Renault’s Journey to Employer Branding Success

About Renault

The auto industry will change more in the next 10 years than it did in the last 50. Automakers across the world are grappling with a rapid pace of change as the race to create and distribute viable electric, connected, and autonomous vehicles intensify. At Groupe Renault, they’re working to reinvent mobility for all, leveraging fast-paced technological change into cutting edge innovations in how humans move from point A to point B. And all the while, they’re working to grow out a continent-spanning international team in a scalable, efficient way.

If the industry is changing at an unprecedented rate, then talent acquisition within the industry is doing much the same. At Groupe Renault, they have 180,000 employees worldwide, including 18,000 in Romania alone—and in order to build up such a strong, diverse global team they’ve had to be as innovative in their recruiting as they are in their products. They’ve had to develop a new approach to crafting their employer brand and attracting job candidates in order to keep pace with the changing face of the industry.

The Challenge

Renault’s business was growing, and they knew that they’d need to grow their team quickly in order to keep up. In the past, traditional recruitment techniques had met their needs, but they could see that in the digital age candidate behaviour was changing and they would have to change the approach. In this increasingly competitive talent market, it was clear that they would have to find new venues for attracting and engaging job candidates—venues where they could find not just active job seekers, but passive ones as well.

As it happened, their needs were a perfect fit for the SmartDreamers solution. Why? Because SmartDreamers’ software is designed to make it easy to create job ads and run awareness campaigns across the web with just a few clicks. The company wanted to establish its employer brand more firmly in the digital world, and SmartDreamers’ array of connected social platforms made it possible to do so in an efficient, scalable way. Studies show that only 20% of potential applicants are actively seeking out jobs at any given moment, and it’s only that 20% that actively frequent job boards and job fairs. Armed with this knowledge, Renault was able to gain a new degree of exposure to the 80% of candidates who weren’t actively seeking new employment, but who could be persuaded to change jobs for the right company.

And how well did these campaigns perform?

Over the course of the year, they managed to garner 7,248,538 impressions with their targeted job advertisements in alignment with their brand.

This led to 33,648 candidates engaging with their ads and either landing on their career page or interacting with the Group Renault Career Facebook page.

The next facet of the collaboration between Groupe Renault and SmartDreamers involved utilizing a SmartDreamers Landing Page to promote Renault’s HUB IT program for hiring IT candidates. They rolled out another 2 awareness campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, and Reddit, resulting in 2,555,073 views and 8,823 clicks.

These clicks redirected interested candidates to a specially designed landing page that was optimized to convert traffic into applications. In addition, they ran 3 job advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram that had a total of 253,919 views and 2,051 clicks.

Further, SmartDreamers helped them to gain more than half a million views and 3,000 clicks with a carefully placed mass media article.

With these combined efforts (to say nothing of hard work and elbow grease), the company developed and leveraged a strong degree of employer brand gravity. Not only that, but they saved considerable time and energy (which could now be spent on more valuable tasks) by automating a host of mission critical processes.

Rather than laboriously posting ads across dozens of different sites and managing dozens of different accounts and campaigns separately—which almost certainly would have been prohibitively time-consuming—they were able to centralize all of these activities within one streamlined, easy-to-use interface.

Because most recruitment marketing tactics work best when they’re done continuously, rather than on an ad hoc basis, the ability to create, implement, stop, and start campaigns at will meant that their odds of success were much higher than they might have been otherwise. Thus, the efficiency of these processes also directly empowered a higher degree of autonomy within the HR department.