Applications up sixfold for a Langen engineering office

Situation

An engineering office in Langen, 25 staff, plans building services (heating, ventilation, electrical) for commercial buildings across the Rhein-Main region. It needed two project engineers and had been looking for eight months. The careers page was one paragraph and a generic email address. The last job ad on a large board had brought three applications, one of them usable. Candidates in this field have several offers and choose by what they can see of an employer online. Here there was nothing to see.

Approach

We ran a half-day positioning workshop with the two partners and three engineers. The question was simple: why do the people who stay here stay? The answers: projects the engineer runs from first sketch to handover, a four-day week option the firm had never advertised, direct client contact from year one, and a 20-minute commute for anyone living between Darmstadt and Frankfurt.

From that we wrote two candidate personas (an engineer with three to five years at a large planning firm who wants ownership, and a person returning after a family break who wants reduced hours) and an employer value proposition in four sentences.

We rewrote the careers page: the four reasons, a plain description of a typical project, salary bands stated openly, the four-day option, photos of real project sites without people, and a two-field application form. We wrote the job ad for the project-engineer role in the same voice and checked it against the equal-treatment rules.

Then we ran one campaign: the job ad on two specialist boards and a targeted social-media campaign aimed at engineers within 40 km of Langen, with a media budget of €1,500 over six weeks. We tracked every application to its source.

Result

In this scenario the careers page went from about 40 visits a month to 610 during the campaign. Applications: 19 in six weeks, against 3 from the previous ad. Twelve came from the social-media campaign, five from the boards and two direct through the careers page. Media cost per application: €79. Seven applicants were interviewed and two project engineers were hired, one of them on the four-day model that had been the deciding argument.

The client now has a careers page, a persona document and an ad template it can rerun for the next role, plus a benchmark cost per application to judge the next campaign against.

What it cost

€4,350 fixed fee for the positioning workshop, candidate personas, employer value proposition, rewritten careers page and one job-ad campaign, set up and managed for six weeks. On top of that a €1,500 media budget, paid at cost to the platforms. Total €5,850. The fee was quoted before the work started. The media budget and the job-board fees within it are excluded from the guarantee, because they are spent with third parties on the client’s instruction. Our fee is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery.

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