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 Volvo’s hiring process as innovative as our cars.” was the heart of our creative brief and we took it to the letter. By applying Artificial Intelligence to the car’s software and safety systems, we turned Volvo’s flagship luxury sedan into a car that is able to recruit its own technicians. It was named ‘The Recruiting Car’. We engineered software that enables the car to complete intake interviews tapping in to the vehicle’s speech- and face recognition features. By doing this, we completely changed the conversation from new car models to employment.

After a qualitative research stage, we understood that being outspokenly innovative is important to appeal to recently graduated car technicians. But audience data revealed 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 change the brand’s image, and appeal to the highly-wanted technicians.

We decided to start from the start and redesigned 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 innovative as our cars.

Implementation

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

We used the pedestrian camera to identify the candidates. And via an integrated voice-enabled AI bot and text-to-speech software built into the Volvo's entertainment interface, we managed to convey a ‘human-like’ conversation with the candidates.

Placement

We installed the Recruiting Car (HR90) on the Motorshow in Brussels – Belgium’s biggest car event of the year. The Recruiting Car is now being used at dealerships to recruit technicians all around the country.

Scale

The campaign was announced on social media and through PR. During the launch, journalists came flocking to the Volvo stand, and Volvo’s innovative showpiece was mentioned in all the 7 o’clock news shows covering the Motorshow, reaching 6M people (57% of the population)

• The recruiting car became the star of the Motorshow and 80% of the national news coverage was dedicated to Volvo

• We got national 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 – half of the Belgian population; value of earned media €600K

• The Recruiting Car turned Volvo into a hot employer for applicants again The number of job applications for technician positions increased by 250% in the weeks after the Motorshow..

• Thanks to our campaign the number of price demands grew 300% compared to last year and helped us overtake our sales targets by 25%!

• Thanks to the success of our campaign and the word-of-mouth it generated, Volvo decided to send the car to dealerships all around the country to recruit technicians and Volvo salesmen.