Babcock Early Careers Campaign – Babcock International in partnership with ManpowerGroup

Babcock is an international defence company, with its headquarters in London. With dockyards, specialist training facilities, equipment testing centres, research & development facilities and offices across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, it is a significant employer to the UK economy.

• The Babcock Early Careers campaign officially closed on 31 March 2023. However, the campaign performance to date had better expectations, with a total of 18,390 submitting applications in the applicant tracking system across all programmes, compared with 9,173 applications last year. In addition, Babcock hosted a number of early careers-focused events and attended carefully selected local and national events.
• Manpower designed and created collateral including website content, employee profiles and a social media campaign. It also created a suite of videos covering 10 topics that were designed to engage and inform the target audience. Some were overviews of Babcock, in which participants described the firm in three words, where employees might see themselves in the future and helping people achieve their goals.
• Marketing channels included a mix of digital media, online job boards and social media. ‘Socially Recruited’ was important too as this takes a consumer advertising approach to recruitment by turning passive candidates into applicants. The posts were delivered across platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat. Through its social campaigns it targeted more females in support of the defined campaign target to increase the female engineering apprentice intake to 20%.

Judges’ comments

“The judges liked Babcock’s extremely data-driven and personalised approach in its early careers campaign, which saw a 100% rise in applications compared to last year. We also liked the multi-stream approach. It was one of the few entries in many of the categories that made use of channels such as TikTok and Snapchat – which are key to reaching young talent – alongside more traditional social channels like Facebook and LinkedIn. The approach seemed to have paid off, with high click-through rates from these channels. Using vehicles such as STEM Women also seems to have helped to attract more women into engineering. It also scored points for being one of the few entries to mention mental health and young people. Overall, an impressive entry with quantitative and qualitative information.”