Getting Greater Value from Marketing Spend at Veolia

An organisation with impact

As a leader in UK environmental solutions, we commit to reducing carbon by preventing pollution, preserving natural resources, protecting biodiversity, combating climate change and raising environmental awareness. We do this by providing a wide-range of waste, water and energy management services that will build the circular economy and help preserve scarce raw materials.

Veolia’s Mission

We are Passionate. We are innovators. We look beyond conventions, constantly thinking about potential solutions with optimism and above all, collaboration. Sometimes we are confronted with failure but this makes us work even harder to find solutions that will transform our core business and resource the world.

“Our brand just isn’t sexy, so we need to work harder to spread our message and keep candidates engaged until the right role presents itself. That’s why we’ve been working to develop a compelling employer brand message which taps into the heart of our organisation’s environmental impact.”

Isobelle Milgate, Resourcing Team Leader, Veolia UK

Key achievements

• Greater value from marketing spend
• Visibility for their employer brand
• Improved candidate experience
• Promotion of the energy and utilities sector as an employer

The challenge

With a UK workforce of more than 14,000 people, Veolia provides waste, water and energy management services that contribute to the sustainable development of communities and industries.

A prominent brand in the energy and utilities sector, Veolia has the challenge of conveying its wide range of job opportunities. For example, Finance and Marketing roles are tricky to fill – Veolia is not the first organisation in mind when specialist candidates are thinking about their next role.

The impact Veolia’s workers can have on their local area and the wider environment is compelling, and the team have worked hard to cultivate a brand around the environmental sustainability of Veolia’s activities, and the way in which the company builds the circular economy and preserves scarce raw materials.

However, brand alone can’t increase the attract-to-fill ratios needed or meet time pressures for critical roles.

With this in mind, Veolia wanted to give talent a route to engage further with the business; to hold people in a space but communicate with them in a meaningful way.  To create a dynamic way to connect, share and educate potential candidates that their current process-led recruitment system couldn’t accommodate.

Working with Veolia

Working with Veolia, we implemented Hollaroo’s Engage platform to manage engagement with passive talent, delivering a premium candidate experience for those not yet ready to enter the active selection process.

In addition, Hollaroo’s Engage facilitates ‘recycling’ of ‘silver medal’ candidates who would otherwise be filtered out of the recruitment process.  This cyclical approach ensures that the effort and time spent to build brand advocacy isn’t lost, and that marketing spend for attraction is firmly delivers a result.

Deploying Hollaroo ‘Engage’ needed a little preparation to consider how best to connect with their audience. The Customer Success Team worked closely with Isobelle to consider how a change of process and approach would be received by the hiring team who were already working at full capacity. We needed to think carefully about the internal launch message and how to demonstrate the longer-term benefit of building strong candidate relationships.

The Hollaroo-tion

Whilst the project is in early stages of implementation, Veolia has already recognised that by deploying the Hollaroo platform, they have access to meaningful performance indicators. These include membership and community growth and engagement.  Veolia work with Eggeborough Power Station where, when the station recently closed, displaced staff were directed to Veolia’s Hollaroo portal for immediate access to current vacancies – resulting in three staff members being redeployed. 

Plus, immediate value will be realised by greater return on attraction spend:

“Every penny of attraction spend needs to demonstrate that we are increasing understanding, engagement and of course, utiliately hiring of talent – who are keen to give something back to the environment” – says Isobelle.

“Our employees are the people that make the world go round.  They make sure that cities, towns and villages that you live in, are safe, clean and warm.  They keep things running smoothly for the people of today and our kids tomorrow – it may not always be glamorous, but their work really does matter.”

In addition, through Veolia’s connection with Hollaroo, the business has begun a valuable collaboration with Energy and Utility Skills to help promote the value of the energy and utilities sector to prospective candidates.

Isobelle isn’t afraid to think differently about the challenges they face and sees Hollaroo as an enabler for change.

“Hollaroo are like no other” she says, when asked to describe the experience of implementing Hollaroo’s technology.  Why wouldn’t we share that feedback from one of our customers!