How to Recruit Tech Talent Digitally with LINZ

LINZ is developing a world-leading database system. To achieve their vision, they need highly skilled employees to join the team. Attracting top quality talent through traditional recruitment channels can get really competitive, and often only reaches people actively job seeking. That’s quite a limited pool.

Aro Digital partnered with LINZ to deliver a unique recruitment campaign across Reddit and Facebook. To attract ideal audiences, we (literally) coded secret messages into ads - capturing tech talent’s attention, engagement, and most importantly - applications!

Our Impact

1.6m
Impressions
15k
Clicks
+628%
Careers Page Users
1.6m
Impressions
15k
Clicks
+628%
Careers Page Users

The Strategy

To capture the attention of STEM experts, we leaned into what they enjoy… a good intellectual challenge! Through focused testing, we discovered the best channels to invest in for recruitment.

LINZ was looking to fill a range of roles:

• Architects: Solution and systems architects, DevOps engineers, and test engineers.

• Designers: UX and UI designers. 

• Builders: Web developers and coders.

• Management: Business analysts, Scrum Masters, product owners and Change Managers.

Our ad placements were across Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. On Reddit, we targeted channels like r/programming, r/userexperience and r/agile.

We verified the quality of the leads with digital ad approaches that attracted people with specific skills.

Reddit was great for attracting a significant amount of clicks. The ads performed well, as seen in the low CPC (cost per click) and low CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

In the future, we can utilise LinkedIn to reach discerning talent. This platform is most apt for serving ads to specific job titles.

Results we delivered

Cheap as chips CPA (cost per acquisition) - significantly better value-for-money than traditional recruitment strategies

24% higher CTR (click-through rate) than the NZ average on Meta (Facebook & Instagram).

• 628% increase in users on career pages.

How did we do it? 


We ran four marketing approaches: 

1. Can You Fix It? 🤖

We resonated with people’s mindsets by challenging our audience with a coding puzzle. Not your classic recruitment ad! We successfully engaged people who love improving and building digital experiences.

Conversations with the community are key for making genuine connections. A lot of people go to Reddit channels like r/programming to help others fix bugs. Our advertising success was attributed to leaning into people’s existing mindsets. On r/programming, people are already in a programming mood.

People in the tech-orientated Reddit communities identified themselves as potential job candidates. They did this by getting amongst playful coding puzzles.

A Reddit advertisement by Aro Digital for Toitū Te Whenua - Land Information New Zealand, to recruit software developers and engineers across Aotearoa, with an IT coding challenge.

2. <b>We Want Bold & Experienced Tāngata</b> 🦸

By speaking their language, we engaged tech talent on Facebook and Instagram. This generated a data-qualified audience for retargeting.

From there, we re-engaged people who had interacted with the initial ads. Plus, we created a lookalike audience based on people who engaged with the ads. And it worked! We found success by targeting audiences with proven potential for interest.

A Facebook ad for LINZ by Aro Digital, for recruiting bold and experienced software developers and engineers, with IT coding text overlaid on a photo of sunset landscape scene with windmills in the background.
The comment section for a Facebook Ad by Aro Digital, showing engagement for social media marketing. It's a recruitment ad, so people are tagging their mates, and commenting things like "would grab the attention of any coder".


3. Work on Revolutionary Programmes with LINZ 🚀

Aro highlighted the exciting projects happening with LINZ. We communicated how people can use their skills for important nationwide causes. This attracted talent who want to work in a flexible, challenging and innovative environment. 🎉

A Meta digital advertisement for a New Zealand government agency that does land surveying, amongst other things. The ad has the text "Want to work on a revolutionary IT project" overlaid on a photo of beautiful Aotearoa landscape from an aerial perspective.


4. Experimentation, Innovation & Professional Development 💖

Aro’s campaign emphasised LINZ’s career progression capabilities. We shared testimonials from existing team members. This brought staff benefits to the forefront of potential hires’ minds. This mindset encouraged them to dive into the opportunities LINZ has to offer. Or, subscribe to updates for future career opportunities.

A Meta ad for LINZ by Aro Digital, that shows potential employees the awesome benefits of working with Land Information New Zealand, including experimenting with new tech. The photo is a smiling person sitting in an office with the text "Join a world-leading IT programme" overlaid.


Qualitative impacts: 

The success of this campaign has sparked LINZ to harness the impact of social media marketing for recruitment campaigns in the future.

LINZ has experienced the value of investing in digital marketing through Aro's mahi.  This has informed forward-thinking conversations at LINZ to help various units within Toitu Te Whenau flourish.

Who is LINZ? 

‍‍Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is the government’s lead agency for property and location information. This includes Crown property and managing overseas investment. They work across land, sea, data and regulatory areas.

LINZ’s responsibilities include managing land titles, land surveying systems, topographic information, hydrographic information, managing Crown property and supporting government decision-making around foreign ownership.

Learn more about them at linz.govt.nz

The result

We crafted an innovative campaign to capture the attention of top quality, forward thinking digital talent. The campaign was a great success, receiving over 1.6M impressions, 15,000 clicks and increasing visitors to LINZ career pages by a whopping 628%.

1.6m
Impressions
15k
Clicks
+628%
Careers Page Users

Working with Aro Digital was a superb experience. They are honest, approachable, genuine, detail-oriented and incredibly creative - the campaign they cooked up for us was innovative, caught the eye of our target audience, was highly engaging, and a great success. Looking forward to continuing our relationship with Aro Digital, highly recommended.

Hayley Jordan
Marketing and Events Advisor
at
Toitū Te Whenua - Land Information New Zealand
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