KC Streetcar - "Next Stop: Love What You Do" Employee Recruitment Campaign

Target Audience: KC Streetcar's "Next Stop: Love What You Do" Employee Recruitment Campaign was created to attract not just more candidates, but the "best" candidates: dedicated, motivated, enthusiastic people who wanted to 1) do something unique and exciting as they play an important role in our city's future; 2) a chance to earn while they learned and discovered their potential to grow right along with KC Streetcar; and 3) an opportunity to work in a fun, supportive environment where they're heard and valued by a team that cares about them just as much as the service KCSA provides.

Strategy Objective:Our approach was to put strategy first. We identified "the best" operators and maintenance technicians on our team, and discovered what it was made them "the best." Then, we held individual insight calls with them to identify their common "why KC Streetcar?", which included the cache of being a part of KC Streetcar itself, taking great pride in their job, having opportunities to grow as the system expanded, and the strongest underlier: Loving what they do. We developed key messaging for both maintenance and operator candidates, and unique secondary messaging targeted specifically to each. From this, we created a campaign that brought it all to life using the beliefs, words, and the faces of these coveted employees.

Situation Challenge: KC Streetcar is a documented success story, both as a fare-free public transit system and as a catalyst transforming neighborhoods along the line. As its popularity has skyrocketed, so has its ridership. Since opening in 2016, KC Streetcar has logged more than 12.5 million passenger trips, averaging 2 million trips per year. More streetcars and service have been added, with two new expansion routes slated to open in 2025. This has culminated in a need for more streetcar supervisors, operators, and maintenance technicians to join the team. Prior to our campaign, posts on recruitment sites and social media with a "we're hiring" delivered few candidates, let alone those who would fit and enhance KC Streetcar's team. The need to capture "the best" candidates became ever more paramount.

Results Impact: A suite of assets specifically targeting operators and maintenance technicians were created and launched on KC Streetcar's Instagram, Twitter/X, and Facebook pages. These posts were boosted through Meta to expand our reach to potential applicants beyond KC Streetcar's organic following. The social campaign ran for six months, garnering more than 140,000 impressions and resulting in more than 2,300 clicks to kcstreetcar.org/employment landing page. The increase in applicant flow during this campaign was a clear indicator of success. Most notably, DMs and comments saying things like "I put two applications in," "I'd love to join the team," and "Applied!! Let's go!!!" show the enthusiasm the campaign garnered among KC Streetcar's following and beyond.

Why Submit: Employee recruitment campaigns often fall back on stale, generic tropes such as "We're Hiring" or "Great Pay and Benefits!" Our campaign instead sought to do things differently, by getting to know KC Streetcar's rock-star-level operators and maintenance technicians, and then creating a campaign to speak directly to them in an authentic, relevant, and meaningful way. The result was more eyes on open positions, a higher quality of candidates, increased engagement with KC Streetcar's social media, and a huge sense of pride among the KC Streetcar employees themselves. They already know that there is no other employer that can offer the cache of working at KC Streetcar — and thanks to this campaign, the greater KC metro knows it, too.