How To Design Tailored Candidate Journeys at Scale: Kohl's Strategy and Results

Running a career site for a coast-to-coast retailer with 1,150+ stores in 49 states is not a simple content management exercise. Kohl's serves over 60 million customers annually, powered by a workforce spanning stores, distribution centers, e-fulfillment operations, corporate offices, and a child development center. Each of those groups draws a different kind of candidate. For years, the career site was not built to reflect that difference.

At IAMPHENOM 2026, Chrissy Hunnell, Team Lead of Talent Acquisition Enablement at Kohl's, walked through how Kohl's used Phenom Design Studio to rebuild its candidate experience: five personas, 200+ pages, and a 44% increase in job seekers.

Watch the entire session, or catch the key insights below!

What Were Kohl's Biggest Career Site Challenges?

Kohl's has been a Phenom customer since 2016. By the time the team decided to overhaul their career site, they were working on an aging legacy tenant that came with operational drag.

Simple changes like updating a header dropdown or adjusting navigation required submitting managed service requests and waiting on responses. Support tickets soon accumulated — and for a team that runs autonomously and moves fast, that dependency was a constant friction point.

The second challenge was scale. The career site Hunnell's team inherited had been built by people who were no longer at Kohl's, with content that no longer reflected the organization's current direction. Five distinct candidate personas: general, corporate, stores, distribution, and early careers, across 200+ pages, all needing to be managed, updated, and kept on-brand. With limited self-service capability and a small team, that was an unsustainable equation. The ambition was there, but the tools to act on it were not.

At the same time, Kohl's had recently rolled out a refreshed brand identity and culture framework for associates, anchored by the acronym C.A.R.E. (Customer First, Accountable, Resourceful, Empathetic). That internal story needed to reach candidates, too. The career site was the most direct channel to carry that message outward, but only if every page, across every persona, felt visually and culturally consistent with the Kohl's brand candidates encountered everywhere else. A disconnected career site risked undercutting the very identity the organization had invested in building.

How Did Phenom Design Studio Change the Way the Team Works?

In 2023, Kohl's migrated to Phenom's new Content Management System and became one of the first enterprise clients to go live on Phenom Design Studio. Hunnell described the switch as "finally getting the keys to the car." With Design Studio, the team can build and publish pages without external dependencies, manage navigation in real time, and apply global updates across hundreds of pages through a single widget change. No spreadsheets or tickets required.

That autonomy changed what the team was able to build. Rather than cutting down the number of pages during the migration, they created more. Hunnell explained, "We had the want to do more, and just the inability to actually put the foot on the gas and go forward." Design Studio removed that barrier. She mentioned building a new landing page for a field facility specialist campaign in 20 minutes at the airport before a trip. That kind of responsiveness wasn't possible before.

The team also went deeper on each persona, working directly with recruiting partners to understand what made each role and environment distinct, then building that specificity into the pages. For early careers, they added a sizzle reel from the summer internship program directly on the jobs page so candidates could see the experience, not just the requirements. For stores, the content spelled out what different roles (e.g. store operations, store management, loss prevention) look like day-to-day. For distribution, they drew a clear line between working in a fulfillment center versus a traditional distribution center.

How Are Retailers Using Self-Serve Career Sites Beyond Job Listings?

One of the unexpected outcomes of having full editorial control was discovering how many use cases the career site could solve outside of standard recruitment.

When a corporate business partner asked how new hires could receive better first-day information, the TA team did not suggest a branded email template. They built a dedicated page on the career site. "Welcome to Life at Kohl's" became a fully branded, structured first-day resource shared directly with incoming associates. The child development center's recruiting team saw it and requested one for their own candidates. As Hunnell described it, "We can actually use Phenom and create a page, brand it, and have it live on the career site."

That pattern, using an existing product to solve a new problem, has continued to expand.

Targeted landing pages now support specific hiring campaigns as well. If there is an outreach push for loss prevention associates in Denver, a custom page goes live showing only roles in that market with location-specific imagery. This way, candidates see content that was built for them, rather than navigating from a generic starting point. That specificity carries into automated candidate communications. In a recent review, Kohl's identified roughly 9 million candidate touchpoints delivered through automated emails over two quarters. Each one was persona-specific and brand-consistent, landing candidates on an experience matched to who they were and what they had expressed interest in.

Innovative Uses of Self-Serve Careers Sites by Retailers

Early careers recruiting at Kohl's runs differently from every other function. Roles aren't posted externally; instead, it's an invite-to-apply process. Rather than a standard apply button, candidates hit a "Submit Interest" button that routes them to a lead generation form feeding directly into their Phenom Talent CRM. Recruiters nurture those candidates through the CRM until they have identified the right fit, at which point they extend an invitation to apply for the position.

Even though the underlying recruiting process is completely different, the early careers page looks and feels like any other persona page, with tailored video content and specific messaging. It's a clear example of the broader philosophy at work: the candidate experience stays unified and intentional regardless of how the back-end process operates.

What Business Results Did Phenom Design Studio Unlock?

The results reflect a career site working harder for every candidate who lands on it. The 44% increase in job seekers was exactly what the team was aiming for. "If we can have a campaign for Sephora associates that lands directly on a Sephora page, they are going to visit that page," Hunnell said. "We put in this work to speak to the candidate's individuality, and that increased the amount of traffic that came to our site." The results speak for themselves:

Job Seekers: 44% increase, signaling that more candidates are finding content relevant enough to explore.
Job Visits: 33% increase, driven by targeted campaigns, refreshed creative, and more specific storytelling per persona.
Page Views: 6% increase, pointing to stronger engagement with employer brand content across the site.
Career Site Pages: 200+ managed independently, without external support.
Persona Experiences: 5 fully distinct journeys built for general, corporate, stores, distribution, and early-career candidates.

What Advice Would Kohl's Give to Teams Starting This Journey?

Hunnell's closing advice was grounded in three years of building, testing, and learning on the platform. The team started with a long list of ambitions and quickly discovered that the roadmap would shift in ways they had not anticipated: new requests from business partners, new product capabilities, and use cases that were not on the original plan. Her approach for getting started? Do not try to execute everything at once. Keep a running parking lot for ideas that are not the immediate priority. Let the data guide where to invest next. If video content is driving engagement, lean into it. If a particular widget is generating strong interaction, find more places to use it.

"We are still figuring out new ways to use the product," Hunnell said. "Still figuring out new things we can do, saying I think we can do that, let me try, and then being able to." Three years in, the Kohl's team is still finding new applications within the product. That is not a sign the work is unfinished. It is a sign that the platform keeps pace with the ambition behind it.

"Continue iterating. There are many possibilities, and it can feel overwhelming at first. Focus on making incremental improvements, prioritize what will have the greatest impact on the candidate experience, and use data and feedback to guide decisions," concluded Hunnell.

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Branka Nikolic

Branka’s a marketer with flair, a teacher turned Phenom player. She loves products that shine, making candidates’ paths fine and turns job hunts into a winner.