Awards of Excellence 2007
Best
Practice or Program—Information Resources for Students—Employer
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP—Your life. You can bring it with you.
Growing business demands and limited qualified candidates prompted PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) to evolve their campus recruitment program to provide a relevant, candid, and attractive message to prospective candidates.
To target Millennials, Marie Rachwalski, brand manager for people programs at PwC, said the firm developed a new recruiting campaign, “Your life. You can bring it with you,” that addresses one of the most important issues that top students identified— work/life quality.
The campaign’s goals are to drive students to PwC’s campus web site to learn about the firm’s “Unique People Experience,” which PwC says is “an environment where each individual learns and develops to his or her highest potential,” and to complete an online application for fulltime or internship positions.
“Developed to target Millennials, who really are interested in driving their own lives, this campaign shows that being a part of PwC is not only a good work opportunity, but it also means that you can bring ‘your life’ along with you,” Rachwalski says. “You can manage your outside interests and passions, while getting a good grounding in your career.”
Amy Van Kirk, director of campus recruiting, also worked on the campaign. “We are all about people and launching careers,” she says. “Work/life balance is forefront for many. Our firm tries to deliver that for each and every employee.”
As Millennials seek full-time employment they must adjust to starting their careers while maintaining their outside interests. Since PwC was already addressing work/life balance, Van Kirk says it was imperative to “showcase some of the good things the firm is doing, to ensure that the message externally was the same as the message internally.”
Rachwalski says that a tightly knit team worked on the “Your life. You can bring it with you” campaign. “Amy and the campus recruiting team, our marketing team—we all worked hand-in-hand to develop a campaign that reflects our strategy,” she explains. “We also made sure that others who will at some point touch the process— the online team, the diversity team, and so on—were included early on in the process so that everyone had a stake in the end result.”
PwC’s focus group research found that students want to know what kind of people work at the firm—real stories, real experiences, and real information. PwC developed a campaign with five core elements to showcase the diverse interests and lives of employees—they are:
Look Here newspaper: This campus communication tool informs students and new grads what it’s really like to work for PwC. Look Here gives an insider’s view of life at the firm. Recent topics covered include work/ life quality, coaching, community service, and career paths. • Core Ads: Multiple ads were developed for the campaign. Each ad has an engaging headline and image representing the interests of the featured PwC employee, and directs readers to learn more by visiting the “Bring It” web site at www.pwc.com/ bringit. • “Bring It” web site: Millennials prefer to learn about prospective employers on the Internet and use social networking sites to keep in touch with friends. PwC developed “Bring It” to provide a distinctive web experience for these candidates. • Posters, banners, and kiosks: PwC’s core advertisements are available in large-size formats for display at career fairs, career services offices, and on-campus presentations. On select campuses, advertisements appear on newspaper stands and cafeteria kiosks. • Informal collateral: PwC also created customized flyers that address specific topics of interest relevant to campus hires that recruiters use at career fairs, pre-interview receptions, on-campus meetings, and office visits.
“Each element was a sub-project that we had to coordinate to make sure it all came together at the end,” Rachwalski says. “It was a challenge doing the video profiles— scheduling, getting to an individual’s home office location, taking the photos, telling the stories, and then getting everything edited and produced and up on the web site in time for launch.”
Adds Van Kirk, “There were time constraints— marrying the creative elements with deadlines adds a level of complexity— it keeps you grounded.”
To measure results internally, PwC surveys their recruiters. “We also conduct a survey and focus groups with student interns that provide input,” Van Kirk says. For the web site, they track hits and monitor online career profiles. Externally, the firm works with Universum to conduct focus groups on certain campuses to measure the campaign’s effectiveness.
“The program is in a continual state of evaluation and evolution,” says Rachwalski. “We’ll keep taking it to the next level because we look at it not as a campus campaign, but as a year-round campaign.”
A new aspect of the program, Project New Orleans, is rolling out in June. “Research collected by Universum during the course of a year indicates that social responsibility is of increasing import to students,” she explains.
“PwC has a long and dedicated commitment to community service—we decided to leverage that this year. One person from each of 86 campuses has been invited to join a group of PwC partners and staff in New Orleans in June to help renovate a school still damaged from Hurricane Katrina,” Rachwalski says. “This is a way for students and potential candidates to get to know the people of PwC in a non-business setting while doing something good for someone else.”
