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Presented by: David Lee, Global Employer Brand Leader, Amazon
When recruiters are asked to rank the most effective employer branding campaigns of the past few years, the US Army is usually ranked near the top. But, that wasn’t always the case. In early 2007, the Army had missed its recruiting goal for two months and it was forecast that they would miss it for the entire year. A change in strategy was required. The Army selected David Lee to take over the program even though he lacked the marketing experience of most CMOs responsible for campaigns of similar size. Applying military strategy to marketing, the team began to change the way they communicated with candidates and their influencers (parents, teachers, coaches, etc.). By year’s end, the team was able to meet their recruiting objectives. In 2008, they focused on increasing the quality of soldiers entering service while meeting or exceeding its recruiting objectives. By the end of 2009, the program was exceeding its goals, meeting quality goals and was in a position to begin 2010 with 43% of contracts for FY10 already complete. As a result these changes to the employer branding strategy, the Army was able to reduce the budget for FY10 by 59%. This was all done during a time of war and with a requirement from Congress to increase the size of the Army, a goal that was reached two years early!
Through the use of a new benchmarking strategy, fresh branding and multiple efficiency improvements the team was able to create one of the most successful branding/recruiting stories that exists. David, now the Global Employer Brand Leader at Amazon will share his story and how civilian companies can achieve the same level of success by applying similar lessons in their organizations.