MARTA Heroes – Recruitment Video Campaign

Target Audience: A broad audience that includes all transit customers, current employees, and all potential recruits for open staff positions; including bus operators & technicians, police officers, and more.

Strategy Objective:We reworked our existing MARTA Heroes video series focus on why our heroes choose to work at MARTA. We continue to uplift our current staff to boost retention while also appealing to others who want to join our team of heroes. The core message of the campaign aimed to appeal to those who want to feel a sense of satisfaction in serving their community while providing an essential service. The campaign intends to inspire potential recruits while also informing our customers that we are actively working to address service gaps. This video series is primarily distributed as an organic social media campaign while continuing use of the existing hashtag #MARTAheroes.

Situation Challenge: The nationwide labor shortage created hundreds of staff vacancies, which resulted in service cuts to bus service. We needed a recruitment campaign that could appeal to new hires while simultaneously boosting retention of existing staff. We also needed to demonstrate to our customers that MARTA is actively working to resolve the labor shortage and restore reliable bus service.

Results Impact: The bus operator recruitment portion of this campaign rolled out ahead of our pending announcement of bus service reductions. The recruitment campaign helped to improve the tone customer complaints on social media since our customers could see and understand the challenge we faced while knowing that MARTA is making an effort to hire more operators to reduce service gaps. Multiple customers posted comments that expressed both their frustration with the service gaps and their support of our hiring efforts. Some people also shared the posts or tagged their friends to encourage others to apply to work with us. The campaign had several targeted segments, including a general recruitment video, plus specific videos targeted to recruit for bus operators & technicians and police officers.

Why Submit: This video campaign was created entirely in house, from concept to implementation, without a dedicated budget. The series uses unscripted, journalistic storytelling so that employees could talk to customers in their own words. This helped the videos to resonate more authentically with various audiences – including both potential recruits and customers. The campaign delivered on multiple goals at once, including recruitment & retention, boosting morale, and educating customers about the challenges and efforts to improve service. All video content was created by editing pre-existing video that was shot before and after the start of the pandemic. We are proud to continue to achieve new goals with the existing MARTA Heroes series and brand.