Stora Enso is a global forestry products company, overseeing research, production and distribution of paper, wood products, packaging and biomaterials. They asked Maximum to help them come up with a direct and authentic way to recruit graduates into their Global Trainee Programme.

Maximum’s solution was to try to bring candidates and current trainees as close together as possible. Rather than creating communication about what the trainee programme was like, our role was to facilitate the conversation by developing the infrastructure, and framing the conversation, then stepping back and letting the current trainees manage and handle the conversation themselves. 

At the centre of the campaign were trainee blogs. Trainees were given relative freedom and autonomy about what content to cover, enabling them to be reflective about their own experiences and communicate their own personal take on the trainee programme as freely as possible. And rather than try to summarize, a teaser video simply edited together one-second long clips that had been shot by the trainees over the course of the programme.

This relative freedom has led to much broader, credible and sophisticated communication surrounding what it means to work at Stora Enso and what the people who work there are really like.

Taking this direct approach a step further, we built a chatroom into the website where trainees and candidates could have a discussion in real-time. The chatroom has a schedule of events from trainees based in different locations around the world. Graduates need only register and sign in to take part in the event of their choosing.

The resulting campaign is much more direct, highly personalised, multi-faceted and entirely authentic—giving candidates a much clearer and more realistic impression of what a career with Stora Enso will really be like.