PR Efforts Catch Media Attention For Hiring Story

Summary

Several Walmart stores in the Phoenix area were struggling to hire employees (pre-COVID-19). With more than 700 positions to fill, they enlisted Zion & Zion to conduct a media outreach campaign to create awareness around the available jobs and entice people to apply by communicating the perks and benefits of working at Walmart. For the purposes of this case study, we will look at the work we completed within the Phoenix area.

Our Role

  • Media Relations
  • Earned Media
  • Brand Awareness
  • Message Development

Summary

Several Walmart stores in the Phoenix area were struggling to hire employees (pre-COVID-19). With more than 700 positions to fill, they enlisted Zion & Zion to conduct a media outreach campaign to create awareness around the available jobs and entice people to apply by communicating the perks and benefits of working at Walmart. For the purposes of this case study, we will look at the work we completed within the Phoenix area.

Our Role

  • Media Relations
  • Earned Media
  • Brand Awareness
  • Message Development

The Challenge

Due to the strong growth in the Phoenix area and throughout the state, local Walmart stores were looking to hire over 700 full- and part-time employees including inventory stockers, cashiers and personal shoppers. It was an urgent need, so they needed to find a way to get the word out and encourage people to apply immediately. Zion & Zion worked with the Regional Market Manager to find out exactly how many employees were needed, which specific stores had a need and what roles were available.

Even though Walmart is an international brand with more than 120 stores in Arizona, securing coverage about jobs or a topic that’s not currently top-of-mind can be challenging. At the time, the economy was stable, and we were not confident that a hiring story would be a priority with local media, so we needed to get creative in our approach.

The Strategy

The Zion & Zion team set out to create a compelling story in a highly saturated news landscape with limited business reporters. The outreach campaign was set in motion and completed within only five days. Since it was an immediate need, we had to execute it quickly and efficiently. Our process was as follows:

Messaging and Media List

We began by creating unique messaging around the benefits of working at Walmart and the need to hire a large number of people immediately. Next, we created a targeted media list that included business publications and reporters, community papers in the area of the specific stores that were hiring and TV reporters and producers that would potentially be interested in the fact that Walmart was hiring a large number of people locally.

Customized Pitches and Media Outreach

We crafted customized pitches for each outlet, writer, reporter and producer to entice them to publicize the fact that Walmart was hiring across the Phoenix area. We leveraged our media relationships to conduct outreach and targeted a variety of reporters and publications including feature, business, consumer and community.

Lastly, we worked with reporters to provide additional information and images as well as to set up interviews with Walmart executives to complete the stories. It was important for the stories to communicate what positions they were hiring, which stores and the fact that Walmart needed people immediately.

Results

The Results

The outreach campaign was extremely successful with the hiring of several hundred employees, fulfilling Walmart’s goals in continuing to serve the Arizona community and adding to the almost 34,000 employees in the state.

In only five days the Zion & Zion PR team secured nine major news stories with over 1.3 million impressions and over $27,000 in publicity value.

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