Making an employer brand fly, without the aid of frobscottle

mydentist is Europe’s largest dental care provider. A fact you’d think would make it highly attractive to potential candidates as it, quite rightly, suggests the huge levels of career opportunity and support available there.

But, once we started to look into it, we found the opposite to be true. We discovered that people thought mydentist was a faceless corporate giant. An organisation that had grown big through acquisition and lacked character, personality and warmth as a result.

Our challenge was how to turn this wrongly perceived corporate giant into the BFG.

It needed a huge injection of personality. For all the character, warmth and chattiness of its people and the energy, friendliness and positivity of the place itself, to be revealed. Yes, teeth were at the heart of everything. But so was the uniqueness of everyone who worked there.

We ran a competition to find brand ambassadors. People who embodied what mydentist stood for. Then we created avatars of each of them and an illustrated world for them to live in. A world where teeth take centre stage, but only thanks to the people who look after them.

Staying as far away from clinical, cold, stereotypically ‘healthcare’ images as possible, we pushed the colour palette and brand guidelines to the max. While a fab day’s filming enabled us to tell the real-life stories of our ambassadors and link their photo-real selves to their illustrated avatars.

The result? A Big Friendly Giant of an employer brand that’s warm, accessible and a million miles from being seen by potential candidates as a faceless operation. Here’s how well it worked:

• Last financial year ended with the highest number of new clinicians joining in the history of the company.
• They also recruited more than double the target number of newly qualified dentists – another record!
• Offers for dental nurses is 42% higher than the year before, resulting in a significant reduction in agency spend.
• In their Support Centre, they achieved 86% direct hires, up from 72% last year, a saving over £175k on agency fees.
• They achieved 91% direct hires for Practice Managers, saving over £150k on agency fees – mydentist’s most successful year yet in terms of sourcing high quality candidates.
• The number of candidates withdrawing from the recruitment process also dropped from 30% to 23%.

All in all, it’s reaching sky-high recognition levels within a traditional looking market. Something we’re hugely proud of.