Diversity and Inclusion

A home for the curious

Deloitte understand that recruiting diverse talent is key to their continued success. To consistently innovate as a business they need a variety of graduates, with different methods of thinking, to become the leaders of the future.

Attracting applications for their graduate programmes has never been a problem for Deloitte. They already receive strong application volumes from ‘traditional’ Russell Group educated, middle-class males. Attracting such a large number of applicants from one group however can be counterproductive to diversity. It may create a wider perception that can put off talented people from other groups. Left unchecked this can become a self-fulfilling problem.

To solve this issue, we needed to diversify the kinds of people applying to Deloitte.

Deloitte are champions of free-thinking and diversity. This is beautifully encapsulated in their brand positioning ‘For the Curious’, which helps to convey how Deloitte invite curious people in and create the right environment for them to succeed, whoever they are.

Deloitte gives everyone with an inquiring mind the opportunity to make an impact that matters. This is a wonderfully empowering position to take when targeting more underrepresented groups.

What makes this positioning so strong in terms of inclusion is that it shows that they only care about how you think. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what age, size, shape, race or gender you are, if you’re curious, you can find a home at Deloitte.

All Deloitte creative must include a roundel. In order to speak to a diverse and inclusive audience, we created a suite of ethereal roundels to sit alongside thought provoking questions regarding curiosity, discovery and intrigue.

Combined, the creative spoke directly to anyone who was curious, regardless of their background.

As part of our integrated campaign we produced a suite of illustrations, which helped to build on the sense of curiosity, discovery and intrigue created by the ethereal images.

These illustrations were used both in the brochure as well as in animations. This quirky approach was designed to appeal to people from different backgrounds, helping Deloitte to stand out as a warm and welcoming destination. This directly challenged the perception that they are traditional and corporate.

Making the curious feel welcome

Our key objective was reaching out to more students who were currently under-represented, due more to lack of awareness, than lack of ability.

We were tasked with taking an innovative approach to recruitment that would be successful in attracting more students:

• From different social backgrounds.
• Who were female.
• From the under-represented BAME audience.
• Inspired to join departments such as Technology and Cyber.
• Or, ready to join Deloitte outside the (seemingly) more desirable London office.

This required the development of a strategy and an approach that made use of all available media, spanning print, digital, video, experiential and web to reach out to these groups. We needed to speak to them, tantalise them and spark their curiosity.

A good example of this is how we combined both content and media strategy to build brand awareness through a programmatic campaign that targeted passive candidates. We also delivered social content created by a broad range of individuals from across the business and promoted this to audiences less often reached through traditional job boards. We weighted our campaign delivery towards a female audience and made tactical use of graduate and apprentice job boards, as well as paid search advertising.

Our proprietary research tool, which pulls together information from a range of sources to create powerful insight, also enabled us to identify and target HE institutions with students who were studying relevant subjects and more likely to be female, BAME or from a widening participation audience.

This allowed us to specifically target inclusive messaging at an audience that may not have previously considered applying to Deloitte, using the budget available to maximise our reach to more candidates from under-represented groups.

Curious to hear how the campaign performed?

The campaign was extremely well received. Candidates were consistently engaged and entertained by the campaign. We inspired over a hundred thousand people from various demographics to explore their curiosity and consider a career at Deloitte.

This is shown by the statistics:

• 40,387,646 impressions
• 187,280 clicks to careers site
• 44,134 submitted applications
• Cost per application of £8.71

The quality of candidates also improved with a 249% year on year increase in candidates having accepted their offer at this stage in the recruitment cycle.

Taking a closer look at diversity specifically, the campaign attracted:

• 41% of applications from female candidates which maintained the fantastic result from the previous year’s campaign
• 47% of applications from BAME candidates which increased from 43.8% the previous year

And in the challenging areas of Cyber and Technology we saw:

• 36% of Cyber applications and 35% of Technology applications coming from female candidates
• 44% of Cyber applications and 50% of Technology applications coming from BAME candidates

Experiential stole the show

Once we understood where our key target institutions were located, we geo-targeted our online activity to drive-time areas around these institutions. We also used this data to inform Deloitte’s on-campus activity, too.

On-campus events were very successful, as shown by the following statistics:

• 102% increase in pre-registration for Autumn events
• 100% positive feedback
• 100% increase in registration
• 56% increase in attendance

The future

The consistently high-level brand content that runs throughout the campaign is working hard to change perceptions and build awareness of Deloitte as an employer. This campaign is true to everything Deloitte stand for and helps position the business as a champion of curiosity, diversity and possibility.

Curiosity continues…

Both Deloitte and SMRS are extremely happy with how the campaign has performed. The increase in both reach and engagement has enabled Deloitte to take up a commanding position when it comes to attracting and recruiting the country’s hottest young talent.

The ‘For the Curious’ positioning has been very successful and continues to sit at the heart of the brand as we move forward. The success this campaign enjoyed particularly in an experiential setting and on social media will also inform channel choices in future campaigns targeting these audiences.

As we outlined at the start, Deloitte understand that recruiting diverse talent is key to their continued success. We know that in order to keep this up, we need to follow our own lead to embrace curiosity and find new innovative ways to reach out to candidates from all demographics.