Mars' swaps jobs and prizes for graduate tweets

Mars’ Tweetshop, the award-winning graduate recruitment initiative from the leading Food, Petcare, Chocolate, Confectionery and Gum company, is back bigger and better for a second year. This year’s campaign has already engaged thousands of students thanks to a UK university tour and a ‘Hide and Tweet’ competition, offering graduates the chance to win weekend breaks to European cities.

The @MarsGradsUK Twitter handle has been sending out cryptic clues for the ‘Hide and Tweet’ competition, asking students to guess where the Tweetshop is hiding. Using GoogleMaps technology, students were able to make their guesses and digitally hunt down the location, with exciting prizes of trips for two people to European cities up for grabs for the winners.

The Tweetshop began a tour of ten universities at the end of January, promoting the ‘Hide and Tweet’ competition along the way through face-to-face activities, posters, flyers, vine videos and motion-activated screens. Mars also ran a university leaderboard offering the chance for the university with the highest number of competition entrants to win a week’s visit from the Tweetshop to their university in March 2014.

Tweetshop encourages students to follow the @MarsGradsUK handle and swap Tweets using the #marstweetshop hashtag for Mars treats and information on its graduate recruitment programme. Students simply enter a code into the vending machine to release a Mars product and information on the company's graduate scheme.

The @marsgradsuk Twitter feed will also provide students with information on the graduate scheme across the different business segments and retweet the best student tweets.

Andrew Sharp, Future Talent Manager, Mars UK said:

“Our 2013 Tweetshop campaign was a world first and we were very excited by the impressive response we got from students when it was launched. This year we wanted to build on Tweetshop’s success and reach even more people. The aim is to build awareness of the breadth of career opportunities at Mars and start even more meaningful conversations with graduates using social media platforms. Applications for the September 2014 intake to our graduate scheme will close soon – so get your applications in before it is too late."

Laurence Hooper, Seasonal Brand Manager, Mars Petcare UK who joined the Mars Management Development Programme after the Tweetshop visited his university last year said:

“I already knew Mars’ graduate scheme had a good reputation, but when I heard about Tweetshop I signed up to the Facebook and Twitter pages and it gave me a really good insight. When the Tweetshop came to my campus I jumped at the opportunity to find out even more about the range of careers available and the Mars culture. I’m now on my first formal placement of the Mars Management Development Programme and am excited about the opportunity to work in different fields within Mars.”

The Mars Graduate programme runs annually across seven different areas of the business – Management Development, European Finance, European Procurement, Engineering, R&D, Sales and IT – and attracts some of the best graduates. Graduates have the opportunity to work across the different arms of the business and in different programmes, which are designed to teach the necessary skills required for the trade.

For the 2013 campaign, 24,000 people engaged with the Tweetshop either in person or digitally and Mars and its agency partner Tonic won a RAD 2014 award for the innovative initiative; the first time Twitter had been used in this way.

Mars was recently ranked 76th in the Fortune ‘Best Companies to Work For’ list, rising 19 places since first appearing on the list in 2013.

For more information and to apply, graduates should visit the Mars website: http://www.mars.com/uk/en/careers/your-mars/uk-graduates/graduate-programmes.aspx.