Creative · Production · Post
In partnership with Haymarket
Barclays
A test-and-measure recruitment campaign for people who’d never considered banking.
Creative · Production · Post
In partnership with Haymarket
A test-and-measure recruitment campaign for people who’d never considered banking.
01 The brief
Barclays had a recruitment problem that wasn't really about recruitment. There was no shortage of people who could do the jobs — customer-facing roles in hospitality, retail and beauty map well onto branch banking. The problem was that nobody in those industries had ever considered a career at Barclays. It simply hadn't occurred to them.
The brief was to change that — not with a glossy corporate campaign, but with something that felt real enough to make someone stop scrolling and think: that could be me.
02 What we did
A series of before and after films — real career transitions, real people, scripted from genuine Barclays employee stories. We shot on location around Brighton rather than building sets, which made logistics harder but the films considerably more believable.
Two weeks from brief to delivery. To keep control of both the schedule and the performances, we cast actors and voice artists separately — no dialogue on set meant no wasted time in a busy pizzeria on a Friday night waiting for the lunch crowd to clear. We kept a lean crew and a small footprint — not just for budget reasons but because the locations were working environments that needed to stay that way, and moving fast meant getting the best out of each one.
The films ran as an A/B testing campaign across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, with the before and after structure allowing Barclays to measure response at each stage.
03 The result
Both films drove an immediate spike in applications on release. It's a model we've used in various forms since — for the NHS, for Amazon, for Bright Horizons — using film to reach candidates who weren't actively looking and wouldn't have responded to a job listing alone.