An Extraordinary Job. Done By Someone Like You

With prisons facing a staffing crisis, prison officer recruitment is a high priority for the government in order to maintain the prison service. Until this year, the Ministry of Justice relied on small-scale, geo-targeted acquisition-led digital activity around the prisons that had vacancies to attract new recruits. While these efforts were somewhat effective, they didn’t generate enough applications or build a long-term recruitment pipeline.

We needed to achieve a greater understanding of the work prison officers do amongst our target audience, at a time when negative media coverage and TV portrayals were undermining our important cause. The very channel responsible for these misconceptions – TV – became a key tool in reversing them. However, due to budget constraints and taxpayer funding, national TV advertising was not an option, and we couldn’t risk targeting regions without vacancies. Sky Adsmart, combined with Captify’s innovative data integration, offered a solution. Their brand-new Search Behaviour Targeting allowed us to identify job seekers in specific regions and present them with our immersive TV ad, challenging their misconceptions. The campaign delivered phenomenal results, smashing public sector media attribution benchmarks for recruitment campaigns by 23%, helping to deliver 11,776 applications, far exceeding the target of 3,000.