Ming Chan

Apr 11, 2017 • 5 minute read

Fortune 500 Talent Recruiting.
Why A Tailor-Made Career Solution Could Be The Fit For You.

The number of HR recruiting solutions is constantly expanding, with a new SaaS or Cloud product on the market almost every day. Each of these out-of-the-box products claims to provide the perfect talent acquisition solution. Given all the options, why should your company consider a custom digital solution for its recruiting needs?

Well, if what you are looking for is baseline functionality at a low cost, one of these out-of-the-box solutions may be right for you. Openings will be posted, applications will be submitted, and (hopefully) jobs will be filled.

But, if you want to go beyond that functional baseline, a custom, integrated solution can be really valuable. Customization provides better integration on the frontend (without sacrificing backend functionality), which offers significantly better opportunities to tell the right story, to the right potential employee, at the right time. By highlighting your brand, your culture, and your community in an integrated context, your organization will be poised to achieve your recruiting goals.

A Case in Point: DaVita Careers:

The1stMovement launched the careers portal for DaVita, the largest kidney care providers in U.S. With over 40,000 teammates (or employees) in locations throughout the U.S. and nearly 2,000 positions available at any given time, DaVita needed a solution that would be scalable on the frontend while also integrating seamlessly into Taleo, their backend HR recruitment system.

Equally important to the DaVita team was developing a solution that told the story of the company’s unique culture. At DaVita, the company philosophy is summed up in the phrase, “we are a community first, a company second.” Prospective applicants needed to understand that unique company culture to decide if they fit with DaVita, or not.

The solution our team created for DaVita continues to be uniquely successful on a number of levels. First, it serves DaVita’s needs by providing a fun, engaging, and shareable site, dynamically updated with real-time, relevant content. Second, it is designed to work for the breadth of DaVita’s audience: by using a combination of responsive web design and location-based content the site tailors itself to the user’s needs based on the type of device that applicant is using (from mobile to tablet to desktop) and the part of the country they are accessing the site from. And third, the site works from a business process perspective, as custom APIs allow the site to integrate with Taleo (a popular talent acquisition system acquired by Oracle in 2012) as well as within DaVita’s existing infrastructure.

In short, this custom-designed careers website allows DaVita to capture more qualified applicants through an interactive storytelling experience and a more user-friendly application process. Since launch, DaVita’s custom website has seen an average monthly visitor increase of over 88% and an over 49% increase in mobile traffic.

Factors For You To Consider:

A custom HR Recruitment website is not appropriate for every situation. Although there are clear benefits to building a customized solution, it also requires an additional commitment of time and energy from key organizational stakeholders. Someone from within the organization must take responsibility for coordinating and implementing a holistic strategy, and will also need to plan ongoing maintenance and governance of the web application moving forward post launch.

As you decide how to move forward with your recruitment solution, it can be helpful to consider the following:

What are your organizational objectives?
Prioritization is a fact of life, and setting strategic objectives is essential to determining where an organization should invest. Beyond the high level objectives, what are the project success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs)? What is your launch plan, and what is driving the dates?

Who is your target audience?
Of course, every organization has a pretty good idea of who they are trying to recruit, but building out a matrix of your target audience (including role and geography) is an important starting point to defining an engagement strategy. Don’t just ask who they are. What do they care about? What technology do they use? What social networks are they a part of? Who do they respect?

What is your engagement strategy?
Building an engagement strategy is a key part of the process, and generally involves gaining a better understanding of your audience by conducting research and modeling their user journey. User Journey Mapping is a process that involves identifying some version of their values, behaviors, and desires then mapping them to key engagement points.

What technology platform are you utilizing on the backend?
Many organization are looking for a solution that will integrate with their Oracle (Taleo), SAP (SuccessFactors), or other enterprise level talent acquisition solution. Virtually all of the established solutions support integration through APIs, as do many of the emerging players in the SaaS market. But, it’s important to understand what level of integration you are looking to create.

Have you developed a maintenance and governance plan?
Launching a website is like planting a garden. You set out a framework and plan, but will still need nurturing, weeding, and more than a bit of fertilizer from time to time. In some ways, it’s more of a beginning than an end.

If your organization places a strong value on telling your story in the context of recruiting, if you are looking for a solution that is integrated seamlessly into the overall structure and fabric of your corporate web presence, and if you are looking to increase the quality (rather than just the quantity) of job applicants, then a custom solution is very likely the most appropriate approach