At this year’s Motorshow, Volvo set out very ambitious sales objectives, and, with a smaller media budget than its German competitors, had to find a way to cut through the clutter of car adverts to get the attention.

Volvo asked us to help them recruit highly skilled car technicians during the 2018 Motorshow, the biggest car event in the country. The campaign had to create stopping power and put the spotlight on Volvo.

Objectives ?

• To get Volvo on the radar of trained and highly skilled car technicians during the Brussels Motorshow

• To boost Volvo’s image as an innovative brand

• To cut through the clutter of car adverts during the Motorshow and get earned media attention

• To boost sales during the Motorshow

"To make the hiring process as ingenious as our cars.” became our brief and we took it to the letter. We made Volvo’s flagship luxury sedan, the S90, become the central part of the hiring process.

We got together with a team of Volvo software engineers in the Volvo Ghent Manufacturing Facility, to modify existing technology in the S90 - normally used for safe driving - to do the intake interviews for us.

The idea required a significant amount of real-time processing power.

We used the pedestrian camera to identify the candidates, and integrated a voice-enabled AI bot and text-to-speech software inside the Volvo's entertainment interface, to have a ‘human-like’ conversation with the candidates. IBM Watson analyses the conversation, and delivers a more elaborate description of the candidate’s personality - which can be plotted against our key metrics such as ‘being client-oriented’. The face recognition hardware recognises facial

After a qualitative research stage, we understood that being outspokenly innovative is important to appeal to recently graduated car technicians. We equally realised that Volvo was performing subpar on this brand image metric. A traditional HR advert wasn’t going to cut it this time; we needed to design an innovative experience potent enough to get people talking, and appeal to the highly-wanted technicians. We’d follow-up with a neat CRM plan to turn visitors into hires.

We decided to start from the start, and redesign the hiring process from step one. Knowing that Volvo Cars are at the leading edge of innovation in the car world, we set ourselves a mission; to make the hiring process as ingenious as our cars.

Volvo Recruiting Car uses different technologies to initiate and maintain a personalized conversation with a candidate. She maintains a personalized conversation based on how people respond, defines people’s facial expressions to detect their stress, detects people’s clothing colours to define personality, loads music songs based on the candidate’s emotional state, loads phone calls of Volvo drivers asking for help and asks technical questions based on interactive visuals of the engine. To get to this, we’ve tapped into the car’s pedestrian detection camera and the car connect system and added advanced artificial intelligence technology to drive the conversations to load all questions and understand and analyse responses.

Volvo Recruiting Car initiates the conversation and after the first response she follows different scenarios based on how the user responds. Via Google Cloud Speech-to-Text software we’ve been able to use powerful neural network models to understand responses. We then analysed keywords the candidate uses and linked them to the aspects of the job. Like client-orientation and technical knowledge. For example when people said things like ‘I’m helpful’ or ‘I like to help people’, we added this to his score on ‘client-orientation’.

The HR90 became the star of the Motorshow and drew all the attention from journalists to the Volvo stand (turning the reveal of the new BMW X2 into only a side note in the coverage).

We got coverage from 7 national television stations, 2 radio news shows and 16 news titles (newspaper, magazine and blogs), resulting in a daily reach of 6.446.211 people; earned media value €600K

The number of job applications rose by a marvelous 250% in the weeks after the Motorshow.

Volvo decided to keep using the HR90 as a recruitment tool in the future, letting it travel to dealerships, and the factory in Ghent. It might even travel along to other motorshows around the world. The car was present at a jobfair in Ghent and at a demonstration day for Spanish National Television TVE.