The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is the federal law enforcement agency of the Australian Government tasked with investigating and preventing serious crime, ranging from terrorism to human trafficking. As serious crime evolves and becomes more complex, the skillsets required to stay a step ahead of it and the people required to prevent it have become more diverse.

Problem is, law enforcement has an image problem. They're often seen to use force over finesse, and are considered a relatively dated and male-dominated industry by the very candidates they require. To combat these misperceptions and position themselves as a progressive and fulfilling career for diverse candidates, in 2021 the AFP repositioned themselves as an organisation that ‘outsmarts serious crime with intelligent action’. To better reflect this positioning, we were tasked with creating a recruitment campaign aimed at diverse and diversely-skilled candidates that the AFP required to tackle complex serious crime.

Creative Idea:

When 91% of people find traditional ads more interruptive than ever we knew we had to create communication that drew our audience in, rather than pushed our message out. So we looked to where they were actively tuning in. True crime is one of Australia’s fastest growing genres, particularly amongst our primary desired demographic (women aged 17 – 25). So we turned our recruitment messages into a true crime podcast - creating resonant entertainment in a compelling format, designed to pull listeners in rather than pushing into their lives.

To tell our stories compellingly, we needed the right podcast partner. We conducted audience analysis of true crime podcasts against our desired audience demographics to match recruitment objectives. Casefile Presents was the perfect partner. The investigative team was not only Australia's top true crime podcaster, but the anonymous host was an ex-police officer: someone well-versed in translating delicate or complex investigation material into entertaining narratives.

Working with the Casefile team, we created a six-episode podcast called Crime Interrupted. Each episode delved into a particular, notorious serious crime - from terrorism to sex trafficking - and through an intriguing narrative, showed the diverse skills from diverse candidates required to stop them. Casefile spoke to officers, victims and even criminals to offer a truly compelling picture of a career in the AFP.

To drive repeat engagement, each of the six podcasts was released weekly across all major streaming platforms – Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Castbox, RSS Feed – and linked directly to our recruitment hub.

Results:

Crime Interrupted resulted in significant recruitment upswings.

Crime interrupted has been listened to over 460,000 times. It reached #1 in the Australian True Crime Spotify podcast charts and #2 in national Spotify charts behind Joe Rogan in total podcast streams.

Visits to the recruitment website is up 114% from the same period the year previously and, in regard to applications, actual numbers from female and CALD applications are significantly up. Female applications rose 40%, and the proportion of female applications as a percentage has increased to 35%, the highest ever figure on record. On top of this, 93% of people who listened to the podcast were interested in finding out more about a career in the AFP.

At a time when our audience were disengaging from traditional recruitment communication, Crime Interrupted had potential recruits actively engaging for over an hour every week.

The Crime Interrupted recruitment campaign is regarded by the AFP as their most successful campaign in history, and series 2 is underway.