Brief
With so many cutting-edge Silicon Valley tech startups, how does a legacy CPG brand compete to attract top STEM talent? By building an emotionally engaging platform to tell the story of the brand through PepsiCo’s greatest assets: Its employees. After a global search, PepsiCo hired Pace to do exactly that.
The challenge faced by the team at PepsiCo was threefold, as many job seekers were:
- Passing up PepsiCo in search of sexier jobs in Silicon Valley and at startups.
- Unaware of the innovative nature and the wide range of careers available at a CPG brand like PepsiCo.
- Unfamiliar with the huge strides PepsiCo has made in the areas of sustainability, diversity and gender parity goals and social impact initiatives in recent years.
What PepsiCo needed was a careers story site that would not only educate potential applicants about the innovative nature and overall culture of the company but do so in an engaging way that builds emotional connections with job seekers.
Additionally, PepsiCo needed to shift the perception of the brand from that of an old-school CPG brand to that of an industry-leading and diverse tech company full of opportunities.
Finally, the visual approach needed to feel editorial and engaging while keeping to the brand’s existing employee acquisition branding and guidelines.
Solution
The new stories site needed unexpected, real stories told in fresh ways—stories that would appeal to an ambitious and curious audience. To accomplish this, Pace partnered with the Talent Attraction and Engagement team at PepsiCo to seek out real employees with real stories to tell. Those stories were used to develop a content lineup that put a spotlight on PepsiCo’s innovation, positive social impact, and its culture of diversity and inclusion, all featured in a new portal housed within their careers site: PepsiCo Stories.
Additionally, Pace worked to develop several series that each provided a framework for more in-depth and interactive storytelling that worked to build that much-needed emotional connection with job seekers. These series were able to bring a multitude of employee voices to the forefront in a way that showed the breadth of opportunity within just one part of PepsiCo’s global business.
Finally, and perhaps most important of all, PepsiCo needed an attractive and engaging way to communicate these stories to the target audience to help shift the brand perception from old-school CPG to that of a cutting-edge, diverse tech company. For this, Pace’s expertise in user experience (UX), which combines cognitive design, heuristics and information architecture, was tapped to create an engaging platform for the stories. Pace accomplished this through gaining a deep understanding of user expectations and extensive competitive analysis.
The goal of the site was not just to educate and engage potential applicants, but to actually move them from the information-gathering stage of their job search journey into the application phase. In order to do this, the stories not only had to be emotionally compelling, but the site had to lend itself to making it easy to tie that story to an actual job at PepsiCo. This was done by placing the story site within the PepsiCo Careers main site and each article listing related job fields at PepsiCo. These job fields further linked to job searches, making the transition from information-gathering to application seamless and low friction.
Results
The goal of this project was to educate job seekers on the innovative and diverse nature of PepsiCo and to transition those job seekers from information gathering to applying. The new PepsiCo Stories site did exactly that. Within the first 30 days of launching, the site received over 10,000 unique visitors with an average time on site of over two minutes. The program also accomplished the goal of increasing engagement with the actual job postings, producing 450 job-related interactions for a 30-day engagement rate of nearly 5%. The overall results greatly exceeded initial projections and early expectations.
Based on the extraordinary success of the PepsiCo Stories site project, PepsiCo further engaged Pace to redesign the brand’s entire jobs site and to lead the Talent Acquisition team’s social response to COVID-19.
The success of these projects was largely due to the outstanding nature of the partnership with the client. PepsiCo gave Pace wide access to their people. This access allowed Pace to do what the agency is known for: telling amazing stories that drive audiences to action.
Learn more about Pace’s employee storytelling strategies in their guest blog post “Employee Storytelling: Why Crafting Emotional Connections to a Brand Gets Great Results.”
