Company Background:
Hire A Hero is a non-profit initiative that brings together military job seekers and military friendly employers by utilizing a web 2.0 networking features. It allows people with a variety of backgrounds to participate in helping those with military experience find meaningful employment.
To achieve their objectives, Hire A Hero reaches out to employers throughout the United States. They have three primary goals: 1) to educate employers on the quality, skills and commitment that returning service members can offer them as employees, 2) to enlighten prospective employers that the national unemployment rate of service members is 3 times higher than the national average, and 3) to drive traffic to the Hire A Hero website where employers can submit employment opportunities for service members and service members can find employment opportunities.
Challenge:
The key challenge facing Hire a Hero is to identify "service member friendly" technology, manufacturing and professional services organizations. Like most non-profits, Hire A Hero has limited financial resources and is unable to invest in large scale marketing and PR campaigns necessary to build brand and awareness. Their strategy focuses on the execution of a grass roots campaign that uses "guerilla" marketing to generate interest.
Solution:
Hire A Hero needed to develop a targeted list of companies that meet its criteria and mission. The company turned to Broadlook Technologies because of its ability to provide a comprehensive strategy, in-depth knowledge, and the technology to execute the plan. As part of the solution, Hire A Hero selected a Broadlook suite of software including Market Mapper to create an exclusive list of companies that fit the right profile. Hire A Hero also relies on Job Pulse to leverage the aggregation of job openings from over 200,000 corporate websites to identify opportunities for service members. By combining these two capabilities with Profiler, Hire A Hero is able to identify multiple key contacts at each company for their outreach efforts.
Results:
Within 1 month and with no additional personnel, Hire A Hero quadrupled the number of companies registered on their online community. "For us, it is critical that we spend our time and resources in a way that provides the maximum yield," saud Rob Barr, Managing Director of Hire A Hero. "The ability to not only use real-time information, but to leverage the speed and scale that Broadlook's products have brought to our organization has made a major impact."
The ability to automate many aspects of the initial marketing efforts was a key goal for Hire A Hero. "We knew the Internet held the information we needed, but we learned quickly that without the right solution, it can be a very expensive source of information," said Mr. Barr. "By adding Broadlook's capabilities into the equation, we were able to achieve a return on our investment in just over two weeks."
Just as, if not more important, Hire A Hero has been able to create real results for our service men and women. Through its services, it has been able to connect thousands of service members with new jobs.
