Barnet Council Recruitment Campaigns.

The Challenge.

Barnet County Council were having a problem with their recruitment drives… They weren’t getting the volume of applications they wanted.
From an external perspective (the perspective of candidates) Barnet was seen as an affluent, pleasant place to live, a place where there isn’t an important difference to be made by family services workers… but this is far from the truth! Barnet faces the same challenges as any other part of London, they are just in one of London's largest boroughs… a borough that has a reputation for being desirable.
So the challenge was to create a recruitment film that dispels the misconceptions around Barnet and its family services requirements. This film needed to show quality candidates that Barnet has plenty of people that need their services and an amazing team in place ready to support them in becoming the best they can be.
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The Solution.

Right from the early stages of development, we were building on two key themes. Firstly, what makes Barnet Family Services great at what they do, and secondly, the veneer of ‘Barnet’ as a place to live and work, a layer that is hiding the needs of its community from potential candidates. We needed to develop a creative that would peel back these layers - show that Barnet is a diverse place with a vast array of needs and, working on a collaboration with the team at Barnet, we decided that ‘time’ was the perfect tool to illustrate this point. Imagine freezing a moment in time. Being able to look at the good and bad, the happy and the sad, takes place all around us in a single moment. By using film to freeze a typical ‘picture perfect’ scenario candidates think of when they think of ‘Barnet’ we could remove the veneer of that moment and show the moments living behind it… The moments where they are needed most. A mixture of practical effects and CGI helped create a film that truly shows viewers the hard work that Barnet Family Services do every day.
The creative collaboration with the team at Barnet was a real pleasure. They were willing to embrace creative suggestions as well as make them and I think we ended up with a strong piece of work as a result of such a great working relationship.
arrow Darren Suffolk - Director