Amey needed to recruit at speed across hard-to-fill roles and locations, including Winter Maintenance positions in cities across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Using always-on, AI-powered recruitment marketing with Gaia, Amey filled nearly 90% of roles for the Winter Maintenance campaign within three weeks and also closed the Scottish Engineers campaign early once targets were met.
Across other live roles, Gaia drove around 50% of all applications where source tracking was available, helping Amey build stronger pipelines during peak hiring periods. As Amey and Gaia progressed with ATS integration, campaigns could also be optimised towards applications, not just clicks, tightening targeting over time.
Amey recruits at scale across infrastructure, transport and engineering, often across multiple business units at the same time. Many roles are seasonal, location-specific or skills-constrained, which makes them harder to fill through job boards alone.
The Winter Maintenance campaign is a prime example. The roles are both time-critical and notoriously hard to fill, with hiring often running deep into the season. When roles remain open for too long, it puts pressure on operational teams and creates unnecessary risk during peak demand.
Alongside Winter Maintenance, Amey needed consistent application flow for a range of roles across the UK, including engineering and project management, without relying on reactive bursts or repeating the same recruitment cycle every quarter.
The approach: always-on recruitment marketing with AI-led optimisation
Amey has been a Gaia customer since 2023. Since then, Gaia has supported multiple live campaigns using a strategic recruitment marketing approach designed to keep Amey visible to the right audiences before and during hiring peaks.
Using GaiaComplete, campaigns were launched and optimised across priority roles and regions. Gaia’s AI engine continuously analysed performance signals across audience segments, creative variants, geography and channels. It then redistributed spend towards the combinations most likely to drive applications. This reduced wasted delivery in talent-scarce areas and helped the right people see the right message at the right time.
This mattered for Amey because it reduced wasted delivery in talent-scarce areas and increased the likelihood that the right people saw the right message at the right time. In practice, that meant faster pipeline build, stronger application shares from Gaia, and the ability to close campaigns early once targets were met.
If you want a broader view of why always-on recruitment marketing is now an operational necessity, this article is a useful companion: Recruitment marketing in 2026: the operating system for hiring teams under pressure.
The impact was most visible in Amey’s Winter Maintenance campaign – a campaign that evidenced speed, scale and early campaign closure.
Within just three weeks:
This was the fastest Amey has ever filled Winter Maintenance roles thanks to the number of quality applications received. In previous years, similar roles typically remained open until halfway through the season.
Across other live roles, Gaia delivered a significant share of applications where source attribution was available. This is important context, because it shows the Winter Maintenance result was not an isolated spike.
Across these roles, Gaia delivered around half of total applications. Amey noted that attribution is not always straightforward, because candidates may see a campaign on one channel and then apply via another route, including direct job search.
What we could track consistently in this reporting period was application share by source for selected roles, plus reach, clicks, engagements and CTR across the campaign window. Down-funnel outcomes like interviews and hires were not consistently tracked by source across all roles in the available dataset.
From 1 August to 6 December, the campaigns delivered:
This reach and engagement helped Amey stay consistently visible during peak hiring windows, particularly across social channels where passive and semi-active candidates spend time.
For hard-to-fill locations and specialist roles, recruitment marketing can fail when it is too broad, too static, or too slow to respond.
Amey’s results show the opposite. With always-on recruitment marketing in place, performance could improve over time as campaigns learned what worked best by role, region and channel:
In short, this was recruitment marketing built for outcomes, not vanity metrics.
For Amey, the value was not just volume, but timing.
Filling Winter Maintenance roles early reduced pressure on delivery teams, improved operational readiness, and removed the need to keep roles open for weeks longer than necessary. It also created confidence that the same approach could be replicated across other business units when peak demand hits.
As Alexandra Pennells, Resourcing Manager – Governance at Amey, noted:
We’ve been really, really pleased with what’s happened so far and what you guys have been able to produce for us.
And, speaking specifically about Winter Maintenance, Amey’s Talent Acquisition Business Partner (Transport Infrastructure), Feli Didier, described it as a step-change in speed:
We’ve never managed to close down Winter Maintenance … the beginning of October.
For another example of performance-led recruitment marketing delivering measurable outcomes at scale, read the Mitie case study.
Amey plans to build on this momentum by remaining consistently visible across social channels, scaling what worked across more business units, and becoming more proactive ahead of known peaks.
Future focus areas mentioned include apprenticeships, EarlyCareers and Winter Maintenance. With ATS integration in place, the next step is improving end-to-end visibility from campaign through to application outcomes, so optimisation and reporting can stay focused on quality, not just activity. With always-on recruitment marketing in place, Amey can build warmer audiences over time and reduce the need for repeated stop-start campaigns.
Gaia will continue to support this by combining AI-led optimisation with practical delivery, helping Amey attract talent that fits, efficiently and predictably, when and where it is needed most.
Nearly 90% of roles were filled within three weeks.
Gaia’s AI continuously optimised targeting and spend in real time, shifting investment towards the audiences, locations and creative variants most likely to drive applications.
Across other live roles where attribution was available, Gaia delivered around 50% of total applications, demonstrating a consistent contribution to pipeline build.