RBS Insurance asked StudentBoard to conduct a research project at their target universities. The research directed the development of its 2011-2012 graduate recruitment campaign during a period of transition.

We developed a picture of why students are / are not actively seeking careers in particular sectors and listed recommendations regarding positioning and promotion.

Our research comprised of interviews with gatekeepers, online questionnaire-based surveying and campus-based focus groups.

ICAP operate in the same competitive environment as investment banks, accountancy firms and insurance companies, but they worried that students sometimes weren’t aware of their presence within this marketplace.

StudentBoard conducted both online and offline research for ICAP, and we found that students often didn’t recognize them as being a financial services organization. Furthermore, we discovered that although in recent years they have become more global, certain regions needed better representing.

With our findings they were able to build a much stronger brand to take on campus, and hone their key message -that ICAP offer a huge range of opportunities, operating on a truly international level, and not just in broking.

Morgan Stanley came to StudentBoard with a very specific brief. Their presentations were already well attended and regularly full to capacity – but they wanted to increase attendance from students who did not have a numerical background, and as such increase applications from such students. We were asked to target students who were not conventionally interested in a career in finance.

We therefore selected students from our campus ambassador network at Morgan Stanley’s target universities with connections in clubs and societies such as languages, sport and media to promote Morgan Stanley presentations at their university. Our ambassadors utilized these connections, as well as links with non-numerical departments such as history, languages, geography and law, as channels for promotion. In addition, our campus ambassadors emailed their peers, used any available online message boards, did lecture shout-outs, contacted their careers services, and distributed posters and fliers.

As a result of our work, Morgan Stanley reported a significant increase in attendance at presentations, and applications from students who were not from a finance or numerical subject background.

StudentBoard have been working with Bloomberg on a very exciting new project. We can’t tell you all the details just yet, but we’ve been helping them to launch a brand new product at universities across the world, taking us all across Europe, to North, Central and South America, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Middle East.

For several years Clifford Chance has used StudentBoard™ to validate the development of its graduate recruitment materials, putting decisions over the tone, design and phrasing of key messages directly in the hands of its target market at universities throughout the UK. As well as testing creative approaches for its brochures and advertising StudentBoard™ has created micro-sites to enable target students to ‘test-drive’ proposed styles of navigation for the firm’s content-rich website.

More recently the firm has used StudentBoard™’s ambassadors to promote its ‘Insights’ – filmed interviews with partners covering key issues in the evolving legal landscape – on both Facebook and YouTube, becoming the first major law firms to proactively engage with these user-defined media.

Confident of its standing in the market, Allen & Overy wanted to refresh its recruitment marketing – retaining a tried a tested campaign theme but re-energising its delivery and asserting more powerfully its own distinctive personality.

StudentBoard™ provided vital feedback and reassurance on the emerging messages and insight into a number of visual treatments – reflecting the views of law and non-law students at Allen & Overy’s target universities. By engaging StudentBoard™, Allen & Overy was able to test the impact and credibility of some of its key recruitment messaging, and test drive some of the design values of its revised campaign. The result was a campaign that swept all before it with its rich production and down-to-earth tone of voice.

Television media company FremantleMedia (famous as producer of such shows as American Idol, The X Factor, Britain’s got Talent) was looking for a small intake of final-year students for its graduate programme. This rotational programme is designed to build a pipeline of future leaders for the business and FremantleMedia is, understandably, very selective about who joins the programme.

The StudentBoard™’s extensive global on-campus network was successfully engaged to access a raft of suitably qualified talent.

Following the successful deployment of a new graduate recruitment campaign in 2008, BNP Paribas CIB asked StudentBoard™ to review their campaign messaging to validate its suitability and relevance for a profoundly changed recruitment environment.

The aim was to develop a textured view of current student impressions of the banking industry in general, how perceptions may have been changed by the banking crisis and which factors motivated students’ career aspirations in this altered economic landscape.

We executed a qualitative research project comprising of online research questionnaires and focus groups. We aimed to receive between 100 and 120 responses to our online questionnaire from final and penultimate year students from across BNP Paribas’s global target school list who had a developed interest in careers in the banking and finance sector. The aim was to gain a better understanding of their current perceptions of the investment banking sector, of BNP Paribas specifically, and to test key messages for the 2009/2010 campaign. The students were asked a series of questions ranging from broad attitudinal samplers to more detailed assessment of BNP Paribas’s recruitment brand and messaging.

This leading global investment bank wanted to develop a communications platform for its Operations division, which recruits at campuses across the globe.

Despite their enormous brand equity, the Operations division suffered from an ‘unglamorous’ image. Students were found to have a poor understanding of what a career in this division could offer.

StudentBoard™ began by conducting large scale research, to validate the brief, and to explore how the opportunities within Operations could be more accurately represented.

Through focus groups, qualitative research, and highly targeted ‘knowledge transfer’ interviews, StudentBoard™ built up an accurate and detailed picture of how the Operations division was perceived on campuses worldwide.

StudentBoard™ presented its findings to a senior recruitment steering group in New York. We were then able to direct the Operations division’s campaign, and disseminate the message to potential candidates that as the driver of client relationships and sales, Operations offers a dynamic and inspiring career.