West Midlands Employers (WME) regularly brings together local authority resourcing colleagues through the region's strategic resourcing board. A common discussion is raising awareness of careers in local government to enable all councils to recruit skilled people across various expertise and job types.

This year, WME led on and delivered a visually striking, large-scale regional local government career awareness campaign. It targeted those outside the sector, highlighting not only typical council careers but also corporate roles which enable smooth transitions from the private sector.

Working with 32 councils we created and delivered the awareness campaign, engaging with recruitment, HR, and communications representatives. Their ideas and feedback were integral, ensuring they were active partners in the initiative.

The chosen creatives were fronted by our West Midlands ‘jobsters' – diverse characters designed to transform negative perceptions and highlight the wide-ranging careers and opportunities available within local government. The ‘jobsters' were inspired by real-life case studies contained in our Local Government Career Guide launched in 2023. We created two interconnected initiatives: one promoting careers in the sector overall, and the other focusing on apprenticeship opportunities. Despite targeting different audiences and using varied channels, maintaining a consistent and recognisable brand across both was crucial. Each campaign featured distinct messages, calls to action, and colour schemes, yet remained clearly linked.

Alongside providing each member council with a toolkit of assets and social media copy they could use to amplify their own attraction strategies; we delivered a substantial marketing campaign across the region. This included engagement with colleges, universities and job centres plus, paid for advertising throughout the transport network, shopping centres, local radio, newspapers, programmatics and social media.

By working together and delivering one centralised campaign throughout the region, we have provided resources and advertising across six counties. This has saved substantial resources and has strengthened the brand of local government careers in the area.

The campaign received positive feedback from local authorities and external partners, including Walsall Council who expressed that their collaboration within the initiative has helped ‘increase the visibility of the sector and regional job board, enhanced our employee brand, promoted our Employee Value Proposition, and highlighted our vacancies'.

In addition, promotional and engagement activities delivered impressive results which were tracked on WMJobs (a dedicated public sector jobs board delivered by WME). These included a 30% increase in apply clicks year-on-year – more than 248,000 new users attracted to the site and our highest number of active users since October 2021. This success was further highlighted by more than 11,000 new jobseekers signing up for job alerts alongside achieving 320,000 social media impressions. We have been able to maintain the momentum from the campaign, with our latest data showing that active user levels are 25% higher in comparison to last year.

Following the success of this, we've recently launched our second campaign of the year, taking inspiration from the ‘Summer of Sport'. It kicked off with the Euros and will follow various events over the summer culminating with the Paralympics in September. The jobsters have returned and retain their spirited nature, engaging in sporting activities and using playful puns to spark interest in careers within the sector.

Targeted social media is the primary promotional route for this campaign, with assets being used across WMJobs' platforms and provided free of charge to our subscribers to use across their channels too. In addition, paid for digital advertising will be live over the Olympic Games' period. As always, our focus is to raise awareness of careers across the whole sector, highlighting key benefits within it including the opportunity to make a difference, career development, flexibility and work/life balance.

Our campaigns aim to draw new talent into the sector, both now and in the future, easing recruitment challenges and diversifying our workforce. By working together with councils and strengthening local partnerships, we can achieve greater outcomes. Our approach of creating resources and delivering campaigns empowers all local councils to leverage our expertise, resources and attract new candidates to explore opportunities within local government.

Our successful regional collaboration has proven that working together will amplify efficiency and impact.

Chloe Herrmann is Principal Consultant, Resourcing, at WM Employers