Australia Post's recruitment strategy for gender diversity

About Australia Post

Established over 200 years ago, Australia Post has one of the largest retail footprints in Australia with over 4000 outlets nationwide, and one of the largest logistics businesses comprising a fleet of trucks, vans and motorbikes.

Over their long history, their social purpose and commitment to the community has remained the same; to create connections and opportunities that matter to every Australian.

The gender diversity challenge

In 2017 Australia Post identified that their female representation in logistics, and especially in truck driving roles, was dwindling and they committed to increasing the female representation by 5% in FY ‘18.

Australia Post knew that women are perfectly capable of driving trucks, but that they often didn’t associate those roles with their own capabilities, commitments and preferences.

With job-specific EVP research already in place that was gender-agnostic, Australia Post dug deeper through employee focus groups and candidate interviews to understand the barriers and opportunities available to them to increase female participation, and discovered the following:

• Female engagement was high
• Female attrition was slightly higher than average
• There were some environmental aspects that needed addressing such as improving female amenities and uniforms
• Inclusion of females was in pretty good shape, despite assumptions to the contrary
• Females applying for logistics openings was much lower than average
• When Australia Post unpicked this they uncovered that awareness of those jobs was lower in females than males
• Understanding of what the jobs required was extremely low

With this in mind, they set out to enhance their end to end employee journey, comprising awareness, consideration, conversion, onboarding and retention.

Australia Post continued to commit to their overarching EVP philosophy which was to ensure a balanced and authentic reflection of their culture, which consults and does not sell, to enable talent to make the right career choice.

The recruitment video initiative

Working in a cross-functional team comprising Business Leaders, Recruitment Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, PR, Brand, Internal Comms, Learning & Development, Diversity & Inclusion and HR, Australia Post developed a program of three parts, to attract, convert and retain more women in transport roles.

These phases were designed along a female-focused candidate journey that stretched from awareness to probation:

1. Raise awareness: video content by women for women, delivered through female-friendly channels about the job, environment and culture in general to generate expressions of interest and connect with a prospective audience.
2. Conversion: targeted emails to the connected audience outlining specific opportunities that aligned with their provided information and encourage application.
3. Engagement & Retention: revised onboarding, training, policies, amenities, uniforms and progression.

To ensure authenticity and resonance, all three stages were informed and actively supported by a large group of employee ambassadors, made up of both women and men, committed to increasing female participation in the logistics workplace.

Phase 1: Awareness

An initial awareness-raising campaign that encourages prospective candidates to join a community interested in finding out more. Australia Post thought the best way to attract women to the business was the highlight some of the women that make up part of the Australia Post Group’s driving community. So, Australia Post hit the road to meet with five women that told them about their choice to join the team, what initially attracted them to the role and what keeps them happy in the job.

Creative: hi res video development of a selection of women drivers, showcasing the environment and leaning into the assumptions and concerns that these women had before taking the role, and what they have discovered since joining the team.

Channels: The output was a selection of videos of various lengths, which Australia Post played on Facebook for their target audience and optimise the campaign week by week. Australia Post also shared the campaign across all internal communications channels and the ambassador group to encourage employees to share the content with their networks.

Phase 2: Conversion

Creative: in a second marketing wave, Australia Post used pictures and EVP-based quotes to target the audience that interacted with the videos in Phase 1 and drive direct traffic to the Expression of Interest.

Channels: These ads were presented on Facebook and Instagram, and shared widely by their employees as well as recruitment and digital marketing teams.

Expression of Interest: using Text.io to ensure that all the language of the campaign is female-friendly.

Targeted opportunities: Australia Post used VideoMyJob to present specific job openings to candidates based on the information provided in the EOI.

Expectation management: Australia Post used VideoMyJob to develop further insight- based video resources that candidates could review and structured points along the lifecycle. These comprised interviews with managers, interviews with other staff, meet the recruitment team and an overview of what to expect once you apply.

Phase 3: Engagement & Retention

To ensure that their successful candidates were able to continue the journey that Australia Post had started with them, they also introduced:

• Online Induction to ensure that new starters arrived feeling informed and somewhat prepared for day 1 and beyond.
• Employee ambassadors as buddies
• Female-friendly uniforms
• Adjustment to certain facilities to improve the female amenities onsite
• Training for new drivers and qualifications for upskilling drivers
• Development opportunities for existing female leaders to ensure continued career progression and retention
• Introduced further family-friendly shift hours and rotations

Video job adverts were created to target specific job openings to candidates.

The video recruitment results

Australia Post measured lead indicators over the eight weeks of the campaign, and lag indicators over the months following and all indicators were significantly up on comparable metrics:

• Over 1.5m views
• 8,683 applications
• 50% increase in female applications
• 330 placements, exceeding their goal of 272
• Attrition under 10%

A very successful campaign in terms of creating momentum and improving awareness, Australia Post will now ensure that the creative, channels and the EVP statements continue to be used alongside regular recruiting activity to keep female participation rates up and to improve engagement along the end to end experience.