Sky

Changing preconceived notions of what home service employees look like

We launched a comprehensive campaign to promote inclusivity and attract female candidates to home service positions at Sky.

The Challenge

We were faced with a problem. Only 25 of Sky’s 3,000 Home Service Engineers, the people who visit customers in their homes to install Sky, were women. This needed to change. We needed a campaign that would:

Dispel common misconceptions about working in Home Service
Change preconceived notions of what Home Service employees look like
Promote inclusivity
Encourage more women to apply for a role in Home Service

Unilever

The Solution

We needed a strategy that was less about singling women out – assuming what they like or don’t like, stereotyping them or imagining what they want to hear as a group – and more about showing people what Home Service is really like. Given women mistakenly believe that Home Service couldn’t be for them, and the job is carried out in communities up and down the country, we called the campaign ‘Surprisingly up your street’. It included:

5 breaking-news videos created in true Sky style to shed light on different, surprising, parts of the role. They featured real Home Service employees and the Sky News reporter and Sky News presenter, Sarah-Jane Mee. The videos were targeted across social with the hashtag #UpYourStreet and also featured on the Sky careers site.
9 authentic profile videos featuring real female Home Service Engineers were created to support our breaking news videos. Each was produced in long form and sound bite length for use on social media. The stories were shared on both social and our careers site – providing an authentic look into Home Service (view here)
The landing page of the Sky careers site was dedicated to the #UpYourStreet campaign. It was redesigned in the style of a news site. It featured all of our breaking news videos, testimonials from existing employees and gave visitors a complete understanding of what life is like as a Sky employee. The landing page also acted as an application platform once the jobs went live.
Animated gifs and digital banners were created to promote the campaign across social and digital media and push users to the landing page.
‘Breaking news’ style referral emails were sent to female colleagues in order to continue the conversation and encourage employees to recommend their friends for the Home Service roles at Sky.

Sky

The Results

Trying to increase the number of female Home Service Engineers from 25, among 2,975 men, doesn’t happen after one campaign. But our results reflect a brilliant start.

Running from April to June 2018, the campaign was pushed out across multiple channels and achieved 2.2 million impressions. The “Breaking News” videos were introduced one month into the campaign and generated an impressive click-through rate of 4.93% – almost 5 times the average.

76% increase in female Home Service Engineers post campaign
254 applications from women
4.4% of all applicants came from women – an all time high
19 women hired, or due to start