The Sanofi Recruitment Story with Havas People and StackAdapt

Solving the Employee Experience Gap: Strategies to Drive Retention and Satisfaction

by Jackie Carow, Shannon van Pelt, Guiseppe La Rocca, Kim Marchan| Published on July 9th, 2025

Catch up on our webinar showcasing how Havas People partnered with Sanofi, a leading global healthcare organization, to solve a recruitment challenge familiar to many: low employer brand awareness in a highly competitive U.S. market and a niche, hard-to-reach talent audience. In this session, we unpack how an omni-channel campaign – powered by creative storytelling, data-driven targeting, and advanced measurement – helped drive measurable hiring success. Havas People’s proprietary AI-driven platform, Converged, combined with StackAdapt’s precision programmatic capabilities, to enable the team to reach qualified candidates efficiently, maximize every media dollar, and deliver scalable results.

Introduction

Welcome, everyone, whether you’re joining live or watching the recording. Thank you for being here. A bit of housekeeping: everyone’s joined with cameras off and mics muted, but the chat is open and we’ll have time for Q&A at the end.

So who’s with you today? I’m Jackie Carow, leading the North America market for Havas People a global employer brand and talent communications agency. If you’re new to us, welcome! I’m joined by our brilliant comms strategist Shannon Van Pelt, who developed the strategy behind today’s case study, and Giuseppe La Rocca, VP of Global Enterprise Sales at StackAdapt, who was instrumental in delivery. And finally, Kim Marchan, who leads agency development for the Americas, will host our Q&A.

At Havas People, we help organizations shape and amplify their employer brands to meet the evolving world of work. We often do this by partnering with platforms like StackAdapt an AI-powered marketing platform focused on helping clients spend less time managing campaigns and more time driving recruitment outcomes.

 

The State of Talent Acquisition

Why are we here today? It’s all about people. If you work in talent acquisition or recruitment marketing, chances are you care deeply about connecting the right people with the right jobs and helping organizations find their best-fit talent.

Let’s talk about the current state of talent acquisition. Ideally, your organization is aligned with hiring managers, fully investing in filling every role with the best-fit person, regardless of time or effort. But in reality? You’re dealing with tight budgets, tighter timelines, and increasing pressure to “do more with less.”

Under this pressure, success can sometimes be mis defined as simply filling roles any roles rather than hiring the right people. This is where employer branding becomes critical. When done well, your employer brand doesn’t just support talent acquisition it actively drives it.

 

Shifting from transactions to connections

Let’s talk about a campaign we ran with Sanofi, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies globally, but with low employer brand awareness in North America. The goal: elevate Sanofi’s talent brand and attract the right candidates.

We applied the 95-5 rule from B2B marketing: only 5% of your addressable market is actively job seeking. But focusing only on that 5% can lead to mis-hires, low employee engagement, and hidden costs like high turnover. Instead, we focused on influencing the 95% building brand awareness, showcasing Sanofi’s employee value proposition (EVP), and nurturing future talent pipelines.

You don’t build champions from transactional touchpoints. To win long-term, you need a defined EVP, authentic storytelling, and content tailored to your audience including those not actively seeking work.

This is where data-driven recruitment marketing comes into play. We used first- and third-party data, AI, and tools like Havas Converged to create long-term, brand-led relationships.

Sanofi had a beautifully designed EVP, but low awareness in North America. So we built a campaign focused on employer brand building and doubled their brand awareness in just 7 months, using pre- and post-campaign tracking.

We approached the strategy in three key ways:

  1. Creative storytelling grounded in EVP.
  2. Audience insights to deliver the message in the right way.
  3. Technology and platforms like Havas Converged and StackAdapt to deliver it at scale.

From a StackAdapt perspective, we applied account-based marketing to reach niche roles clinical researchers, scientists, production technicians especially at competitors. This granular targeting helped us reach passive candidates where they were: streaming content, on the subway, or on digital billboards not job boards.

 

Embracing efficiency, efficiency, creativity and strategic excellence

Havas Converged is the tech backbone of this strategy. It blends human insight with machine learning, pulling data from Google, Amazon, surveys, job titles, and more. This allowed us to build interest-based audience segments to improve media efficiency critical when targeting hard-to-fill or high-cost roles.

This wasn’t a lead-gen campaign it was brand-to-demand. We built demand at the top of the funnel through regional, high-quality brand executions (like CTV and City Bike). Then, we nurtured talent using remarketing and acquisition tactics all backed by strong creative.

 

The power of real partnership

What made this campaign successful was the spirit of true partnership. At kick-off, we brought together Sanofi, their partners, and ours, for a workshop. We aligned on brand goals, ambition, and vision so we could co-create a hiring strategy that delivered real results.

This holistic, collaborative approach understanding each partner’s role across the funnel was the secret sauce. It ensured every tactic aligned to broader recruitment goals.

Results:

  • 178M+ impressions in 7 months
  • Doubled employer brand awareness in North America
  • 1,220.3% above expected impressions via Converged
  • 13.75% lift in career site CTR through StackAdapt

Key takeaway: Don’t just focus on the 5% actively job seeking build relationships with the 95% early. That’s where effective hiring strategies are born.

Use AI, platforms like StackAdapt and Converged, and strong audience insights to reach and nurture the right people before they even know they’re ready to move.

Trends in Employer Branding & Talent Acquisition:

AI is transforming talent acquisition. It’s not going away it’s evolving. From helping recruiters become talent advisors to improving internal mobility and retention strategies, AI is helping teams unlock actionable insights and elevate the hiring process. 

One optimization? We had to limit nursing-related keywords too many unqualified clicks from people switching out of clinical roles. Also, political ad environments were avoided thanks to real-time optimization from StackAdapt. Our best-performing audience segments? People interested in travel and financial investment.

We tied experiential and digital together CRM captured at live events fed into a digital nurture strategy. That’s true full-funnel recruitment marketing and it worked.

 

Conclusion

We’d love to have extended this campaign employer brand building is a long game. The foundation is set; nurturing and conversion would be the next exciting phase.

Sanofi needed a talent brand in North America.We delivered that but imagine what we could have done with Olympic-level placements. Still, we optimized continuously, and that agility was key.