A tweaked employer brand and recruitment strategy aimed to appeal to ex-forces personnel has helped Jaguar Land Rover reduce cost-per-hire by almost £4k.

Speaking at creative agency Pink Squid's The Art and Science of Employer Branding event, co-hosted by The Guardian, in London this week, JLR talent acquisition manager Julie Herdman said her company was faced with a shrinking talent pool of skilled maintenance technicians. 

But it noticed it had made some hires of ex-forces personnel and had found they were a “good fit” both in terms of skills and behaviours or attitudes, and so embarked on a recruitment campaign specifically targeting the ex-military.

The company’s previous employer brand was ‘Excellence in Motion’, but was tweaked to ‘Be the Force Behind British Manufacturing’. 

With Pink Squid’s help, new art was produced to echo the revamped brand. It combined classic JLR shots – pictures of cars or the manufacturing process, for example – with military-types shots of helicopters, for example. 

It was then pushed out online, in key military publications, and at careers events such as one held in conjunction with the Invictus Games, a Paralympic-style multi-sport event for wounded, sick or injured armed services personnel and veterans held in London last year. The company was an official partner of the games.

The revamped brand was aligned with its corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy to support ex-service personnel resettle into civilian careers.

The initiative helped the company significantly reduce agency spend and fill its target of 500 recruits well before deadline — it had wanted to hire 500 skills technicians by the end of this year, but closed recruitment a couple of months ago.

Although those roles have been filled, the company continues to work with the Career Transition Partnership, an organisation that helps resettle ex-service men and women.

It provides a ‘wounded and sick placement programme’, a work placement programme that sometimes sees participants taken on permanently by the company, elsewhere, for example with its supply chain partners. 

The JLR/Pink Squid partnership won Most Effective Employer Brand Development at the 2014 Recruiter Awards for a previous project which had resulted in the Excellence in Motion brand.

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