The Lyle & Scott Twitter account has been active today, searching for a leader.

The campaign is centred around Twitter with a #nextgreatleader hash tag.

And the microsite is well-branded with a strong HTML5 design, incorporating history of the brand, what it takes to be a leader, and how to apply.

The brand, which goes back as far as 1874, experienced significant success over the past decade, growing sales from £10m in 2000 to over £30m in 2013. The brand is now split into ‘classic’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘golf’ lines, and has seen its recent boon fuelled by a new indie generation patronising its products. This mirrors somewhat the punk and casuals adoption of Lyle & Scott in the ‘70s and ‘80s. 

Lyle & Scott, despite its heritage, is now also a young contemporary fashion brand so the recruitment process is in line with its savvy customer base.

Beringer Tame has done the work and CEO Patrick Tame admits “It seemed like a bit of a gimmick at first”.

there is a lot of background noise in the social media space and we were worried that we would miss our target market and either be ignored or get swamped by unqualified applications.  However after a bit of thought, we bought into the vision. 

Sue Watson, owner of Lyle & Scott, wants a modern tech-aware retail CEO who is social media literate. By conducting the search using social media, we automatically select out the dinosaurs.

Tame had some interesting thoughts on Twitter as a recruitment medium.

Twitter can be seen purely in terms of as a mass market only tool but in fact, it can be extremely targeted. People self segment by who they choose to follow.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the summer profiling our target market and looking at how they use Twitter.

Time will tell if the ‘corporate journeymen need not apply’ tagline will become the mantra for recruitment of senior management, and social media the platform to weed out the non-digital leaders.