Voith launches first ever career-themed sticker set on WeChat
This campus recruitment season saw the first-ever recruitment-themed sticker set launched on WeChat.
As a record-breaking number of nearly 7 million graduates enter the Chinese labour market this year, companies should be giving it their all to differentiate themselves during the campus recruitment season. As the post 90’s generation are orientating on the best place to kick off their careers, they are looking beyond the traditional campus talks and USB stick giveaways. With WeChat’s staggering number of monthly active users reaching 377 million in September 2014, Voith had the brilliant idea to engage with graduates on the booming social messaging platform in their native language: stickers.
Why stickers?
When Robindro Ullah (Head of Employer Branding and HR Communications) from Voith HQ reached out to Maximum asking if we could realise their ambitions to develop the world’s first-ever career-themed sticker set for WeChat, our immediate response was: “Brilliant idea. We’d love to”. As emoticons and emoji’s have been populating our emails, mobiles and instant messages for decades, ‘stickers’ have been pioneered more recently by the popular Asian messaging service ‘Line’ in 2011. Stickers are a mix of cartoons and emoji’s, often animated and used to express certain emotions. Especially in Asia, they are incredibly popular in mobile messaging as stickers provide a faster and fun way to share feelings. Voith is the first company to launch a sticker set with a career theme targeting students and graduates.
Meet Xiao Fu
The leading character in the Voith career sticker set is Xiao Fu, a robot graduate and Voith’s own campus ambassador. In a set of 10 stickers, Xiao Fu expresses different emotions students go through during their period transitioning from a student into a young professional. Different experiences graduates can relate to like feeling pressured, waiting on replies, recharging, receiving offers, feeling proud are translated into simple animations that students can send to each other to communicate how they are feeling. Xiao Fu is only subtly branded in Voith’s colours as these stickers target a much broader audience than just graduates interested in joining Voith.
Viral robot graduate
Through online and offline promotion, the sticker set was launched leveraging the popularity of WeChat and the enthusiasm on campus. Maximum helped Voith set up a social recruitment WeChat account and developed a mobile campaign site where the stickers can be downloaded. With integrated sharing options, users can easily bring it to their friends’ attentions through mobile messages or on their WeChat moments, for all their friends to see.
Engaging with graduates in a language that is native to them through the channels they use on a daily basis is the key to winning the war for talent. We hope this inspires other employers to think more innovatively and try things that are truly new to their people strategy.
Interested in the stickers preview? Follow VoithCareer on WeChat for best mobile experience.