Define
The initial step was to gather information about what was effective in selling The Climate Corporation. I attended team standups and conducted focus groups with recent hires, employees, and current candidates.
The Team: Project manager & content creator (me), Visual Designer, Jr. UX Designer, 2 Front-end engineers
The Challenge: A Site For All Applicants
The primary goal for the new career site was to showcase compelling content for all types of candidates. We wanted to engage with each distinctive type of candidate and demonstrate why The Climate Corporation was the right choice for their next job.
The initial step was to gather information about what was effective in selling The Climate Corporation. I attended team standups and conducted focus groups with recent hires, employees, and current candidates.
Research
Next, I looked at numerous career sites and noted what they did well and what they did poorly and evaluated how these career sites structured roles and information.
We learned that different types of candidates were more interested in certain forms of information and had different needs. Engineers wanted very specific information about the technologies that they would be using, Sales and Marketing candidates wanted to know their potential commission structure, and Product and Design people wanted to know about the product development process.
We decided that we would break up the career site into career categories and feature a long scroll for each of those pages.
We performed a card sorting exercise with a number of people within and outside of the company. We found that most people sorted positions into four categories: Science/Engineering, Product/Design, Sales/Marketing, and Business Operations.
Sketch
I created very basic mocks that represented the basic information structure that would best sell the company. I worked with a UX Designer and Visual Designer and discussed possible layout options.
Wireframe
I helped the UX Designer develop wireframes based on the basic mock-ups and the information gathering that I had done. The basic layout across each department was consistent. We wanted to put a major emphasis on photo and video content, so that we could personalize the company and our careers a bit more.
Create content and develop
To get the pages out the door as quickly as possible, the designer and engineer worked on the visual design and HTML/CSS templates, while I created the content for the final pages.
Videos
The goal for the video content was to have an overall "Why Work at Climate" video that gave the scope of the company's mission, talked a bit about the challenges that we face, and provided a compelling reason to join The Climate Corporation.
The department-specific videos, on the other hand, were meant to give a very in-depth view of what prospective employees would do on a day-to-day basis, what technologies or tools they might use, and whom they would work with.
I hired two freelancers to help with production and I produced, shot, and edited the videos myself.
Photos
In order to give the company a more personal feel, we decided to pair quotes from employees with "profile photos" that were taken in various parts of the office. The quotes would illustrate major selling points about working at the company, the photos would give candidates an idea of who they would be working with, and the backgrounds would give them a feel for the environment in which they would be working.
General Video: http://vimeo.com/62657628
Science/Engineering Video: http://vimeo.com/63381109
Engineering Requirements
The basic engineering requirements were straightforward. We had photo carousels on each page, and each page had to pull in a list of jobs through an iframe. We also needed unique pages that automatically pulled in lists of jobs based on location to allow candidates to more quickly sort through open jobs.
Final Implementation and Results
The final version of the site (as seen above) resulted in a significant decrease in the career site's bounce rate (from 68.25% to 15.7%) and a significant increase in engagement with pageview time increasing from 2 minutes per viewer to an average of 4:01 minutes per viewer. This does not take into account the department specific pages, which had an average view time of over 3 minutes per page. Thus, the overall career pageview times had grown to upwards of 7 or 8 minutes in the case of some pages.
The site did so well that the rest of the company's website was redesigned to match the career site.