Wellington is the South Pacific’s tech and innovation capital, bubbling with innovative tech companies developing leading edge solutions and exporting them to the world. The biggest challenge for any company in the sector is finding the talent that will enable real growth.

Traditional international recruitment practices for talent can be costly, inefficient and often risky. We partnered with HainesAttract to develop an idea that enables Wellington tech companies to attract the best talent in the world – at a fraction of the cost and effort of traditional recruitment approaches.

What emerged was the LookSee Wellington programme – a world-first global talent attraction programme.

Our approach

With a tiny media budget for a global campaign we needed to be smart about achieving the level of reach we were needing. Key to this was to activate local organisations and the people within them to spread the word through their global social channels.

Videos of real-life stories from people who have already made the move were the centre-piece of our web site.

An extensive employer and employee activation programme invited partner companies and their employees to share these through their own social channels for wide global reach.

This was enhanced with paid digital media and extensive PR through key target markets.

Outcome

The campaign went viral a week after launch and exceeded all expectations.

Target registrations: 11,000

Actual registrations: 180,000+

Target full applications: 2,000

Actual full applications: 48,703

Estimated advertising media value: +$5 million

The campaign was picked up by leading international publications including The New York Times, Time magazine and Mashable.