Workopolis rebrands, lets customers market themselves

Workopolis wants job seekers and employers alike to “shine” with its new products and supporting marketing campaign from Zulu Alpha Kilo.

“Time to Shine” is a national, bilingual campaign based on the idea that there’s more to building careers than a job posting.

Much of Zulu’s creative work shows interviewers and interviewees sitting separated by oversized classified ads. Unlike previous campaigns, which ran with the positioning “Canada’s biggest job site,” “Time to Shine” focuses on customers, not Workopolis itself.

“It’s not only a campaign, it’s the results of a long strategic process that led to repositioning of the company,” said Workopolis president and chief brand officer Gabriel Bouchard.

Bouchard said Canada’s workforce is about to undergo a massive change, so his company needed to adapt.

Not only is the sizeable Baby Boomer generation about to leave the workforce en masse, “most of the new positions being created will require post-secondary education,” said Bouchard. “As a society, we’re not producing enough people with post-secondary educations to fill those roles.”

After consulting with client companies and researching population trends, Workopolis settled on a product strategy that would allow companies to market themselves to this shrinking talent pool. The company’s new Employer Brand Optimizer online tool also launches today to facilitate that.

“We’re basically bringing some marketing best practices to the HR community,” Bouchard said. “Those professionals have a marketing job to reach those candidates.”

Aside from touting its new customer tools, the campaign is meant to entice more “window shoppers” through its application process. Bouchard said 54% of Workopolis’ web visitors, check listings but do not follow through to the application process.

As part of its rebranding, the company dropped the “.com” from its name, making Workopolis the umbrella name for its more than 100 online properties. Online ads will tout the rebranding across that network and on third-party sites. A social media element is also being developed, but a launch date has not been released.

Television, alongside consumer- and business-facing print ads, will bring the campaign offline. The media buy was handled by Roundtable Advertising.

The media mixed has changed slightly from years past, shifting budget away from search engine marketing to be able to bolster its other media channels.

“We realized after a while that [SEM] was driving tons of traffic, but that traffic wasn’t converting to job search activity on the website,” Bouchard said. “So we shifted some of that money away from the Sympatico, MSN and Yahoos of the world toward the current campaign investment.”