Bus Operator Hiring Campaign - Dance Challenge Videos

Target Audience: Organic social media is a top-of-funnel tactic; therefore, our social media content for the bus operator hiring campaign focused on broader awareness and brand affinity among residents of the greater Los Angeles area.

Strategy Objective:While we were able to address some of the findings of our market research into why potential candidates for bus operators were not interested in the position – insufficient pay, barriers to applying – we were still not receiving the numbers of applications that we needed. And we needed a way to change the narrative of Metro as a faceless bureaucracy that was unresponsive to riders' needs. We decided to try a novel approach by using our social media platforms to showcase our bus operators through a more personable lens: via TikTok-style dance challenges. We tasked divisions with assembling a dance team of operators, selecting a song and choreographing and rehearsing a dance, tapping into the friendly rivalry among our divisions.

Situation Challenge: With Los Angeles County residents complying with stay-at-home orders during the height of the pandemic, transit ridership plummeted, and, facing the risks of driving a bus during a pandemic, many bus operators vacated their positions. As we began the road to recovery, Metro faced dual challenges of restoring bus service to pre-pandemic levels while overcoming a severe shortage of bus operators. We didn't have enough operators to provide coverage when operators called in sick, prompting regular service cancellations. This led to an influx of negativity on our social channels, in comments, direct messages and other users' content. At least one account was established with the sole purpose of posting vile images and commentary about Metro.?

Results Impact: The five dance challenge videos to date have been posted on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok and garnered 1.8 million views in total, making some of the individual videos all-time top performers on our social channels. A total of 7,000 new Instagram followers are attributed directly to these videos. Additionally, the videos generated over 6,000 comments, most of which expressed positivity toward Metro and our bus operators and marked a significant change in the tone of comments on our social media at a time when sentiment had been negative. Ultimately, we met our hiring target of 800 new operators and in fact now have a backlog of 1,000 applications to process for this position.

Why Submit: Who knew that Metro allows its employees to have fun on the job? From the outside, we were told, it looks like a stuffy, strictly regulated governmental job. While the position requires professionalism, those stereotypes don't tell the full story of life at Metro. Our social campaign aimed to change that perception – not only to increase numbers of bus operator applicants, but to highlight to the broader public the personable side of Metro and showcase our most essential staff members as multifaceted, multitalented individuals. Not only did the campaign play an essential role within the larger hiring campaign, it also marked a noticeable shift in the reactions to our social media content, helped drive the larger narrative around Metro and gained us a sizeable number of new followers.