Case study: Essent Trading attracts fresh talent with Onefish Twofish
The war for talent rages on. In a highly competitive market place, Essent Trading take steps to prepare for battle.
In the fast-paced, fast-developing Energy Trading sector it seems that never before has there been such strong competition when it comes to recruiting top talent. For the majority of organisations in this industry their growth strategy is built upon hiring the right people for their business and they are willing to invest heavily in order to find them. Richard Bovenschen, Senior Marketing Communications Advisor, Essent Trading comments, “If you have the brightest minds you have the ability to grow and achieve excellence, thus creating leadership within your market.”
As a result, Essent Trading focuses heavily on marketing themselves to the top echelons of the MBA audience, so it is absolutely vital to send out the right message. Richard explains, “We know it’s hard to find the right people so when we talk to people it is critical that we give them the right information and most importantly, we understand what they look for in their future employer.” So Essent Trading turned to Onefish Twofish to unlock the mysteries of the MBA mind and provide them with a comprehensive insightful piece of research that would lift them above the competition!
The Research was split into 3 key areas:
1. Desk Research – understanding and building on current thinking and leveraging existing research
2. Internal Research – interviewing existing top talent within Essent Trading
3. External Research – interviewing and surveying MBA Students on an international scale.
Carrie Bedingfield, Director, Onefish Twofish explains, “Firstly, we needed to understand what these bright, ambitious people actually wanted from a potential employer, and secondly, we turned our focus inwards to learn what current employees think is great about working at Essent Trading. Armed with this information we created a powerful proposition that would both attract MBAs and also keep them interested once they joined.” Onefish Twofish deployed skilled project management and fiercely tenacious researchers to target leading Business Schools, LBS (London), IESE (Barcelona) and INSEAD (Paris/Singapore) to discover what MBA students really want. Carrie comments, “Talented people guard their time well so we had to be creative about how we gathered the data for this project to achieve the right result, on budget. We conducted over 25 hours of in-depth telephone and face-to-face interviews with MBAs on a worldwide scale. It required a great deal of flexibility with locations as diverse as Madrid, Paris, London and Singapore.“
Onefish Twofish then hotfooted over to Geneva and spent two intensive days conducting face-to-face interviews with 18 of Essent Trading’s brightest people, to discover the inside scoop on the highs and lows of life within the business. These interviews were then graded and cross-referenced according to age, tenure, nationality, department and level of seniority, which ensured accurate and meaningful data not just a ‘general feel for opinion’. Richard explains, “We needed insight into how the people within Essent Trading feel about working for us and what the MBA students are looking for – by linking the two together we ensure that our communications to MBA students reflect the reality of what Essent Trading has to offer, not what we think they want to hear.”
The Results…
Onefish Twofish collated, crunched and compared the data from all sources – the online web survey, telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and produced a cohesive and readable report which fuelled strategy discussion. The major outcome of this project was the creation of 6 core messages which now feed into all Essent Trading's recruitment activities. Aligning the internal and external data in this way has enabled the business to translate the results into every facet of their marketing and communications activity, so now when Essent Trading tell their story they know exactly what they need to say. Richard comments, “We had been working on a specific MBA section for our website, this research allowed us to match our initial copy against the research results and we were able to clearly see that we needed to make changes because we were not telling the story in the right way. Our next step is to look at all the career pages on our website and align them with the results of this project.” Richard continues, “Most importantly this research project has enabled us to target our budget much more accurately. At Essent Trading we pride ourselves that we are ‘not just marketing it, but meaning it’. With the help of this research we are now confident that the things we say we offer are a reality.”
Carrie comments, “Because we know and understand talent opinion research so well we were able to design a project that would really help Essent Trading communicate with the right people and recruit the talented people that would grow their business”.
Next Steps…
Essent Trading now plans to run this research project again at the end of the year, looking both internally and externally again to measure how thoughts and opinions may have changed both within the company and with MBA students so that they can continue to create the perfect proposition for them.
Kristin de Thouars, Marketing & Communications Manager, comments, “At Essent Trading we expect suppliers to take the initiative and get the job done without us holding their hands. Onefish Twofish grasped this project with both hands and made things happen for us. Their expert knowledge meant they were able to shape and design the project quickly and efficiently and meet all the deadlines along the way. We have a great deal of trust in our relationship because we know we can rely on them to deliver great work.”