ManpowerGroup’s Game to Work campaign is a social-led and new way for us to engage with candidates who may have difficulty entering the labor market because they lack work experience and the ability to make their skills seems relevant to employers’ needs.
This campaign is not a recruitment campaign to recruit gamers for gaming roles, but rather invites candidates to highlight their gaming experience on their resumes/CVs and demonstrate the in-demand soft skills they have developed through gaming.
It builds on a simple yet important insight: digital games help develop positive skills and competencies that are transferable and relevant in the workplace.
ManpowerGroup has over 70 years of experience translating in-demand skills across different sectors and developing innovative approaches to connect talent to jobs they can thrive in. Through assessment, we’re looking beyond the traditional sources of skills and expertise and tapping into gaming communities—more active than ever and growing in size during the COVID-19 pandemic—to identify a vast talent pool with a unique combination of digital capabilities and the soft skills organizations need most.
Our award-winning campaign, first launched in Norway, to raise overall brand awareness with younger audience and drive candidate conversion. From the pilot success, in 2020 we expanded the campaign globally with the following objectives:
Expand our B2C marketing strategy globally, raising overall brand awareness of Manpower among a mass audience and younger demographic.
Tap into a vast talent pool with a unique combination of digital and soft skills employers need to fill in-demand roles.
Build awareness among employers the need to assess skills differently and creatively to attract new sources of talent.
With rising unemployment, repeat COVID lockdowns and lengthy quarantines in place, it’s easy to see why gaming is up 75 percent since March 2020. Leveraging gaming’s sharp rise, we evolved the original Game to Work campaign substantially for a global rollout, targeting candidates entering the job market with little to no work experience.
To ground our campaign in substantiated data that would help us identify game-skill matches we conducted a comprehensive review and analyzed more than 11,000 games across 13 genres—from action-adventure to role-playing to music and indie—to identify the top soft skills developed in each gaming category and then mapped gaming skills to work skills. We also identified the job families where those skills were most critical to match job recommendations. For example, a gamer who plays games like Call of Duty or Fortnite cultivates soft skills that a warehouse packer requires, such as critical thinking, spatial awareness and problem-solving.
To package this information for candidates in the most engaging way possible, we developed a proprietary online Gaming Skills Translator tool (currently available in 9 languages) that allows candidates to input the specific games they play, their experience and skill level, and the amount of time they spend gaming. The tool then translates that into workplace skills they can add to resumes and discuss in interviews and ultimately help connect to potential job matches.
To attract and resonate with the gaming audience, we worked with an award-winning artist to create unique characters inspired from the most popular games in the world and placed these characters in real-life work situations. Based on our most high-volume job placements, we leveraged six creative scenarios: Call Center / General Office, Warehouse / Logistics, Digital Manufacturing, Healthcare, Social Care and Hospitality.
To support our markets with deploying this campaign, we created a global Game to Work landing page that serves as an overarching campaign support and international directory with links to each participating country page for a localized candidate experience. Country teams received a customizable marketing toolkit for them to localize and translate with over 400 assets, including internal training content and tools (e.g., a Guide for Recruiters and an Assessment Guide for Administrators) creative assets/characters with global licensing, full suite of social media assets for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitch, webpage support and content.
To build widespread interest and participation in the campaign, we also strengthened ManpowerGroup’s point of view on the advantages of bringing gaming skills to the modern workplace with a cascade of social activations, including the “Game to Work” white paper which articulates ManpowerGroup’s point of view on the role that digital games and the ‘gamer disposition’ can play in the attracting and developing the best, most diverse talent. We also developed several blog articles and case studies —targeted individually to both employers (B2B) and candidates (B2C).
Key measure of success is expanding the already successful pilot from Norway to other countries. We successfully expanded to 13 countries: France, Norway, Sweden, UK, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Belgium. Additional countries are expected to launch in 2021.
The Game to Work campaign is the company’s 1st global B2C campaign, and the only amongst recruiting and staffing company amongst its competitors, to reach out to this diverse audience for transferable soft skills from gaming and has already yielded over 24,000 Skills Translator assessment completions by candidates. The white paper has received over 12,000 views.
Other key metrics include website traffic, social buzz from industry experts and clients, high social engagement and country metrics of web applications, conversion rates, and number of testimonials received.
Odin, a candidate in Norway who didn’t have higher education and was unsure about his job prospects, says, “It was Manpower’s initiative that actually made me sit down and write my CV. Finally, I had something to write about, instead of the empty CV I would have had. It didn’t feel dumb to share my CV anymore, now that I had been able to fill it with my gaming experience and relate it to transferable skills.” Odin now works as a process operator at Norway’s largest producer, distributor and exporter of dairy products.
Employers across a range of industries are now also seeing the value of transferring skills from the gaming world to the real world. “Gamers are the kind of people you give a set of instructions to and they’ll just figure out it; you’re looking for trainability,” says Mike Hetisimer, a customer service manager at Truno.
