“A fun way of hiring helps break the ice and understand a job seeker better”

Samar Singh Sheikhawat – Senior Vice President, Marketing – United Breweries Ltd

To counter the problem of limited existing talent pool and to attract the best available talent many organisations are picking innovative strategies to hire candidates. Heineken’s campaign ‘The Candidate’, is one such attempt at a non-contemporary recruitment campaign.

Excerpts from the interview:
How does creativity fit into the hiring process? Does it help?
Creativity helps in fresh flow of ideas, in line with the latest trends. It helps innovate and makes people think out of the box. Heineken as a brand feeds on innovation and believes in surprising constantly. With Heineken, even something as common as recruiting an intern can be made novel and unexpected. While hiring, we look for a person who can think out of the box, develop fresh ideas and refresh the brand’s image in the bargain.
‘The Candidate’ opened up Heineken’s world to outsiders. It gave insight to Heineken’s role as an employer brand and demonstrated why Heineken stands out from the rest. The campaign had the intention of hiring a creative person through an engaging process (rather than the standard one-on-ones) where the job-seeker could act on real-time situations and come up with out of the box ideas. The resourcefulness and spontaneity of young job-seekers was instantly instigated and it paid off. In the process we as a brand came across as fresh, engaging and innovative in our approach to hire someone with similar core values. It is a good practice but it surely has to be in lines with the brand’s messaging, imagery and the campaign has to be interesting and engaging enough to attract job-seekers.
What are some of the advantages of hiring the creative/fun way?
A fun way of hiring helps break the ice and understand a job seeker better; especially with regards to his/her spontaneity and wit. Through this campaign Heineken inspired young adults / job-seekers to think beyond traditional qualifications and encouraged them to be resourceful, innovative, and inventive and stand out in order to fulfill their dreams.
Also, considering that the process has the potential to be an engaging one, there is tremendous opportunity to generate lot of buzz through the campaign. That is what we did for ‘The Candidate’ where we used the social media platform and created noise around the hiring process itself. The campaign spread like wild fire and we were able to generate consumer interest which helped us shortlist our ‘Candidate’. Even the video which showed prospective candidates reacting to various situations went viral within minutes of posting online.
What key factors should be kept in mind while employing such strategies to recruit staff?
It is important to recognise the power of digital and social media as it holds great potential in unearthing talents, especially for a country like India which has the most number of active users on Facebook. ‘The Candidate’ campaign was primarily run on the digital medium and we saw a lot of buzz generated through it. Engagement, innovation and sticking to core brand values are the key factors that should be kept in mind.