We are Hamburg! Won't you join us?
Each year the city of Hamburg recruits over 600 people for training towards jobs in areas such as the city administration, taxation, police and fire services. Annual monitoring of the city’s vital signs – from economic data to demographic profiles – also made it clear to city officials that their recruits did not represent the diversity of the city’s population. Young people of migrant origin were underrepresented with the city administration and services.
Wir sind Hamburg! Bist Du dabei?
In 2006, the city of Hamburg set an ambitious target to increase cultural diversity among its city workers. At the time, only 5.2% of candidates came from a migrant background even though they represented 26.3% of the city’s population (and 45% for the 6-18 age group). The plan, legislated by the city Senate, aimed to have up to 20% of applicants, trainees and apprentices come from a migrant background within five years. Recruitment is every employers challenge. To reach out to potential applicants from across a the city landscape, the city launched a highly innovative marketing campaign – Wir sind Hamburg! Bist Du dabei? (We are Hamburg! Won’t you join us?) – aimed to prove to young people and their parents how determined the city was to attracting young people with different cultural backgrounds to the civil service.
Key message "We are Hamburg! Won’t you join us?"
Its key message is clear: “We are looking for young people who come from different cultural backgrounds. We need your experience, your knowledge and your intercultural knowledge.” To achieve the city’s goals, the Senate’s own Centre for Training and Personnel Development (ZAF-Zentrum fur Aus- und Fortbildung) ran the campaign. ZAF focused on 3 areas:
- Improved marketing and outreach of training opportunities;
- A new emphasis on ‘intercultural competence’ to open up the applicant pool;
- And a program of ndividualized support during the training.
The Wir sind Hamburg! Du bist dabei? campaign’s hub is a web niche
within the city’s own website. It includes information on how to
apply, what qualifications are necessary, who is eligible (German
citizenship is not necessary) and links to multilingual brochures
in Turkish, Russian and German. The site also contains other
examples of outreach from a team representing the city at a local
dragonboat race and video diaries about working for the city of
Hamburg.