How Flexa became Airbus’ third-largest traffic source through Employer Brand success

Flexa has become part of how we make decisions about our employer brand and how we attract talent. We started by building personas for the people we wanted to reach across different roles and locations, understanding what they value in an employer and how closely our offer matches those priorities. Alongside that, we mapped our competitors to understand where we stood out, where we were competing on the same messages and where we had strengths we weren’t communicating effectively.

That helped us sharpen our EVP and make practical decisions about what to lead with in our campaigns, job adverts and content. Our Flexa profile brings that to life and helps people discover us based on what they’re looking for in an employer, with a route through to our careers site and jobs.

The ongoing feedback loop is what makes it particularly useful day to day. Through the dashboard we can see who we’re reaching, which audiences we’re missing, what’s generating interest and how our appeal compares with other employers. That gives us a way to test whether the things we believe make us attractive actually resonate with the people we want to hire.

We use those insights to adjust our messaging, shape content and decide where to focus our recruitment marketing. The quarterly reports and conversations with the Flexa team help us step back and look at the bigger picture, including what the data means for our benefits, policies and future investment.

It’s a continuous process: understand the talent we need, communicate the parts of our offer that matter to them, measure their response and feed that learning into what we do next. Each round gives us a clearer understanding of how to attract the right people and evidence to take back to the business.

It’s absolutely critical. Our goal is to pioneer the future of aerospace, and you simply can't do that with a homogenous team. To solve the biggest challenges we face, like decarbonising aviation or designing the next generation of aircraft, you need people who think differently and come from all walks of life. The best ideas often come from the friction of different perspectives meeting.

This is the very heart of our diversity and inclusion strategy. My job in employer branding is to make sure our external image and our recruitment efforts reflect that internal commitment. We need to go out and actively find talent in communities that might not have considered aerospace before. At the end of the day, we’re a global company with customers all over the world. Our own team needs to reflect that reality.

Flexa has been a fantastic partner for showing people what we're really about. Let's be honest, the aerospace industry can have a reputation for being a bit old-fashioned and rigid. Our biggest challenge is proving that this perception is outdated and that our EVP actually offers something for everyone.

Showcasing our EVP through Flexa gives us real credibility. It’s not just Airbus saying we’re a great place to work; it’s an independent, trusted platform confirming it. Flexa also surveys a statistically significant portion of our employees to independently verify that what we say about working here is accurate. This means that the claims we make about our culture, flexibility, benefits, career progression, and employee experience aren’t just marketing messages, they’re backed up by real feedback from our people. That's a powerful signal to candidates. It also gives us a direct channel to connect with people, especially many talented women, who are specifically looking for a flexible employer. They find us on Flexa, see the verification, and it builds an immediate layer of trust that we might not have established otherwise.

Flexa has been Airbus' third or fourth largest source of traffic since we began our partnership, and has given us access to talent that we otherwise struggle to reach at the volumes we need. This credibility, combined with Flexa's talent demand data, has been pivotal in reaching new audiences and positioning Airbus as an employer of choice.

This is something we work on every single day. For us, it starts with our leaders, so we're rolling out inclusive leadership training across the board to help managers build and support diverse teams. It’s also important to not forget about the basics so female tailoring for workwear is critical along with ergonomic adaptation for tooling, this ensures a safe working environment for everyone.

Our employee-led resource groups are also a huge part of our culture. We have groups like Balance for Business for gender balance, Pride@Airbus for our LGBTQ+ colleagues, and many others. They create community and have a real voice in shaping company policy. We also believe in being transparent. To do this we set public goals for things like the number of women in leadership and hold ourselves accountable for hitting them, we also publish our gender pay gap report each year. It’s a constant process of listening, learning, and improving.

For me, it boils down to a few key things. First, there's the purpose. People who work here get to contribute to projects that truly change the world. You could be working on sustainable aviation fuel or a satellite that helps us monitor climate change. That's a powerful reason to come to work each morning.

On top of that, the global scale of Airbus is just immense. You have the chance to work with brilliant people from all over the world and can build a career that takes you to different countries and different parts of the business.Personally I’ve have had the great pleasure to work across engineering, customer services, commercial marketing and HR in the near 20 years I’ve spent at Airbus.

And finally, and this is crucial, there's a real focus on people. We're an engineering company at heart, and we have a long-term view on everything, including our employees' careers and wellbeing. It's that mix of incredible, world-changing projects and a genuinely supportive, human culture that I think is unique to Airbus.

That's a tough one because the whole EVP is something my team and I are passionate about. But if I had to choose, two things really stand out to me personally.

The first is this idea of "redefining what’s possible" . It's not just a slogan. It’s the promise that you can come here and work on things that no one has ever done before. It speaks to the innovator in all of us, and I’m incredibly proud that we offer people the chance to build a real legacy.

The other part that I'm just as proud of is our focus on "We Are One." This is our commitment to being a single, collaborative, and inclusive team. It means that no matter how big and global we are, we succeed together. It's the combination of those two things: the chance to do incredible work, and the feeling that you're part of a team that has your back. For me, that’s what makes Airbus special.