2024 was a record-breaking year for Erste Premier. As the service grew, so did the need to expand its team of premium bankers. With intense competition and more than 70% of the talent pool made up of passive candidates, conventional recruitment campaigns were not enough. Together with Erste Premier, we therefore harnessed the power of its own people and showed the bank through the eyes of internal ambassadors. The result? A 119% increase in CV submissions and a reduction in time to fill new positions to just 14 days.

HOW DO YOU REACH PASSIVE CANDIDATES?

Erste Premier was experiencing record growth and needed to strengthen its team of premium bankers. The starting point, however, was far from simple. Competition within the segment is intense, and experienced bankers and financial specialists are highly sought-after candidates who can afford to be selective. In most cases, they are not actively looking for a new job and therefore tend not to respond to conventional recruitment communication. Our task was not simply to promote open positions. We needed to spark the interest of people who were most likely not even considering changing employers.

OBJECTIVES

• Increase the number of applicants for open positions
• Reduce the time needed to fill positions
• Drive traffic to careers content
• Strengthen the brand’s image as a modern and innovative bank

INSIGHT, AMBASSADORS AND AUTHENTICITY

Understanding our target audience was crucial to the entire strategy. We needed to identify the key factors that could encourage bankers to consider making a change. We found that better financial conditions were not the only motivation. Company values, the level of autonomy, the quality of the working environment and support, long-term prospects and work-life balance all played an important role.

Instead of presenting candidates with a conventional list of benefits, we therefore decided to show Erste Premier from the inside. Through our communication, we wanted candidates to discover what working at Erste Premier is really like, who their potential colleagues are, how they think, what they enjoy about their work and how they operate within the bank. That is why we placed Erste Premier’s internal ambassadors at the heart of the communication, including Erste Premier Director Pavel Kratochvíl and Jiří Tvrdoň, Premium Banking Leader at Erste Premier. Through their stories, perspectives and everyday experiences, we presented the bank through the eyes of the people who actually work there.

A MIX OF COMMUNICATION TOOLS AND OUR APPROACH TO CONTENT

We did not treat recruitment as separate from brand communication. The campaign was designed to work across multiple audiences – candidates, clients and the wider professional community. To deliver our message, we used a mix of communication tools across earned, owned, shared and paid media, bringing them together into one interconnected campaign. The ambassadors played a central role. Their different personalities and authentic voices made the communication more credible. From the very beginning, we also approached content with efficient reuse in mind. Rather than creating isolated stories for individual platforms, we adapted them across communication channels to maximise the potential and reach of each topic.

COMMUNICATION TOOLS

• Media partnerships with business and financial media
• Business and finance podcasts
• Personal LinkedIn profiles
• Corporate social media channels
• Paid online and social media campaigns