How one Employer Successfully Marketed to BAME Students

Learn how to increase awareness of your employment opportunities to BAME students.

Carry out a quick search on Google about workplace diversity and you’ll be greeted with a wide array of useful guides on how it can be improved in the recruitment process. Employers are recommended to mitigate the risk of unconscious prejudice by implementing plug-ins that remove gender biased wording from adverts or prevent the recruiter from seeing the names and faces of applicants on networks such as LinkedIn.

While our ability to diversify the workplace through the hiring process continues to innovate, there is still little in the way of guidance with regards to attracting minority groups during the awareness stage.

One of our clients, a Government Department, came to us recently with this very challenge. They wanted to target BAME students on campus but were concerned at how easily this could be achieved. Here is how the client changed tactic and successfully increased their number of BAME applications.

They identified what they wanted to achieve from the campaign

The client set out to hold a Diversity Careers Fair. They wanted to target a small handpicked number of universities with high BAME UK British Citizen pools who they weren’t already working with.

As a secondary objective, they also wanted to target Universities that has high numbers of female technology students.

They targeted influencers rather than students directly

They decided to cater more toward the people that influence student decisions with regards to career choices. The client therefore set out to invite careers advisers in for a workshop to offer guidance on how they can work together to encourage more diversity applications.

They used our university connections and expertise

Campus Media has strong existing relationships with universities in the UK. Keeping their objectives in mind, we identified universities with high BAME student population numbers and then worked with the client to shortlist ten.

We then set to work to create a database of careers advisers, senior lecturers and diversity officers. Each contact was spoken to and made aware of the bespoke event. Finally, they were emailed with an invitation promptly after they were called.

We managed the RSVP list on behalf of the client to maintain interest in the lead up to the event.

The end result

22 academic staff attended from the 10 universities. This led to the staff actively passing on the information that they learned to their own student communities, which allowed the client’s employment opportunities to reach a much larger scale of their target audience through just one event.

As a result, more students from minority ethnic groups and female candidates were encouraged to apply to their graduate jobs.

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