Thales Nederland is part of the Thales Group, which has 65,000 employees in over 50 countries, 22,000 of which in R&D. As such, Thales is one of Europe’s biggest high-tech companies, with an incredibly strong market hold worldwide. Thales Nederland operates in the Defence, Security and Transportation Systems sectors. With nearly 2,000 employees, it is the leading provider of high-tech jobs in the Netherlands. To always stay ahead, Thales is constantly looking for new technical talent.
One of Thales’ objectives is to be seen as the leading employer for technical talent. That is precisely what we were contracted to achieve. We focused on increasing awareness of Thales as an employer and improving their employer image, thus contributing to a stronger employer brand.
To ensure that the strategy lined up optimally with the intended target audience(s), we developed different personas and then outlined the candidate journey for each persona. For example, the candidate journey of Leo, Senior Software Engineer with a large company specialising in high-quality software, is different from that of Risk, a student about to complete his Embedded Systems master’s degree at the University of Twente. The various candidate journeys consist of touchpoints during which the (potential) employee and Thales may come into contact, mapping out the journey that the target audience goes through from the moment they first hear about Thales right up to their job application process. This encompasses things like clever social media strategies, a presence on the right job boards, display campaigns on relevant websites, etc. All of these messages should be in line with the stage of the funnel that the target audience is in at that very moment.
The strategy we developed has resulted in many qualitative leads (i.e. high-tech professionals) and job applications for Thales. The results include high engagement ratios, moments of contact, clicks and impressions. The annual Universum study has also shown that the (post) graduate target audience’s awareness of Thales as an employer has risen from rank 65 to rank 48!
#1-3 Digital agency '21 '22 '23