Higher engagement and retention at a national construction company.

Richard Crookes Constructions (RCC) is a family-owned builder that has been delivering projects for government and private clients since 1976. It has grown into a major national contractor, with more than 800 people, offices across New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT, and more than 50 projects live at any one time across sectors including education, health, defence and aged care.

The challenge.

Many of the people RCC wanted to hire did not realise how large the company had become, or how significant the projects it was winning really were. It was competing for engineers, project managers and site teams with the major contractors, and it wanted to tell a story that matched the scale of the work.

RCC also had to hold its culture together across many distributed work sites, where most people are on a project rather than in an office.

What we did.

We began with employee consultation: all-staff surveys, workshops, and work with the board. From that we developed an EVP promise that RCC could use to attract talent and that its people recognised as true.

We have then worked with RCC over several years to bring it to life. That has included:

• Action and activation plans that connect the EVP to RCC's hiring
• Executive spotlight videos and full hero employer brand video campaigns
• Employee benefits brochures and recruitment marketing brochures
• Recruitment marketing campaigns that put RCC's people in front of the right candidates
• Internal culture videos that help embed RCC's values across many different sites

More recently we have been producing video content with the senior people who have joined RCC, so that they can talk in their own words about the quality of the work and the working experience. Those videos are used in campaigns aimed at RCC's main talent competitors, to keep attracting more high-calibre people. We also worked alongside the team on resources and evidence for their workplace award submissions.

The outcome.

RCC's employee engagement has risen, as measured in their Culture Amp surveys, and retention has improved.

They are also winning larger projects and attracting more experienced people, and the video content has become part of how they present RCC to the market. RCC's Chief People Officer has shared the story with other HR leaders at our EVP Summit.

If you want your own people to tell the story, you can read more about our recruitment video production.

For more on the thinking behind this work, read You can't market your way out of a poor employee experience.