Background
The Royal Opera House is one of the most prestigious venues for opera and ballet in the world and its Covent Garden location is a very well-known London landmark. Almost 300 main stage performances take place each year during the September-July season with more than 600,000 people attending.
Around 900 staff are employed, most at the Covent Garden site, with some at a scenic construction workshop in East London and others at their 17,000 square foot scenery store in Wales. Interestingly less than a third of the staff are performers (orchestral musicians, dancers or singers). The staff who are not involved in performance cover a whole range of essential activities: some 200 are involved in customer services, 200 in technical/backstage roles (lighting, sound, stage management etc) and 60 in backstage crafts (making scenery, equipment, costumes or wigs). The remainder are involved in a variety of management and administrative roles including fund-raising.
This case study concerns the way that the new internet technology, particularly YouTube, has been used to provide a new dimension to the recruitment of staff for non-performing roles.
HR and recruitment issues
Steven Foulston is one of three HR Managers at the Royal Opera House, reporting to the Director of Personnel. He operates in a business partner role covering the full range of HR issues for a number of parts of the organisation but has a particular role in developing policies for diversity and recruitment. His major challenges reflect the widely different roles of the employees. For example, he needs to deal with many different types of employment contracts from orchestral musicians to carpenters. Some areas are heavily unionised. Moreover the strategic requirements are changing as the Royal Opera House develops its reach beyond “300 performances each year in a theatre” and also challenges perceptions that opera and ballet appeal only to an elite minority of the population. One example of this is the recent purchase of Opus Arte, the leading classical DVD production company which markets DVDs of its productions and films and records productions for live and pre-recorded cinema screenings. The resultant need to acquire performing rights within contract for a number of its staff groups has had profound implications for contractual discussions.
At first glance recruitment does not present a particular challenge. The traditional approach has been to advertise any vacancies, irrespective of role, in the performing arts publication “The Stage”. Generally the number of applicants has been sufficient to fill any vacancies. However, beginning in 2005 it was felt that a different and more proactive approach to recruitment was required for a number of reasons. Firstly, although the name and prestige of the Royal Opera House attracts a lot of candidates it was of concern to the HR team that for a large number of jobs the diversity of the applicants and appointees did not reflect the diversity of the community in which the Opera House operates. Secondly, there were issues about the common perceptions of the attractiveness of the jobs which did not involve stage performance. As a prominent employer in the arts sector, the Royal Opera House was anxious to dispel the idea that the only worthwhile career in the arts is as a performer. Moreover, in the longer term the HR team recognised that some jobs, particularly in backstage crafts could become hard to fill as the arts sector continues to grow.
Using internet technology
Given its prominence in the arts, the Royal Opera House first developed a website in 1996. Over time, the range of web content expanded, information on employment opportunities was added and since 2005 there has been a down-loadable application form on the site.
In October 2007, following extensive discussions and creative brainstorming with the Royal Opera House’s advertising agency ‘aia’ a new approach was adopted for recruitment. This had two related strands. The first consisted of a themed campaign “Find Yourself”. This was defined to promote and encourage applications for backstage careers and consisted of posters, other promotional literature and a web site www.findyourselfjobs.com. The campaign was based around four images, each one focussing on a different career path in the arts: customer service, backstage, costume and arts administration.
The second strand is a series of six short videos which were launched on YouTube. These irreverent and idiosyncratic clips show actual staff undertaking singing out of tune or dancing badly, and are intercut with the caption “(Name of employee)... performs at the Royal Opera House”, and after a brief pause a follow up reveal caption reads “as a (job role – for example stage technician)”. The video ends with the core message “get into the arts without the song and dance”. There follows a link to the vacancy section of the ROH website. These videos can be seen on www.youtube.com ‘Royal Opera House Careers’. In 2008 they won a Recruitment Advertising Award (RAD), and a CIPD award. The judging panel for the RAD awards said: ‘These short videos do more than put a smile on your face. They promote the human face of the Royal Opera House and convey accessibility in a way that does full justice to the medium’.
The results and the future
The new approach, and the YouTube videos in particular, have attracted considerable interest and won praise for their promotion of a positive image of non performance careers in the arts both inside and outside the Royal Opera House. The key question is, of course, has there been a positive impact on recruitment. Steven Foulston can point to some impressive statistics. Since the start of the campaign, there have been more than 100 registrations per month on the Find Yourself site and overall more than 7000 hits on the YouTube videos. There has been a 22% increase in the number of job applicants. More than 25% of job applications are now sourced directly via the Find Yourself site. Most impressively, in the two years prior to the campaign, less than 10% of new hires were from a Black or Multi Ethnic background. This has increased to more than 15% in the six months following the campaign launch.
Steven Foulston sees the use of new technology playing a greater part in recruitment. Looking to the future he comments that ‘from early 2009 we intend to offer an on-line recruitment platform where we will encourage applicants to register their interest. They will receive e-mail alerts and text messages when we have vacancies which might interest them. We will offer a good quality recruitment service using modern media and provide access to various sources of arts sector careers advice’. This suggests further progress in the same direction as the recent initiatives which have involved imaginative use of technology to dispel preconceptions and to widen access.