Nissan Europe approached us to develop an authentic employer branding strategy that could be used to develop the candidate and employee experience
Involving 56 user research interviews and stakeholder engagement across all levels of the business in eight European countries, this was an ambitious and far-reaching project.
The aim was to attract candidates who were going to succeed at Nissan. To do this we knew it was essential we understood the company culture and values and use that insight to feed into our strategy.
We conducted in-depth user research interviews, speaking to 56 candidates to gain a detailed understanding of their career journey at Nissan.
It was important that we got a wide perspective, so we spoke to people at several different stages of the process, including those who had just been through the candidate experience, employees who had left the business and long-serving employees across various levels and departments.
We wanted to know the specifics of why people were staying, leaving, and choosing to work at Nissan or not.
We used our research to develop employee personas:
Our next step was to create an extensive employee journey map, following a candidate at each stage from the point they considered applying to their twilight career. This allowed us to demonstrate how employees navigate their journey at Nissan and highlight potential fall-out risks.
Using this technique we could identify if people were falling out of the process because the cultural fit wasn’t right or if there were areas Nissan could do better, for example not using technology effectively during the candidate experience.
Our aim was to ensure that Nissan wasn’t losing candidates that would have otherwise been a success at the organisation. For example, we learned that issues like the length of time it was taking to get back to a candidate was having a detrimental effect and alienating potential success stories.
Research and fancy employer journey maps mean nothing without real steps clients can take to act on what they’ve learned.
We held a two-day collaborative ideation workshop with the HR teams in Europe to help identify how we could turn our findings into tangible actions. Following the workshop, the teams dispersed and engaged with stakeholders locally.
Next, we held remote online sessions with all departments in different European locations to create strategic roadmaps for different stages of an employee experience, from job seeking and interviews, throughout the onboarding process and into established employee status. This provided a definitive action plan showcasing the role each department played and actions to take.
For example, understanding that prospective employees wanted to know more about the culture of the business translated into “walk and talk” interviews allowing them to get a better experience of how things worked and get a glimpse into day-to-day life at Nissan.
Drawing on our research and stakeholder engagement work, we pulled out core values that spoke to who Nissan was as an employer, including innovation and diversity.
We used these values to form the basis of the brand identity, using examples of real Nissan employees to show how the values were played out every day across the business.
Using a combination of posters and videos we created a rich and, more importantly, realistic picture of life at Nissan.
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