Ask most European travellers about Eurostar and they’ll be able to describe how one of the region’s best-known companies whisks passengers between London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and beyond. For years though, potential job candidates would have struggled to tell you what type of opportunities the business had to offer – or what type of working culture it had. Eurostar had high levels of awareness as a consumer brand, but as an employer brand it effectively didn’t exist. And this meant that the Talent Acquisition team kept coming up against the same barriers when trying to source the skills that the business needed.

When Donna Price arrived at Eurostar in 2016, she found a small talent team that was forced to rely on external recruitment agencies to help fill vacancies. The lack of resource that required them to outsource recruitment also meant that communication on platforms like LinkedIn had to be left to the marketing department.

“The team were responsible for Talent Acquisition, but they had relatively little control of the levers that would allow them to build a talent strategy or control their employer brand,” says Donna, who had initially joined Eurostar in a Resourcing Manager role. “These situations can easily become self-perpetuating: because you don’t have the resources to execute a broader talent strategy, you can’t demonstrate the value that it brings. You end up responding to the immediate need to fill vacancies but because you’re not really controlling your talent pipeline, you’re not necessarily appealing to the right candidates.”

Job interviews were often the first chance the Talent Acquisition team had to talk to candidates about the experience of working at Eurostar, and where a career at the company could lead. The trouble was, many of the people with the skills Eurostar most needed never got to this stage.

“When people came in for interviews they would be really surprised about how many departments we had,” agrees Nurana Syeda, who as a Recruitment Specialist at Eurostar, had a first-hand view of the problem. “Candidates weren’t aware that Eurostar involved areas like marketing, legal and engineering; they assumed it was all about frontline staff and train drivers. We were struggling to source skills in IT, for example, because there was no awareness of the interesting types of development projects that we do. When we did speak to candidates directly, there was nowhere we could really direct them to find out more about the business.”

Donna realised that the journey towards taking greater control of the talent pipeline had to start with small steps. By finding ways to unlock more value from the tools the team already had, she could make the case for more resource. “The team had LinkedIn Recruiter licenses but they weren’t really using their full potential for finding the right candidates and reaching out to them,” she recalls. “I’d had experience with the LinkedIn recruitment tools in previous roles and I made it our first priority to make sure we were using them as efficiently as possible – and reaching out to candidates who were the right fit.”

The increased value that the business started to see from Recruiter meant that, when Eurostar’s hiring rate increased in 2017, Donna could make the case for employer branding. “It was always on my radar but it was something the business hadn’t invested in before,” says Donna, who had now moved up to a role as HR Business Partner. “The key challenge was always going to be freeing up the resource to make it happen.”

“I did some research to compare what we were doing to competitors who were attracting the kind of candidates we wanted,” says Nurana, who had herself moved up to a role as Talent Acquisition Partner. “It was clear that we didn’t have the presence and profile that we needed – and we didn’t have the right type of content. We’d just been doing business updates with no real human element – and they weren’t getting a lot of traction.” 

During this time with the introduction of the new Director of People Gerard Jacques the HR organisation was taking a new direction. This spurred Donna to explore creative approaches to finding resource to support employer branding – and found the solution in Eurostar’s Graduate General Manager Programme, an HR initiative that was already up and running. “We decided to use six months of employees’ time in the graduate programme to focus on employer branding,” she says. “This gave us a dedicated resource for managing our employer brand across LinkedIn and other touchpoints. And from an HR perspective, it meant that we could give our graduates valuable marketing experience. It was a case of finding creative ways to work with resource that we already had rather than going back to the board with a traditional business case asking for more investment.”

Enter Frazer Worboys, one of Eurostar’s first Graduate General Managers for Employer Branding – and somebody who quickly saw the opportunity in the role. “I was shocked and thrilled that Eurostar was giving me a social channel to look after,” he recalls. “None of my other friends in graduate schemes at other companies had an opportunity like this. I was really hungry for information. I was on a hunt to find out about the type of people they wanted to attract, and what those people might be interested in. We broke it down to a couple of different personas, which helped us think about the type of content formats that would work. We then had a really good starting point for brainstorming and generating ideas.” 

Nurana gave Frazer a small, dedicated employer brand budget within her Talent Acquisition budget – and a lot of creative freedom and flexibility with how he deployed it. “We had a quarterly budget and Nurana gave me guidance on budgeting for the job ads that we would need to run that quarter and leaving money aside for that,” says Frazer. “Then we could roughly divide the remainder between sponsoring different types of activity and optimise based on what worked. We knew that distributing and sharing content organically, through our employees, had a lot of potential too.”

Filling out a content calendar for employer branding on LinkedIn was one of Frazer’s first priorities – and there was one area that he was convinced represented a big opportunity. “I knew that native video was coming to LinkedIn and with it the potential for a massive spike in engagement and a really big opportunity to grow the following for Eurostar’s page. I didn’t want us to be blindsided by this and left behind. I’d done a tiny bit of filming before I came to Eurostar and vaguely knew my way around a camera – but I had an idea for how to tell a story and I quickly realised that it’s not always about delivering the best video in terms of quality. You don’t have to spend thousands of pounds through a studio. It’s about telling the most engaging stories.”

The engagement levels for the first few films that Frazer shared on LinkedIn provided him with clear guidance on the type of content that drove the greatest engagement. “We realised that our audience wanted to hear from people: why they come to work, who they are and what motivates them. We wanted to showcase people in each area of the business and come up with different ways to tell their stories. Some were hilarious – but I quickly learned that whatever we’re doing, our people come across really well on video.” 

Frazer’s filmmaking took him to the National Railway Museum to film Eurostar employees talking about their passion for the design and engineering of trains over the years. Another innovative idea, Ensemble, created a musical track from the background noises of different areas of the Eurostar business: trains, depots, offices and more. “Having such autonomy really helps you to be agile and rapid in what you do,” says Frazer. “The more content we posted, the more people engaged around the business – and people started coming to me wanting to showcase their area of Eurostar rather than the other way around.” 

One of those on the other side of the camera was Marie de Decker, the Graduate Manager in Eurostar’s Programme team, who would be taking over from Frazer as the graduate for employer branding after their initial six-month rotations. This is where another advantage of enlisting rotating graduates to help build the employer branding business case became apparent. Different perspectives are helping to keep the style of content that the team shares fresh and engaging. 

“Video delivers great engagement but it’s not the only format that does and Frazer and I have been testing other approaches as well,” says Marie. “We’ve developed blog posts as an alternative way to tell our stories – and I’ve put a lot of emphasis on infographics that are very visual, easy to read and easy to remember. We usually post three things a week and we vary the content between these different formats.”

From the start, Nurana encouraged Frazer and Marie to take a test-and-learn approach to content on LinkedIn. “We’ve made really good use of analytics with this programme,” says Nurana. “We’re always trying to understand why things work and why they don’t – and integrate this into the way that we plan the content calendar.” 

Another key element in content planning involves aligning the employer branding activity with more immediate recruitment objectives. “Nurana has been great at keeping what we’re doing aligned with recruitment needs,” says Frazer. “It helps to make sure that, within the mix, we’re targeting the right people with the right content about the right kind of jobs.”

As Marie points out, the versatility of video content enables it to play a role at different points in the candidate journey. Marie has generated wider awareness and engagement on LinkedIn through a film of drivers in Ashford talking about how they balance their passion for beekeeping with a life on Eurostar trains. However, she’s also used video more directly to engage relevant candidates through video job ads. “We’ve discovered that video has a big contribution to make to a lot of our different objectives,” she says. “It’s really interesting to see the additional impact we’re generating by using this format.”

The employer branding initiative has driven a step-change in reach and engagement for Eurostar on LinkedIn, with follower numbers up 25% to over 25,000 in less than a year. However, engagement numbers only tell part of the story. “We’re seeing a significant difference in the quality of candidates: people who are right for our business, passionate about working for us, and often talk to us proactively about the content they’ve engaged with on LinkedIn,” says Nurana.

Two and a half years after she first walked into Eurostar, Donna can see a very different level of engagement with employer branding and the Talent Acquisition strategy as a whole. “The business has really got behind this initiative, right up to our CEO,” she says. “We’ve proven why a broader talent strategy matters and established that it has real benefits in terms of the quality of candidates and our ability to fill roles. It’s important to remember that we didn’t get here in one step, though. We’ve made gradual improvements and demonstrated the value of each of those changes before moving onto the next one. That’s the approach that we’ll continue to take as we explore what talent strategy can do for this business.”