Round the world
I had no idea until that point that we had assessment approaches in common with Belgium and Spain, but they were very different to what was practiced in France and Germany; that our trials with video assessment at the time were also being implemented in America; or, that I would have so much to learn on the benefits of interns from Mexico. I think it is fair to say that we all quickly saw value in our discussions, and they have continued ever since.
We identified similar challenges. AXA is a huge global organisation, but we targeted students based on our local requirements, and not with the bigger global opportunities in mind. Could we now leverage that? We also shared some brand challenges, with AXA and the insurance industry as a whole, historically not being perceived as a great place to start and grow a career. Something we knew was not true, but how would we convince a student audience to turn away from other avenues and consider us as an employer of choice?
I had no idea until that point
that we had assessment approaches in common with Belgium and Spain, but they were very different to what
was practiced in France and Germany…
An agreement was put in place to bring our graduates together for an event in November 2014 at the Paris headquarters. Our first Global Graduate Camp was a complete success. The graduates spent a day in central Paris hearing from and engaging with our global leaders on the key issues and challenges that they would help AXA to overcome and achieve. They spent the next two days outside of Paris working on structured development
together as a global graduate cohort. The feedback was phenomenal, and as a result, the Global Graduate Camp is now an annual event as part of our graduate programme.
By this point our group had already worked on some common shared principles, such as the best approaches to selection, induction, ensuring mentoring was used effectively to support the graduates, and opening up opportunities
for international placements. The challenge still remained in attraction. How could we tell people what a great proposition we had in such crowded markets? Whilst we have grown our graduate populations and encouraged new countries to adopt programmes for the first time, we have concentrated more on the calibre of our hires and the value of the journey that they are on.
We were working on a global graduate brand and discussing ideas to keep our current graduates connected through some form of social game, when we started to consider if the gamification concept might apply better in the external market. Having decided on a game concept, we had to work together to identify partners to work with, use cohorts of our graduates (and their friends) to test the games, and pull in every favour we could with local teams to overcome the potential obstacles, from Marketing, IT, Legal, HR, Communications and Risk, to eventually launching the Great Global Adventure in late 2014, then again in early 2016.
The game concept is simple: The player identifies a city from a clue and is transported to that city on a Google Maps landscape. They then complete a puzzle before being fed the next clue to move onto the next city. Points are accumulated for completing the challenges and sharing the results on social media. The top scorers then enter a selection process to win the prize – a round the world trip including two internships at international AXA offices, and a chance to carry out a community project with one of our global charities.
The results were beyond our expectations. The aim was to create a buzz around our brand with the target student audience, and we had over 220,000 visits to the game in the few months it was open, from almost every country on the planet. Almost 26,000 individuals played the game with over 8,000 completing all of the challenges. With a number of the challenges
focussed on our brand messages we now had an audience, and an engaged one - they spent an average of 44 minutes playing the game.
The winner, Will Moore, was from the UK, and he has shared his Great Global Adventure with a social media audience that grew from a few hundred to over 150,000 on the ‘Discover AXA’ Facebook page. The world watched as he travelled though China, Siberia, and Russia; took an internship at our office in Hong Kong; taught entrepreneurship skills to kids in Indonesia; and continued his travels through Australia, New Zealand and South America, before he concluded his journey with an internship at AXA’s Digital Innovation Lab in San Francisco. A life-changing experience.
With the game winning significant recognition and picking up awards, it was obvious that we were going to continue. As this article is being written, the second Great Global Adventure is being played now by students all around the world in the hope that that they can win that incredible journey. All the while, we gather more interest in our brand, our graduate opportunities, and our supportive development culture, to entice more students to consider AXA as a place they want to start a career.
Looking back on the internal journey from a group of graduate recruiters with different objectives, alternative ways of tackling the challenges of attracting, recruiting, and retaining the best graduates, to what we have achieved today fills me with a great deal of pride. For those of you that have international partners, I would say reach out and connect with them. You will be surprised by how much you have in common, how much you have to learn from each other, and how much you can achieve collectively.
www.agr.org.uk | Graduate Recruiter 15
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