#NextSTep@Michelin

#NextStep@Michelin is an internal Employer Branding campaign meant to promote career mobility within Michelin; it derives from our employer brand promise (“Moving forward together”) of giving employees the opportunity to build a career inside Michelin, and not just to find a job.

Coming after a series of systemic changes in Michelin, the campaign has two major objectives:

• to educate about the new mindset that turns the employee into the driver of their career;
• to inform about the systems, policies and resources that give access to career opportunities.

We needed to turn a theoretical topic into a practical, visible and tangible experience. Starting from the ultimate iconic experience of looking for a job (the job fair), we decided to offer our employees the option to live the same thing inside Michelin, via an internal career fair.

#NextStep@Michelin has 3 parts, all taking place in the same day (September 12):

1. HR workshop on career management, the systems and steps to take to manage your career;
2. “Living books” panel with inspirational career stories in Michelin (broadcast to the region);
3. The career fair: departments had a space with representatives, promo materials, interactions.

#NextStep@Michelin had a mixed target audience; the core are the employees in Bucharest; the secondary target are the employees in the region (20 countries), connected via web for parts of the event and future hosts to partial re-iterations of the project (e.g. HR Roadshow).

In line with our core business (mobility), communication centered around the metaphor of career development as a journey and had two focuses:

• Getting buy-in: To convince teams to be exhibitors at the fair and to train them for this;
• Awareness: To get employees excited about the career fair and attend the 3 parts of the event.

We chose a mix of face to face communication (managerial meetings, trainings, briefings and 1-on-1s), videos, posters and desk-drops, electronic messages (e-mail, Yammer, intranet), as well as relying on employees as ambassadors of the project and vectors of communication.

The attendance rate for all the events was high (+70% of the employees in Bucharest present to least at one of the 3 events of the day); testimonials were positive; we registered a 4.20/5 satisfaction rate and 100% of exhibitors would do it again next year.

Creativity and innovation come in a duo for #NextStep@Michelin: on the one hand, there’s the originality of having this flipped perspective, of bringing an external experience inside the company and of inviting people to look at their current situation from a new angle. On the other hand, each department has had full ownership on their branding strategy at the fair, to highlight their attractiveness and visibility. This empowerment has brought a lot of employee-generated content, fresh ideas that can be used for other external Employer Branding initiatives; the chance to collaborate cross functionally, to create new partnerships, to network and exchange knowledge and also to develop or test new skills (copywriting, event planning etc.)