Pizza Hut

Building trust one real story at a time

Building trust one real story at a time

Focus:

Employer brand and counterintuitive EVP strategy

Pizza Hut recruitment campaign billboard featuring restaurant team members
Pizza Hut recruitment campaign billboard featuring restaurant team members

Key Elements:

Decision-Dynamics
Employment Value Research
Creative Direction
Creative Strategy
Content Strategy
UX Design
Career Site Reinvention
Brand Storytelling
Campaign strategy

Hiring at ten times normal, in the middle of a lockdown

Employer Brand Strategy & Design

When the pandemic hit, pizza became the comfort food of a nation in lockdown. Demand surged, and meeting it required delivery drivers at ten to twenty times normal levels, almost overnight.

Every restaurant chain, grocery service, and gig platform was chasing the same people at the same moment. By some measures the competition for drivers ran hotter than the competition for nurses. Pizza Hut was closing stores for lack of people to serve customers, not for lack of customers.

What we did

We couldn't go into the field, so we surveyed thousands of crew members and drivers and ran decision-dynamics analysis on what actually drove their choices. Money and safety were expected. Manager empathy was not, and it outranked both. That had never been part of the employer brand, but it was already part of the reality.

Pizza Hut “Pizza Delivery Drivers wanted!” recruitment hoardings wrapping a city storefront as pedestrians walk past
Phone on a red background showing a Pizza Hut careers story headlined “Ahh, the smell of success — like hot pizza coming out of the oven”
Delivery rider wearing a red Pizza Hut insulated backpack printed with “Wondering if delivering our pizza is a good job?”

No EVP. Just Hut Stories

Employer Brand Strategy & Design

The workforce was too varied and the reasons for staying too personal to compress into one positioning statement, so we didn't write one. We built a wall of real employees describing real days. Great ones, hard ones, and the moments that tested them. The honesty was the offer.

Three Pizza Hut “We’re hiring!” recruitment posters pasted side by side on a stone wall
Four phones showing Pizza Hut career site screens, including job search and employee stories
Laptop showing the Pizza Hut “Hut Stories” page where drivers and crew describe working there
Bus shelter poster asking “Did you really just walk past a pizza delivery job?”
Two phones on a red background showing the Pizza Hut delivery driver recruitment page and its benefits list

Recruitment Campaign

Employer Brand Strategy & Design

Out-of-home, transit, in-store, mobile, and delivery bags carrying the same voice the stories did. Candidates met the tone before they met the application, and it matched what they found when they arrived.

When the pandemic hit, pizza became the comfort food of a nation in lockdown. Demand surged. And fulfilling it required delivery drivers — not at normal levels, but at ten to twenty times normal levels, almost overnight