'I care for lives, not likes' recruitment campaign

An eye opening recruitment campaign that celebrates real heroes

Concept Print Digital

Context

Cygnet cares for thousands of people every day. To continue to provide excellent care, they desperately needed to hire more nurses. In fact, they needed to double the amount of job offers they made each month. And they needed to do it with bolder recruitment marketing.

Solution

Our research into Cygnet’s audience took us into their hospitals – where we got to understand what motivates and inspires mental health nurses. With this knowledge, combined with our experience in candidate attraction, we created a series of campaigns that went to the heart of what the vocation means. The most notable of these was the ‘I care for lives’ campaign.

Outcome

The ‘I care for lives’ campaign went viral across the world. It started a discussion on the purpose of mental health professionals. And it won an industry award. The number of job applications to Cygnet doubled – from 300 to 600 a month.

The concept

Loosely inspired by the Netflix documentary about Fire festival, the concept came out of protest to how today’s society worship those who don’t deserve to be worshipped and wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the real heroes – nurses. This campaign was about speaking to those real heroes and allowing them to see themselves in our ads, rather than celebrity influencers in glitz and glamour. This lead to creative that celebrates those who couldn’t care less about how many followers they have on twitter or how many likes they get on instagram, we care about changing lives.

Social media reach

We pushed the campaign across socials such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and managed to reach an international audience, sparking thoughtful conversations.