Behind the frontline of the NHS is the critical infrastructure of human resources, the digital experience, finance and general management. The NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme (GMTS) is an important recruitment pipeline for this work, so it’s crucial they not only reach top talent, but talent representative of the communities they serve. Our campaign comprising original photography, authentic messaging and strategic digital activity saw improvement in the diversity of their pipeline and is still being used four years on.

1.6 million people come into contact with the NHS every day. With growing demand and resource challenges, high-quality management behind the machine is vital. We worked with the NHS GMTS to develop their employer brand and strategically engage BAME students, students with disabilities and LGBTQ+ students.

With limited resources, it was crucial our campaign would cut through and be flexible to a variety of channels with an evergreen styling and message. We developed ‘Start your journey here.’ and invited real trainees on the programme from across the UK down to London to be photographed and feature in the campaign.

We then developed a toolkit with ‘plug and play’ assets, empowering the NHS GMTS talent team to confidently use the content across social media and their website. We created social templates, ready-to-use posts, presentation assets, Teams backgrounds, banner ads and video guidelines.

To celebrate Black History Month, we created a toolkit of content to use on NHS social media channels as well as to share with universities across the country.  Importantly, the focus for this wasn’t on the graduate scheme. Through our research, we found that it was really important to place more emphasis on great stories of Black individuals within the NHS.

Careers Services had been overwhelmed during Covid, and many employers had found online careers fairs to have variable levels of engagement.  We also found that many of the people we wanted to engage weren’t always attending these fairs.  We had to find another way. So we focused on the BAME and Diversity reps within Student Unions at universities across the country – and the response was amazing.  Very few employers had reached out to them in this way before, and we started partnerships with a range of union reps.

With everything virtual, we saw a tendency for lots of students to sign up for events – but not always to attend.  We worked hard both to encourage sign-ups and to ensure lots of people attended the event.  In the second webinar, there were over 270 attendees – the best engagement so far for the NHS GMTS.

To complement all the engagement we were doing, we suggested that we create a Diversity Zone on the website, and also focus on a far-greater diversity of graduate ambassadors.  The Diversity Zone included insights into NHS’ commitment to diversity, different employee networks within the UK’s largest employer and help and support for students.

The NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme has grown from taking on 100 graduates to now hiring 500 a year, and the NHS is one of the world’s largest employers. This was a campaign with purpose, and we are proud of our contribution to making the NHS GMTS journey accessible to all graduates.