RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Did they dare?

In today’s talent market, you live and die by the quality of your attraction, networking and sourcing specialists.  It’s a premium market for your business critical people and an increasingly congested market across the board whilst truth and relevance have never been more important in convincing great talent to join you, whether you are a major corporate or SME.

So with a view to keeping our clients and ourselves ahead of the market, the Ochre House Challenge was launched earlier this year.  The challenge is a part of a knowledge programme aimed at up-skilling our talent acquisition specialists in web mining/research and Social Media.

Challenging our best to track down a fictitious character online, it was a great piece of gamification, with an I-Pad and eternal glory the prize. Not only did we want our folks to sharpen their sourcing skills and ability to deliver a premium service to our clients, we wanted to engage and inspire them to commit to their own professional development and personal brands.

Working with the sourcing Grand Master herself, Katharine Robinson, the challenge soon became the talk of the office through a five week teaser campaign. Oblique emails, posters, intranet banners and a SMS alert 24 hours before the start of the challenge lay down the challenge, with nothing but the mysterious #OchreChallenge hashtag to whet their appetite.

Participants would sign up to the challenge (if they were clever enough to find the sign up page) and be given a single clue. They were then on the hunt for four fictitious individuals – their goal was to approach the fourth person about a job with us at Ochre House. So as not to give an advantage to those experienced in recruiting for a particular sector, Katharine invented a group of four recruiters.

Our characters all had vaguely magical names, starting with the charismatic (and wizardly) Barnabas Ochredoor.

In order to simulate the demands of real world candidate identification, our challengers needed skills like relevant keyword identification, putting oneself in the shoes of a candidate, networking with knowledgeable people and getting referrals.

Barnabas would be a guide on the challenge journey for our participants – he was very good at answering questions and giving clues in the public forum of Twitter but irritatingly useless if you happened to contact him privately via LinkedIn.

Barnabas’ clues began as rather vague and cryptic but this didn’t slow down our front-running participants. His clues would then become more and more explicit, encouraging any stragglers to keep going.

Our second character, Dorothy Blake, had to be contacted by phone. Once participants had worked this out, leaving her a voicemail resulted in SMS clues to the next character in the trail. Only three intrepid researchers reached this point. We had definitely succeeded in finding out who was “hard enough” for #OchreChallenge.

The final stages will forever remain secret, but more than 10% of our entire workforce engaged into the challenge – many of whom were not acquisition specialists and had never used the likes of Twitter.

Watch this space for next year’s #OchreChallenge and given the interest from non-Ochre House sourcers that found the clues, it may even be open to external participants. We cannot think of a better way to really test our sourcers and potentially find great talent

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Comments

1. Time For An Update – December 2012 says:

   December 6, 2012 at 10:09 pm

   [...] This project culminated in the creation of a sourcing challenge open to all Ochre House employees called #OchreChallenge. I’ll let them explain that to you in this blog post by Andy Curlewis. [...]