BT Group wanted to pioneer a precision approach to recruitment for its EE division, segmenting audiences and diversifying hires in its contact centres. As BT’s consumer brand, EE has a vision to deliver the UK’s most personal service to more than 22 million customers, and this goal depends heavily on frontline services staff. However, it faced recruitment challenges due to high turnover of staff, and its gender and age profile did not always reflect the diversity of its customer base. A new EE brand strategy that would segment its audience would focus on distinct groups including gamers, learners and families.

BT’s in-house team looked closely at high-performing and long-serving colleagues, coming up with a matrix of recruitment messages and behavioural traits aligned to five target segments. On a limited budget, it gained insight into the demographics of labour markets around each of its contact centres, and working with Crunch Media, developed an innovative business intelligence dashboard so it could see how each segment performed. The dashboard’s data visualisations combine EE contact centre locations with local demographic data showing how they consume media, age and lifestyle, gender, income and interests, adding ONS insights into the mix.

Using the dashboard meant it could create a multi-channel campaign curated for each audience and location. Every piece of media and content was precision-targeted, helping EE to tap into new audiences and passive candidates. For service-based roles, it increased the proportion of hires who are female, tripling applications from women. The campaign reduced cost-per-hire and generated extremely high conversion rates of more than 80% for sales roles and 90% for tech roles. Retention at three months with the business has improved since the launch of the campaign. BT Group will continue to refine the tool as it activates new segments and locations, as it is helping to improve the way its recruits and retains colleagues.