CASE STUDY
The SBS Careers Site
Beautiful, Responsive and Custom-built
1 – The Company
About: Australian public broadcasting radio, online, and television network
Company size: 1,400 to 1,800 employees
2 – The Project
A responsive Career Site, promoting SBS’s employer-of-choice brand i.e. why should someone work for SBS as well as, a live job-board. The job-board has to showcase all current SBS jobs and allow candidates to search for a suitable job and apply for it – and the candidate should be able to do all that from any device and from anywhere.
3 – The Features
3.1 – Employer of choice branding
Clearly, this is a very significant aspect of the career site – Recruitment is Marketing and so if you don’t attract the right candidates, you’ll never get quality employees no matter how good the job application process and the recruitment process is. Just like the basics of Marketing, you need to position yourself and promote your organization to the right audience i.e The candidates you want to work at your organization. So the SBS team including HR, Marketing, and other stakeholders did a great job briefing and liaising with the creative agency to produce the awesome site that positions SBS exactly where they want to be in the candidate market.
3.2 – Job Search
The job-board aspect of the site is a key to this project – clearly, the employer branding is there to attract but unless you have a good job search-find-and-apply functions, then all the marketing work is wasted. So the job-board features had to be naturally and seamlessly integrated within the site resulting in a smooth transition from attracted candidate to a job application with the hiring managers.
Our API(s) and WordPress Plugin allowed the agency executing this project to achieve exactly that – a smooth integration and transition from the employer branding and all the way to an application.
The job search – had to include filtering based on location, job industry/title, and keywords.
The Search Results Page – had to beautifully list and present the jobs that match the search – the site is beautiful and so the search results page had to match those standards and therefore the flexibility and the customisation level of the plugin were critical for how seamless the integration of the job-board withing the site is, and for complete continuation of the styling and branding.
3.3 – Custom-built Application Form(s)
The application form is the most critical part of any marketing funnel and there is no difference here! Recruitment is Marketing!
I can tell you that on average a career site in Australia has in excess of 50% abandonment rate i.e. Candidates abandon the applying process half way through filling out the application form and before they submit it.
So to have a high conversion rate, you need to take care of these things:
- Responsive – the application form has to work on mobiles and tablets
- Apply with social profiles
- Apply with job-bord profiles
- Relevant – the questions have to be relevant – asking a candidate to give you information that isn’t relevant to the job they’re applying to will no be received well by the candidates – so you need a platform that allows you to customise the application form in a way that you have a number of templates ready to use for each of your roles
- Branded Application Form
- Modern looking application form
3.4 – Responsive (mobile-enabled)
The Career Site had to be built using the latest responsive technology and techniques so the candidates to interact with the site from any device including mobiles and tablets. There is a strong evidence that almost 50% of all job applications are submitted from mobile devices.
So The career site the agency build had to be responsive as well as the MyRecruitment+ WordPress Plugin had to be responsive too.
3.5 – SEO
It would be a huge missed opportunity if the job-board wasn’t designed with SEO capabilities.
With SBS for example, if you search on Google for “Italian Content Producer in Sydney” then the SBS ad (as of 29th November 2017) comes up # 1 on Google.
I mean this is great right?
The My Recruitment Plus plugin comes out of the box with SEO qualities and so nothing had to be done on this project in order to ensure that the SBS jobs can be found on Google.
4 – How was it built? The Technology Stack
4.1 – The MyRecruitment+ platform’s WordPress Plugin
The MyRecruitment+ Applicant Tracking System comes with both a highly customisable WordPress Plugin that our clients can easily customise in order to provide rich job-board functionality within their career site.
Alternatively, if the client (their chosen developer) decides that the plugin is not going to allow them to achieve the level of flexibility they require or if they don’t want to use WordPress then they can work with our Open-Architecture-based API(s) to achieve their exact requirements.
4.2 – WordPress theme, HTML, CSS
The Creative agency built the career site as a WordPress Site and it was hosted as a sub-domain i.e. careers.sbs.com.au
This allowed the agency to work independently of the main site and therefore gave them more freedom with the choice of their technology stack and it also meant that it can be hosted separately too.
5 – The Teams & Partnerships Who Made It Possible
5.1 – SBS / Creative Agency
HR, Marketing, and other stakeholders.
The creative agency SBS contracted for this project.
5.2 – The MyRecruitment+ team
The MyRecruitment+ Plugin dev team who are the PHP and WordPress Developers as well as the support team.
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