Booking.com needs to recruit skilled candidates, and on this front they’re competing with Silicon Valley giants like Google for the best tech talent. They needed a campaign that would help them stand out, and reached out to us to help bring it to life.

The resulting Expand Horizons-campaign, aims to attract new talent by showcasing the people that are shaping the future of travel: the employees of Booking.com.

Expand Horizons features over a hundred Booking.com employees – just a small portion of the 17,000 people responsible for evolving the brand from the inside out. The campaign also shows how Booking.com is expanding as a business and evolving its services to include everything from attractions to transportation.

Booking.com reached out to us to launch their first-ever global employer brand campaign. The end result was a video shot across three continents as part of a campaign that provided a personal peek inside the tech company’s global community – with Booking.com’s very own employees starring in the campaign. After all, who better to convince potential new employees to join the company than the people who are already happy to be there?

The campaign was an opportunity to position Booking.com as more than just a travel company and emphasize its credentials as a tech company, as well as the sleek, fun atmosphere that helps turn employees into evangelists for the brand.

Working from the insight that an authentic message trumps any slick marketing speak, as well as having identified Booking.com’s own employees as the best ambassadors for the brand, we then set to figure out a way to best get the message out there. The production involved five months of preparation time as well as five full days of shooting in the Booking.com offices in Amsterdam, Toronto and Shanghai. Expand Horizons is the second large-scale film collaboration between the two companies.

The entire production involved five months of prep and five full days of shooting across Booking.com’s offices in Amsterdam, Toronto and Shanghai. Booking.com relied on us to complete the cross-continental production. Expand Horizons is the second large-scale film collaboration between the two companies.

Everything about how the campaign was developed involved the Booking.com internal community: from the way our strategy was developed, to refining the concept and writing the script, through to our cast of talented employees who auditioned to take part. Because we shared a mutual vision for this project, the process was rewarding and seamless for everyone involved.

The film earned nearly 13.000 organic views on YouTube, and 98% of reactions were positive (in terms of likes versus dislikes). The reach for the film was 40M potential candidates, and social engagement KPI’s were two to three times higher than average industry benchmarks. Brand perceptions improved measurably in some key hiring locations, and the film caused a significant uptick in job seekers applying to work at Booking.com. In internal research conducted before the campaign launched 80% of people who watched the film indicated it made it more likely for them to apply for one of our job opportunities.