The New Career Site Essentials that Set These Two Top Companies Apart

There’s a reason Phenom’s State of Candidate Experience report focuses on the career site. It’s the centerpiece of a modern TA strategy — ideally a compelling first touchpoint for job seekers, which either engages them enough to apply on the spot or enables seamless hyper-personalized nurturing from their passive browsing.

One thing that’s non-negotiable for companies that are delivering this kind of experience? Layering AI into all of the digital touchpoints along the way.

Phenom went behind the scenes with two companies that rose to the top of our Fortune 500 and European 100 rankings to get the details on how they’re delivering a top-notch candidate experience that attracts, engages, and converts top talent. 

Keep reading to gather insights from DP DHL’s Meredith Wellard, VP Group Talent Acquisition, Learning and Growth and Regions Bank’s Ryan King, Executive Vice President, Head of Talent Acquisition.

Rising to the Challenge

For both Wellard and King, maintaining consistent employer branding and messaging across widespread locations and disparate business units was an overarching challenge. 

As a global company with 600,000 employees in locations in every country, Germany-based DP DHL found itself with more than 200 career sites at the outset of their effort to improve the candidate experience. Needless to say, ensuring that branding and messaging stayed on point had become unwieldy. “We needed to position a global career site that also supported local requirements in terms of language, visuals, and so on,” Wellard said. 

It was crucial for DP DHL to give TA teams in individual countries the power to proactively respond to meet recruiting demands specific to their environments. “People need the ability to manage their own career sites within the parameters we set for brand and experience.” 

Regions Bank, meanwhile, is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, and has 20,000 employees across 15 states. They also wanted their career site to do a better job showcasing Regions’ employer brand to external candidates in a dynamic way.

“It’s also about addressing the same challenges that we all face, like maximizing social content, maximizing brand, and personalizing jobs. These are all critical,” King said. “Candidates are expecting a different experience from all of us.”

Both organizations turned to Phenom for a holistic intelligent talent experience solution with powerful career site capabilities that would give them the flexibility and control to improve the candidate journey and their recruiters’ lives.

Today’s Must-Have Features

To provide a career site experience that embodies the hallmarks of brands like Netflix and Amazon — personalized, seamless, and easy to use — Regions and DP DHL’s career sites layer in helpful yet unobtrusive AI and offer the following all-star features: 

• Semantic job search. Phenom career sites offer type-ahead search capabilities – that understand keywords so that contextually relevant options can be provided for job seekers to improve discoverability 

• Personalized job recommendations. The platform’s AI is always “learning” about site visitors, retaining data on their location, browsing habits, and apply history. This enables the career site to dynamically display relevant job recommendations and other useful content for an individualized experience that improves engagement and conversion. 

• Self-serve options. Candidates can take control over their journey, electing to receive job alerts, update their profile, or share jobs on social media platforms. They can save jobs they’re interested in the same way e-commerce shoppers add products to an online cart. 

• 24/7 availability. With a conversational chatbot, site visitors have an always-on resource to answer questions, navigate them swiftly through the career site, and capture data for personalized follow-up. “I had no idea how important this little piece of technology was going to be to our strategy when we first partnered with Phenom. It’s been a game changer,” King said.

• Quick apply. One of the most significant aspects of a conversion-driven career site? A fast, frictionless apply process that doesn’t even require candidates to input their information. Being able to upload a resume which  automatically populates apply fields or apply via social profile with the click of a button should be the norm not the exception. Even better? A career site that allows job seekers to complete the entire application process without leaving the career site experience. This “hosted apply” significantly increases apply completion and conversion rates. 

• Relevant, authentic content. One of the most valuable tools for both organizations is a user-friendly no-code content management system (CMS), which gives non-technical team members the ability to manage career site content from copy, graphics, and video to multi-language tenants. They can make updates or create a new page within minutes without relying on a third-party agency. This helps ensure cohesive branding and EVP messaging — and that site content stays relevant. 

Low Friction, High Engagement, Better Conversion

According to SHRM, 92% of career site visitors never complete the online application process. That’s a lot of drop off. 

The capabilities listed above give candidates an outstanding experience — and at the same time, help recruiters increase conversions by simultaneously facilitating engagement and data collection. Regions’ career site, in fact, has seven ways to capture site visitor information in addition to the formal application process. 

These mechanisms include their career site chatbot as well as Region’s talent community, where site visitors are invited to join an email list that keeps them updated on company news and available roles. Once a new lead opts in, their Phenom Talent CRM triggers an automated drip campaign complete with a welcome email and subsequent communications tailored to their areas of interest.

With these super-charged career site capabilities, DP DHL and Regions have been able to leap barriers for a candidate experience that’s low friction and high engagement. 

Regions is averaging over 100,000 career site visitors and 25,000 applicants a month to fill just 1,000-1,200 open requisitions, revealed King — which means continued engagement with silver medalists and other qualified candidates is essential. “Think of it as a drip campaign from a marketing perspective to keep the Regions’ name and brand in front of the candidate,” he explained. 

Clearly, the strategy is working: “We’re hiring faster, and turnover is at an all-time low,” King shared. “All of this activity results in a better hire, which is the ultimate goal for us all.”

For DP DHL, success comes in numerous forms:

• Consolidation of 200 satellite career sites into one cohesive global career site

• An improved candidate experience with a simpler search and apply process

• Strengthened employer brand with localized content in multiple languages

• A talent CRM that integrates and works in conjunction with their multiple ATSs

• GDPR compliance

They were also able to improve how their recruiters:

• Create and automate targeted marketing campaigns

• Analyze recruitment marketing data for agile decision making

• Self-manage site content without reliance on outside agencies

“We're benefiting from the volume and the positioning of our jobs,” said Wellard. “From a strategy perspective, it's really about understanding the full landscape and ensuring that you bring it together. And most of ours is positioned around the career site.” 

Tips To Consider 

Before you get started transforming the candidate experience at your organization, King offered these tips:

1. Develop a holistic strategy for adopting and using technology solutions, and set goals for the entire enterprise rather than individual business units

2. Secure buy-in across your team team and organizational leadership

3. Partner with your marketing and communications team from the start. “They probably have employer branding content available that you don’t even know about,” which can save precious time creating content, King shared.

Wellard emphasized that success starts not with the technology itself, but with a firm understanding of EVP and brand, and how they manifest across the career site and other touchpoints. “The platform is brilliant, but it will only do what you enable it to do,” she said. “You need to look at how brand and messaging is reflected in the experience.” 

DP DHL spent time ensuring that their recruiters understood how to maximize the out-of-the-box benefits of the platform first and then experimented iteratively to make continuous improvements. “It’s worth investing time upfront to understand the new technologies,” Wellard said. Then, highlighting internal success stories with the platform was an effective change management strategy, she explained.  

And finally, a strong partnership with your technology vendor is essential to long-term success, Wellard noted. A career site needs to be continuously optimized to return great results — and the right capabilities and partner will help you figure that out while making the process more efficient and impactful.

Ready to optimize your candidate experience? Schedule a custom audit with our team and unlock the data you need to get started, or schedule a demo here. 

View the entire on-demand webinar with DPDHL here
View the entire on-demand webinar with Regions Bank here