global workforce.
The stakes were quite high - 43,000 feet, to be precise - as Airbus had founded its future on a new fleet epitomised by the game-changing A380 passenger jet. All the company now needed was an employment narrative that could inspire the very best engineers to join this journey.
The project proved to be an eye-opening professional journey for me, too.
As early spring turned into a baking hot summer, I moved in increasingly less formal attire from meeting to meeting, often getting lost in the huge 2,700 acre complex. And I must confess, on more than one occasion, I found myself equally challenged to navigate a talent map that needed to attract a large number of highly specialised engineering experts from both France and Germany (as well as a much smaller number of their avionics colleagues from Italy, Spain and the UK).
I found myself challenged to navigate a talent map that needed to attract a large number of highly specialised engineering experts
The challenge was not so much one of identifying an employment offer - Airbus had and still has an exceptional employment package - but rather one of ‘positioning’.
How best to arrive at the key ‘heart’ as well as ‘mind’ sentiment capable of swaying people from different engineering traditions, towards Toulouse?
Working through a disciplined discovery method, it gradually became apparent that attracting French engineers could be a relatively straightforward affair. Not just because of the rather lovely location - but because France has aeronautics in its vocational soul, courtesy of history.
In 1909, the intrepid Louis Bleriot climbed into a 25-horse power single engine monoplane, took off from the French coast and - despite a few hairy moments with an overheated engine - landed to a delirious welcome in Dover. He became the first pilot to cross the English channel. And France fell in love with flight.
France has aeronautics in its vocational soul, courtesy of history
The British, Italian and Spanish engineers had a similarly starstruck attraction towards engineering human flight.
But Germany’s engineering history - and subsequent sector hierarchy - was different.
The German engineering mindset put ‘automotive’ and ‘industry’ ahead of ‘aeronautics’ as a place to pursue professional dreams and ambitions - a very understandable viewpoint given the pedigree of world-class German engineering in those sectors.
So how did we craft a central mantra and matrix of compelling messages that hit home with all engineers, wherever they happened to be?
It’s an employer brand narrative framework that we have built into the WriteRecruit copywriting platform. And it’s one of the reasons why your WriteRecruit ads will read so humanly and engagingly to attract every talent community, in any sector.
We've integrated brand narrative frameworks into WriteRecruit to make your ads engaging for all talent communities
It means any employer who wants to empower their in-house recruitment team to produce consistently on-brand ads that convert, can now do so - easily, and in less than 10 minutes.
And it’s a method that is waiting here for you. Just ask for a demo, or our free two-hour online copywriting training session, which will show you how to write the best ads you can, in the shortest possible time.