Tasty skills

Bringing home the bacon

So here’s the history bit. On 14 July 1887, 500 farmers joined forces to form Denmark’s first co-operative meat company and killed its first pig. A good few more have met the same fate since then.

Back in the modern world, Danish Crown nowadays sends a whole container across the North Sea every 48 minutes, to meet British consumers’ passion for processed meats. And that needs a lot of staff to keep moving - which is where they were struggling.

Lightbulb

Danish Crown has 25,000 employees globally. But it was the 7,000 UK-based employees which it needed to bulk up.

It especially needed good candidates for its butchery apprenticeship roles - but these were based near St Austell, which, though lovely, is a long way from a lot of candidates. So, what would interest a young candidate looking for a first trainee role in butchery?

What we did

We drew up our candidate personas so we could get inside the head of these young people and work out what would be important to them starting out. There would be plenty of time for all that old people stuff in the future - job security, life assurance, pensions...

After all, what’s more important to a growing apprentice than a subsidised restaurant and a vending machine?!

Did it work?

Once we understood the mindset of our target audience, we knew our campaign concept would work.

Our image-led career page used lots of cool black-and-white photography where we shifted focus away from ‘trimming, cutting and deboning’ (which was where our un-squeamish European clients came from), and instead towards live shots of engaging, happy people of different ages in white coats and hygienic hair nets - reinforcing the teamwork and camaraderie, as well as the professionalism, candidates could look forward to.

And it was only after hooking them in with all that, that we got round to the benefits - long holidays, the rewards schemes, all that earning while learning as an apprentice, the training on offer, the mentoring and support and the possibility of permanent roles for promising candidates.