Making its mark

When UK firm Burges Salmon LLP decided to launch a recruitment advertising campaign, it looked to its people, it’s core values and public perceptions of the firm, to create a unique final concept which would undoubtedly be unmistakable to its audience.

By Alexandra Van-Hattum, Burges Salmon LLP

Burges Salmon has always been a firm that places enormous value on its people. It only makes sense, therefore, that a lot of thought and energy should go into the recruitment process to maintain a steady stream of talent coming into the firm. We are lucky to have a team in place that focuses entirely on recruitment. This has enabled us to spend time refining the processes we use and ensures a high level of service for every candidate coming through. It also enables us to work closely with our advertising agency to come up with an advertising campaign that truly reflects the firm’s values and recruitment strategy.

Pushing the boundaries
Law firms are currently struggling to cope with a very difficult recruitment market. There are simply not enough lawyers to meet requirements and firms are having to work harder than ever to attract and retain their people.

As a result, there has been a steady trend towards more adventurous advertising campaigns.

In the past, Burges Salmon had been the only firm to use its own branded and developed recruitment campaigns, while now more and more firms are following suit. Firms are also having to target lawyers who may not be actively seeking new roles, and so are placing their advertisements in a wider range of publications as well as using significantly toned down ads in places where recruitment adverts have not traditionally been allowed.

Our firm’s previous campaigns have always had a very strong focus on quality of life. The rationale behind this was that our main source of lawyers has always been London, and quality of life was the predominant reason behind their decision to leave their firms and join us. Our more recent thinking, however, was that although this was a good reason to leave the City, it didn’t really provide a specific reason to join Burges Salmon above all other national firms. Also, despite us not having the ‘hours culture’ found in the City, our lawyers do work hard and we didn’t want to do them a disservice by not representing the effort they put in. Equally, we didn’t want to recruit individuals who saw us as an easy option.

We felt it was extremely important to enhance the emphasis on quality of work that the firm is involved in, not least because very few (if any) firms outside of London can genuinely promise the City quality of work that Burges Salmon can, and this is what really makes the firm unique. The message therefore was: leave the City for quality of life, but choose Burges Salmon for quality of work.

Fine-tuning the campaign
Having decided on the overall message of the campaign, we ran some internal focus groups to gain feedback from recent joiners on what had attracted them to the firm’s adverts in the first place. Almost everyone agreed that it had been the ‘quality of life’ photography of our campaign that had captured their imagination and led them to start daydreaming about leaving the City. This meant that we had quite a tricky balance to achieve – maintain the lifestyle photography but somehow balance it with a strong work message.

Other important issues to us were that the style of the copy was professional rather than ‘ad speak’, and that the ads must be clearly Burges Salmon through and through – not a recruitment ad where if you cover up the firm name/logo, it could pass for any firm’s campaign.

We wanted the campaign to have a serious message about the work that the firm undertakes, but a more light-hearted overall tone. It also needed to be eye-catching and stand out from the huge volume of recruitment advertising always present in the mainstream legal publications. Ideally, we were hoping it would be the sort of campaign where people would look forward to the next concept – even triggering the interest of lawyers not actively searching the legal vacancies. The final thing that we wanted to achieve was to encourage direct approaches from candidates to the firm.

Outside help
Once we were clear on the brief, we asked several advertising agencies to tender. We decided to use Vivid Communications (then McCann Erickson People Marketing) because it was the only agency whch truly understood that the ad had to be 100 per cent bespoke to Burges Salmon and had the balance of the campaign just right – professional with a touch of humour. We were also really impressed with the agency’s copywriting ability – and this is often the most difficult thing to get right.

It did not have extensive experience of working with law firms which, perhaps unusually, really appealed to us as we didn’t want an agency coming in full of preconceptions about how legal recruitment advertising should look. Instead, we wanted to benefit from the more creative approach often used in other industries.

We have always worked closely with our advertising agencies on the advertising concept to ensure that the message and tone are exactly right. It is unrealistic to expect any agency to know your organisation quite as well as you do. Rather than go back and forth with amendments, expecting the agency to understand what you’re trying to get at, we have found that it’s better to refine the campaign and final copy ourselves. It means that we get exactly what we want and is actually far less effort.

Reaching the final concept
The final concept was very clever, using powerful imagery with a bold headline that tied in lifestyle, work and our clients. The intention was to use words that would not usually have been associated with law firms, and where possible raise a smile. Although the image was still lifestyle focused in appearance, it also related to work that the firm had done, which was tied together by the copy. We feel that it really achieved the balance we were looking for of attracting people’s attention to the imagery without moving away from a focus on the quality of work at the firm. The salmon pink background colour and bespoke photography of our lawyers and South-West landmarks would make it very clearly Burges Salmon branded through and through. We also felt that the bespoke black and white photography added to the quality of the message.

With the final concept of the campaign and style of copy agreed, we presented it in a ‘walk in clinic’ at the firm, so that everyone who wanted to had a chance to have a look and write down their comments. We used stock photography for the session with only two examples of copy style as it would have been a mistake to go to the expense of executing each concept before we had thoroughly tested people’s reactions to it. It is amazing how many useful points come out of these sessions, and it certainly prevents any embarrassing misinterpretations of images/headlines. We are fortunate that with lawyers’ attention to detail, everything is gone over with a fine-toothed comb, and generally the comments books are pretty entertaining and informative. This process ensures that everyone with an interest in the campaign feels they have played a part in its development, and creates buy-in to the final concept. This is important as everyone is affected by the perception of the firm that the campaign creates, and this must not be underestimated. It is also important that lawyers are happy with the message as it will be seen by the firm’s clients. Few firms do any advertising outside of their recruitment campaigns, so it does play a large role in creating an image of the firm’s brand and values.

Campaign themes
There was no single theme to the campaign as we wanted it to represent the diverse interests of our lawyers, and also the huge range of attractions that the Southwest has to offer. The concepts (pictured) ranged from SCALE, which included two of our lawyers who are in a successful band, to BRAVE which was shot on a beautiful beach just half an hour outside of Bristol and featured one of our lawyers who regularly competes in ‘Iron Man’ competitions. We also featured events such as the Cheltenham races in LEAD and the Bristol Balloon fiesta in HOT, as well as landmarks such as Clevedon Pier in the REACH concept and the Burnham-on-Sea lighthouse in BRAVE.

This was mainly a press and online campaign, with a new concept appearing each month. We used double-page spreads for maximum impact and, fortunately, the concept carried over well to banner advertising on websites. Vivid Communications also created and hosted splash pages for each concept, which directed people to our recruitment website and enabled us to monitor the success of each concept of the campaign.

We were absolutely delighted with the response to the campaign. There were approximately 200 hits to the splash pages for each campaign, which for busy lawyers is quite something. We maintained a steady stream of excellent candidates coming through in response to the advertising, and felt we were far more engaged with them through the direct communication then if they had used a third party organisation. Before the campaign started, we were 60 per cent reliant on recruitment agencies to provide us with candidates. By the end of the year over which the campaign ran, we averaged a 15 per cent reliance on agencies – a figure unheard of in the legal profession, particularly as it included a direct partner hire. The reduction in agency use also lead to substantial savings, which more than compensated for the cost of executing the campaign.

Something we were also rather pleased with was that the campaign won ‘Best Professional Recruitment Advertisement’ at the Recruitment Business Awards, seeing off competition from the likes of retailers Asda and Superdrug. This was a real testament to the creativity of the campaign – particularly unusual for a law firm.

After such a successful year, the great difficulty facing us was how would we top the campaign? It was very tempting to keep running the same campaign as really it had scope for endless concepts and imagery and had hit exactly the right balance that we were looking for. However, we felt we had to maintain our reputation for originality and come up with something new to keep people interested. The new ads have started to run, and whether they prove as successful remains to be seen – inevitably it will take a few concepts to run before we have refined to a point we are happy with. Either way, we have made huge progress in raising the brand awareness of the firm in our target market and, fortunately, the campaign has left a mark that will be difficult to undo. ?

Alexandra Van-Hattum is legal recruitment manager at UK firm Burges Salmon. She can be contacted at alexandra.van-hattum@burges-salmon.com