The Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency (DJI) is the overarching organisation responsible for prisons, forensic clinics, detention centres and youth facilities in the Netherlands. It employs around 16,000 employees across more than 50 locations, including security staff, social workers, psychologists and administration teams. However, it is relatively little known in a tight labour market where there are more job vacancies than people seeking work. Its aim for the first year of a new recruitment campaign was to fill some 1,200 vacancies.

It needed to overcome a number of challenges to shift candidates’ perspective of DJI. Even once the scope of the organisation had been explained to the target audience in a survey, only 27% found it an attractive employer, and only 45% were willing to consider working there. People’s views tended to rely heavily on cliches of working with criminals, such as the image of a guard patrolling corridors with a jingling keychain. A new strategy needed to overcome the portrayal of these roles in media coverage and show that working for DJI is not just about incarcerating people, but more about helping detainees progress and reintegrate into society. Key concepts included: from repression to reintegration; from confinement to assistance; from guarding to guiding.

The final concept tagline was ‘Working at DJI, there’s more than meets the eye’. In the Dutch sentence, there is a creative twist because it has a double meaning that invites people not only to look behind the closed doors of DJI facilities, but to question their own prejudices. An employer brand video tells the story of working at DJI at an emotional level, drawing viewers in by getting them to confront their biases and then focusing on how their work could overcome these. A 90-second version appeared on the recruitment site and YouTube, with smaller cuts made for social media and online. Since the new campaign, the attractiveness of DJI as an employer has increased substantially, and 1,900 vacancies have been filled, rather than 1,200.