Bouygues Telecom: Hanging up on students

Recruitment information leads targeted candidates into a dead-end.

The Site

Bouygues Telecom, France’s third-ranked mobile communication services provider, targets college students but leads them into an information dead-end.

Bouygues Telecom’s corporate home page features a Careers appeal to students to explore its Campus space. This is a single information page explaining the company’s policy for and approach to recruiting college and university students as apprentices or stagiaires (trainees). At the bottom of the page is a timetable of college campus visits (Forums) between October 2007 and May 2008.

There are no Campus contact details on the page nor direct calls to action.

The Takeaway

Bouygues Telecom claims on its Campus page that 60 per cent of its graduate posts are filled by stagiaires or apprentices, so college recruitment is obviously important to the company as well as a favoured track into it for students. Strange, then, that the website does so much less than it could to attract candidates, and in so (not) doing undermines the impression it paints on the page of an innovative and go-ahead, high-performing company (“une entreprise dynamique et performante”).

The age of the campus visit calendar suggests the Campus page is updated once a year when the new timetable is released, and is thus seen as a low value addendum to the offline recruitment process. But while college visits may be the best or preferred way of generating candidates, the site could do much more to augment that effort. Contact details and an e-mail form for students attracted to find out more or register interest outside of the recruitment season would widen the candidate database and suggest the company in turn was interested. And it would be appropriate, if hardly innovative, if Bouygues were to offer a recruitment news or text alert service to students’ mobiles.

First published on 08 July, 2008