Youth unemployment reached an alarmingly low level in 2022. 20% of young adults under 24 are NOT working at all. Moreover, the retail industry is outside Gen Z's top preferences, occupying a tenth place in this segment's most wanted job industries. Despite Gen Z's lack of interest, Kaufland needed to find a way to "get under the skin of youngsters" and ignite a relevant conversation about its not-so-cool store jobs. And to be honest, we knew that Gen Z ignores real world job announcements. The only jobs they pursue with an open heart are in the virtual world. They spend several hours daily practicing jobs in the GTA Real Life mod while in the real world the workforce is declining. The newest GTA game mod gives a life-like feeling to the game; players can apply to multiple jobs, and make a salary while working their way up the charts.

Kaufland created the Grand Job Experience, the first in-game recruitment experience that revolutionizes recruitment techniques for Gen Z. We leverage gaming to fully immerse young generations in Kaufland's store universe to practice real jobs and tasks in their preferred online environment. Not to mention that the players who entered the Grand Job Experience server were surprised to find a supermarket like the one in the real world, both in terms of appearance and store assets: working cash registers, truck cargo, floor washing machines, etc. We invited gamers to explore real jobs such as building caretakers, sales workers, cashiers, district managers or store managers. To add fuel to the story, players were trained by 8 famous gaming streamers. Of course, Kaufland staff trained them before the event. Convincing gamers to pursue a job at Kaufland in real life was at the heart of our in-game activation.

Young audiences are notoriously difficult to reach with traditional advertising. As they don’t react well to top-down or intrusive brand messages, we chose another way to engage them where they are: within the GTA Real Life mod. We built a four-tiered strategy: - Creating a behavior in the GTA Real Life gameplay that can become a behavior in your life: you practice real jobs and tasks, as in the real world. - Considering gamers as real people. Gaming is more than a leisure activity, it’s a source of gaining money. If you want to be competitive in your gameplay, having a job is a key factor for your performance. - Teaming up with the biggest streamers to spread this message to gain persuasion. - Making the job announcements from the real world accessible to all gamers by introducing our career website on their in-game phone.

We created the Grand Job Experience server from scratch by working with game architectures from all over the world. Developing a server is easy but building a new virtual Kaufland like the one in the real world, both in terms of appearance and store assets, it’s a complicated job. We released the server through PR, digital, and social media campaigns during East European Comic Con. Targeted ads spread the video teaser on gamers’ favorite platforms (Twitch, YouTube, TikTok). Leading streamers did multiple streams in which they practiced different jobs such as Store Manager, Cashier, Commercial worker, Department manager, and Building janitor. During the streams, they tried to recruit other players to start a job at Kaufland. To be sure that they would do their job well, real people from Kaufland trained them before the event. We introduced our career website on their in-game phone.

All of the following results were made without media investment, through a 100% organic spread of our idea. In less than two days, our streamers have accumulated over 193.000 views, with +150% versus the initial objective. The visibility was hot! The gaming community has spent over 1.5 million minutes, translated into 25,000 hours, watching the new Kaufland virtual store streams. Grand Job Experience is the best campaign ever made for Kaufland, with an all-time high engagement rate (+180%) from the gamers. During the two days of activation, we hired 1240 virtual users at the Kaufland of the GTA RealLife. We also achieved impressive results in the real world - the number of CVs received from Gen Z and Young Millennials by our HR department increased with 1200 in September 2022 (7248 new Cvs) versus August 2022 (6043 new Cvs). Gen Zs stopped considering Kaufland's jobs not so cool for them.