Laura Robertson
I’m the Account Director at TMP for South Western Wales. I’m based in Bristol. With a lot of these things it all started with research. We did some research a couple of years ago which looked at graduates perceptions of GCHQ as an employer. One of the key things that came across was that GCHQ was seen as a very white male organisation by those outside of GCHQ so those were some of the barriers we looked to break down and in terms of widening our reach; and to try and attract a more diverse workforce.
We did a number of focus groups with recent recruits to GCHQ and then did some focus groups on campus with graduates who were about to qualify and then did an analysis of what the perceptions were about working for GCHQ.
Humour is not something you would necessarily associate with an intelligence agency given the nature of the work that they do. It is a very serious business; it is about intercepting electronic communication signals and keeping British interests safe. But with this, the careers on a need to know basis; the concept behind that was fairly light-hearted and it was a play on the spy stories - ‘we’ll give you this information if it’s absolutely critical’. So there was an element of that. And the dossier itself was incredibly unusual in terms of how it’s come together.
Although winning awards isn’t the be all and end all, from the client’s point of view, as well as from TMP’s point of view it really is the icing on the cake particularly for creativity because it shows that what we are doing is really good and is working very well in the market place. One of the things that we’ve tried to do in the years that we have been working with GCHQ is to allocate a small portion of their budget to doing something different each year; just to push them that little bit further in terms of creativity. So one of the ideas that came to us and we were really keen to develop was the interactive gaming opportunity that came up with Massive who own the network of games for X-Box 360.
This medium has produced such interest and has made the headlines literally all around the world.