Bar Experience became an official requirement to work at the Heineken Company.

Our top management became influencers promoting barwork. Bar backdoors turned into ads to later work for Heineken. A social campaign translated bar work into the most sought after soft skills according to corporate recruiters. And after 3+ months of work GenZ'd receive the official Heineken Bar Experience Linkedin badge, a tool used by Heineken HR to select candidates for the Company.

The staff crisis was higher in the Netherlands than in other parts of the world. According to the Labor Market Monitor for the Hospitality Sector 2022, once the country started getting back to post covid normality, the need for hospitality staff surged. Between October 2021 and March 2022, the vacancy rate in the hospitality industry doubled to reach 112 vacancies per thousand employee jobs - a number never before exceeding 100 for any industry in The Netherlands. For that same period, the number of vacancies also grew fastest (49%) when compared to other Dutch industries. As of such, the staff crisis was a very pressing issue in the Netherlands and received plenty of attention from our audience.

After the 2020 pandemic that led bars to close down, a new major issue has now afflicted bars all over the world: major lack of staff. As a result, the whole industry went from not having enough customers to not being able to serve customers. That’s why Heineken has decided to once again support the bar industry, this time on the staffing crisis. Without bars, Heineken would lose a major distribution channel and beer consumption occasion.

There's no experience like bar experience. The idea was brought to life through an on-trade platform and an integrated campaign in collaboration with 25 other large companies that depend directly or indirectly on the hospitality industry. First, show how working in bars is good for their careers. Then, the commitment: Heineken will consider bar experience as an important skill in the hiring process. Simply put, if you want to work at the Heineken company, start working in a bar. The Heineken Company is one of the most attractive employers in Europe. So it had the power and the credibility to turn bar jobs into the kick-start of a bigger career, to help bars overcome staff shortage.

Strategic opportunity: Hospitality is an industry in which Gen Z don’t want to work. A nationwide survey commissioned by Umbrella Training found that only one in 10 young people were willing to choose a career in hospitality, with 31% saying they would not choose a career in the sector because it’s perceived to be low paid, either there is a lack of knowledge about jobs in hospitality (26%), or not believing they had the sufficient skills (25%).Therefore, even with better wages, many Gen Zs who would choose to work in bars and restaurants, fear it is simply not worth it. We needed to reframe the perception of work in a bar, from a dead end temp job, into priceless formative experience that kick starts their careers. Insight: bar work is important, because it uses all of your soft skills: coordination, agility, persuasion, customer empathy.

To give a better image to bar work and invite young people to go work behind the counter, bar backdoors were used for the first time as media as they "turned" into Heineken offices' front doors, then we used Heineken managers and employees as influencers. People who applied for bar jobs would enter the program and after at least 3 months of bar work, they would receive the Bar Experience official skill on Linkedin. The Linkedin badge worked as a diploma and was recognized by 25 other partner companies for corporate jobs (Coca Cola, Burger King, Starbucks, Pepsico, Febo, Lipton, McDonalds, Hms, Fuzetea, Käfer and more) in the Netherlands as well as Heineken Ireland and England.

We reached 90% of the target (18-24 y.o) with the campaign.

5000 applications for bar jobs in the Netherlands on the platform in just the first 2 weeks of the campaign.

Click through rate was 225% vs benchmark for social media ads and 100% vs benchmark on Snapchat. Strong increase in the NPS (Net Promoter Score metric) after the campaign (+ 8.7)

Since the campaign, job ads include a request for previous bar experience, especially for entry roles. 25 major companies joined the program and updated their hiring process for corporate jobs (Coca Cola, Burger King, Starbucks, Pepsico, Febo, Lipton, McDonalds, Hms, Fuzetea, Käfer and more). 120 employees were already hired with bar experience.The campaign inspired the Dutch government to create a fund to support the Hospitality sector.

Heineken understands the value of bars and venues and it knows it has a responsibility to help. The brand previously launched ‘Back the Bars’, which was a global campaign aimed at supporting the HoReCa industry around the world by suggesting that people buy beer while the bars were still closed, that they could enjoy once the bar reopened after the pandemic. Now it was time to support bars in another problem, in this case correlated to a staffing crisis.