Case Study
The Company
Mobile Fleetcare is one of the west coast’s largest providers of on-site fleet vehicle & equipment maintenance. Their team travels to their clients’ locations through Northern California to provide basic preventative maintenance, on-site vehicle and equipment repair, and DOT/BIT inspections. If a job simply can’t be completed in-the-field, they have the abilityt to bring it into their commercial garage in Oakland. They may be servicing a fleet of Google’s mapping cars in the morning and a giant bulldozer in the afternoon.
How We Contributed
The Challenge
We need to hire more people… like immediately
You know business is good when your biggest problem is hiring enough qualified people to keep up with demand. We had worked with Mobile Fleetcare a couple of years ago to help with a website redesign. We’ll explore that a little bit below, but this year, the folks at Mobile Fleetcare reached back out to 4S Design Studio with the problem mentioned above. They were bringing in so much new business (arguably because of our previous digital marketing work), that they immediately needed to hire multiple new positions to keep up. That’s a high class problem to have.
It’s a good time to be a commercial mechanic. It’s a bad time to be hiring one.
Our biggest challenge with launching a recruitment campaign for Mobile Fleetcare is that the economy is really strong. A halfway decent mechanic can write their own ticket in The Bay Area right now. There are simply more companies looking for mechanics than there are qualified mechanics.
MFC was offering 3 things to give them a competitive advantage. They were willing to pay extremely competitively, including great benefits and other perks. They offered a lot of freedom and independence for their mechanics – something we felt would catch the eye of someone sick of being in the same “pit” all day. And finally, they offered clear advancement opportunities for early-career mechanics.
Our job was to take those 3 differentiators, get them in front of the right target audience, and do so in a way that would convince someone who was comfortable in their current role, to check out Mobile Fleetcare as a more rewarding career path.
A Digital Recruitment Campaign
Numbers that matter
A Quick Look at Results
4
Average recruitment campaign click-through-rate (CTR)
13
Website application conversion rate from recruitment campaign
38
Cost-Per-Applicant
How We Got There
Finding the right audience
Obviously this is generalizing, but with such a strong job market, we felt there was a reasonably high percentage chance that those mechanics actively looking for work would come with hurdles. We didn’t want to miss out on a qualified mechanic looking for a new role, but based on the strong job market we outlined earlier, we knew we needed to make a run at poaching talent from other employers in order to drive any sort of meaningful volume.
The other piece was that they didn’t necessarily need master mechanics. For their early-career roles, they’d actually prefer to bring in someone that knows their way around under the hood, but wasn’t a full-blown diesel mechanic.
Leveraging Social Media Audience Targeting
We primarily focused on Facebook and Instagram – building out a series of videos and ad graphics designed to capture the interest of mechanics just going through the motions in their current role. We wanted to position Mobile Fleetcare as an exciting (and lucrative) new position with real career advancement opportunities.
Then, through deep-dive audience targeting, we used precision to get the creative pieces in front of the different audiences they were designed to resonate with. By split testing a couple of different assumptions on the audience side, as well as with different ad formats, we were soon generating click-through-rates more than double Facebook’s average.
Get the Recruitment Funnel Right
We had built out an employment application portal during our rebuild of their website the year before. This included a fully digital application as well as a resume upload option. On the application side, it was a long form.
When we began this recruitment campaign, we had built out new landing pages to help drive conversion rates, but in doing so, we had reused the original application.
Early on during the recruitment push, we were getting really strong click-through from our ad spend, but we weren’t getting nearly the conversion rate we were hoping for. Looking at the data, we were getting a large amount of traffic mid-day and hypothesized that we were getting a lot of click-through from our targeted audience while they were on their lunch break. Filling out an application takes time.
We built out a second series of calls-to-action that allowed the user to submit their basic contact info and then automated an email to that user inviting them to complete the application when they had more time. We immediately saw our conversion rates triple – putting us slightly ahead of the KPI we had established.
