The world’s largest supplier of commercial airplane assemblies and components, Spirit AeroSystems, was on a mission to go to as many college campuses that offer degrees in aerospace engineering as possible. The schools were identified, the events planned and the schedule set. That my friends, was the easy part. The hard part – deciding on whether to have a give-away item on hand.
Whether it’s a pen, a lint brush, a pack of mints, a magnet, you name it, these items emblazoned with your company’s logo and website can be seen by recruiters as:
A.) A great way to connect with talent and for them to reconnect with you
B.) More junk for me to lug to a job fair
C.) An opportunity to make a memorable experience – first impressions count!
This particular company may have had a mission, but after travel expenses were factored in what they didn’t have was much of a budget. A recent company name change left their supply closet full of dated materials – nothing was handy. So what to do?
The last thing I was going to do was click onto an online catalog, sort by price and give the client back a list of chochkey items that fit the bill for price and quantity. Even with a low to no-budget challenge, I’ve got to make sure that the end result is an A or C solution – we all know junk when we see it and that’s not the impression you want to give.
Reviewing the data we collected on aerospace engineering students we learned a couple of very helpful things about their common personality traits – including that many grew up making lots of model aircraft and rocketry and that they enjoy problem-solving.
Alstin’s solution exemplified the beauty of simplicity. We gave this aerospace company – a company behind some of the coolest stuff in the industry – a paper airplane.
With one 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper we told the story behind the name change, hilighted their key accomplishments and shone more light on the career paths they offered. Along the margins we printed fun instructions on how to fold the sheet into a paper airplane.
The students got a kick out of them, the recruiters had a great (lightweight) tool to bring along to break the ice and in the end the increase in traffic to their website and applications by the soon to graduate beat any effort in the past – all for pennies on the dollar.
