Background

Johnson Matthey is a FTSE 100 speciality chemicals company and world leader in advanced materials technology. The company focuses on core areas of catalysts, precious metals and fine chemicals.

The company is home to some of the world’s leading scientists, engineers and researchers and has a long held policy of recruiting the best people to its ranks.

Increasingly however, the company recruitment team were experiencing low interest rates at graduate fairs, and were losing out on the elite graduates to other competitor corporations.

Cool Blue was appointed to work with the HR team to find new and engaging solutions to capturing the attention and imagination of the UK’s brightest graduate talent.

Strategy

We reviewed all of the recruitment materials in a series of guided discussion and focus groups with under graduates, graduates new to the company, and graduates who had chosen another corporation over Johnson Matthey. Their feedback helped to shape the new materials that we designed.

Our essential shift in emphasis came though the development of highly engaging and interactive recruitment materials which were used in digital and print formats. A key change was to make application possible online using the digital version of these materials.

We also placed emphasis on the areas of corporate activity that had been identified during the focus group activity as highly important to the graduate audience; namely environmental stewardship and personal career development.

Our overall approach was a more human and less corporate interface with Johnson Matthey. This was expressed in the use of consumer-style visuals and a heavy use of first-person accounts, via video and text, of young graduates in their first year of employment by Johnson Matthey, at the end of year one and at the end of year five.

Result

Graduate applications rocketed, leading to Johnson Matthey recruiting in excess of its annual quota of graduates from its target universities.

We let the graduates themselves spread the good news about the company, which gave the materials direct resonance with the target audience and greater authenticity than plain corporate messaging could have achieved.