The Talent Attraction Lab - Three Experiments at Worley
In 2024, MoreThanNow conducted three experiments on employer branding at Worley, a professional services company of energy, chemicals, and resources experts helping customers shift their operations towards a more sustainable future, employing 50,000+ people globally. Together, our research involves over 12,000 job seekers from around the world and forms our most comprehensive research on inclusive talent attraction. We share abridged versions of all three experiments below in the hope others can learn and build on our work.
Experiment 1 - Testing the effect of employer brand messages
The journey started with the launch of a new Employee Value Proposition (EVP) at Worley - this outlined four reasons employees think Worley is a great place to work, and could be used to attract new joiners to the company:
Pillar 1 - social purpose and sustainability (the organisation frame)
Pillar 2 - innovative, ambitious projects (the work frame)
Pillar 3 - a great place to progress your career (the career frame)
Pillar 4 - a great workplace experience (the culture frame)
While all these pillars convey reasons that job-seekers might decide to join Worley, the organisation needed to make decisions about which it led with in its employer branding. What career site headline message would be best? What opening line in a job description would they lead with? And would these choices change who applied and why?
To support them with a strong evidence base, we randomly allocated ~4,000 job seekers across Worley’s primary geographical regions to one of these messages (a headline and a ~100 word description of the organisation that aligned to each EVP pillar), and then invited people to explore job opportunities and apply. Here are the results:
Women and men who explored opportunities by message (%)
We find a 16% increase in job-seeking behaviour from job seekers who hear about Worley using the Culture frame in comparison to the lowest-performing Organisation frame. We also find this effect to be highly consistent in multiple sub-analyses - across seniority, occupation (i.e., technical vs. non technical workers), age, ethnicity and geographical location. This uniformity was a shock to us – whatever people’s experience, background or career stage, they were drawn toward an environment in which they would feel valued and respected above everything else.
Experiment 2 - How do employer brand messages interact with imagery?
In our second experiment, we explored whether the impact of the culture messages could be amplified by imagery. In particular, we wanted to test the commonly held belief that imagery representing demographic diversity within an organisation will be seen as more inclusive, and therefore attract a greater diversity of applicants. This is important to Worley as a means to increase diversity and representation within the organisation.
We tested that imagery focused on gender and ethnicity, using photos of Worley colleagues in their place of work. For the purposes of our experiment, we labelled these themes underrepresented group imagery, overrepresented group imagery, underrepresented individual imagery and overrepresented individual imagery. Each image was tested alongside an abridged version of the high-performing Culture EVP messaging from the first experiment, and once again, was randomly allocated to thousands of job seekers globally. Here are the results on job seeking behaviour:
Job-seekers who explored opportunities by imagery (%)
Here, we see effects that might conform to our expectations and others that we might find counterintuitive. First, the clearest result is that the group imagery conveying a diverse team performs best for everyone. This is true for job seekers from both under- and overrepresented demographic groups. Secondly, we predicted that imagery of underrepresented individuals would appeal to underrepresented job seekers, and were surprised this did not play out in the data. After a literature review and some conversations at Worley, we wanted to explore why this was happening and whether there was anything we could do to bolster this image theme.
Experiment 3 - Improving the effect of individual imagery with storytelling
We hypothesised three reasons that underrepresented individual imagery might not perform as we’d hoped; one that sprung to mind for many is whether people called into question the authenticity of that image, or whether this was simply a case of an organisation ‘ticking the boxes’. However, we also wondered whether a picture of an individual with a headline about culture simply wasn’t aligned. Or similarly, whether a picture of an individual brought to mind a more individualised culture that wasn’t as attractive to job seekers.
To explore these ideas, we tested the effect of a personal story that would be aligned to the image. One would be focused on individual success and progression and the other would be focused on culture and community. We predicted any story would increase the perceived authenticity of the image, while the nature of the story would help us understand whether misalignment of image and content was the problem (i.e. an individual picture with a culture story), or whether promoting individualism was the problem (i.e. an individual picture with a career success story).
Job-seekers who explored opportunities by story (%)
Once again, we see that the culture story significantly outperforms the career story and no story – this is consistent across our sample, but disproportionately effective for women and individuals who self-report as ethnic minorities in their country of work.
Clearly any story was more effective than no story, which we use as evidence to suggest there may have been an authenticity issue with the images alone -- an important lesson for others using imagery to represent diversity in their organisation. However, we also see consistency in the EVP headline results, in that stories about supportive culture outperform stories of individual progress and success.
In short…
These experiments honed in on enhancing the talent attraction process to increase inclusivity at Worley. Our results demonstrate the impact of experimentation — though some findings are more intuitive, others are less so. We share these results not only to encourage your organisation to learn from them, but to empower you to test your talent attraction and branding materials — to know what works in your context, and among your job-seekers. And in doing so, your organisation can become more inclusive in the way it attracts talent.
Thank you to our partners at Worley for setting out to investigate how to maximise inclusivity in the talent attraction process, and working tirelessly to implement experiment results. With special thanks to Jackie Beer, Richard Fairs, James Kirk, Melisa Waters, Sarah Ross and Mehreen Yusuf.