RWE npower will launch a new careers website this autumn that aims to bridge for what many companies is an uncomfortable gap between a well-designed corporate career site and the applicant tracking system’s (ATS) web portal.

Adam Templeman, resourcing manager at RWE npower, told Recruiter that, while its ’brochure’ site looked good it wasn’t capturing the quality or quantity of traffic it expected and fed into the ATS in a rather ’clunky’ fashion. “The experience for the candidate was disjointed, it didn’t engage with them and the ATS wasn’t optimised from an SEO [search engine optimisation] perspective nor did it follow our branding,” he said.

RWE npower is working with specialist recruitment website design and digital marketing company 4MAT on the project and the site is built on its DV3 platform.

David Johnston, corporate web consultant at 4MAT, told Recruiter that the look and content on the site has been based on feedback from research carried out on those people who were employed by the company over the past year. The research revealed that, as well as wanting information on vacancies, people also wanted to know what it is like to work at the company and were also interested to find out more about benefits.

“This enabled us to categorise the information in terms of what is critical to users,” he said. “So rather than starting with the design from a brand perspective, we started with these areas of content and built a wireframe in terms of where they sit on the page.”

4MAT then worked with npower’s branding agency to apply the employer branding imagery to the site. “So we’ve taken a very scientific approach based on research, experience and usability so people can find the content they want quickly,” said Johnston.

When candidates visit the new site, alongside the vacancies they will be able to find content such as video, employee testimonials and blogs connected to the job role as well as the related benefits. “Npower has some great content such as videos of what it’s like to work in a department but people had to go looking for it,” said Johnston. “Now we can tag content against job families, location and salary. It’s really looking at recruitment with the same eyes as a consumer site.”

The research also found that more than half of respondents wanted to get job information through social media such as Facebook and Twitter so this will be catered for. Both jobs and content about the company can be shared on social media sites and npower can control it all through the website.

“Often corporates will just embrace social media by pushing jobs out through Twitter and Facebook but that’s just creating another job board, not engaging content,” said Templeman. “Social media is not a panacea but you have to treat it with the same respect as other communication channels.”

Using research as the foundation for the site has also helped Templeman sell it internally. “In the past when I’ve been involved in website design at other organisations, it’s often been all about look and feel. It can also become very emotional between branding, marketing, resourcing, HR and the various function units involved,” he said.

“Here though we can say we’ve done the research. Hopefully the result will be a website designed by the user.”

Templeman also hopes that the new site will help the organisation reduce its reliance on agencies and help to use them more strategically. “I don’t want to send the message out that we wouldn’t use agencies but we want to have more of a partnership approach with them,” he said. “My background is in agencies and I know they can add a huge amount of value but I also know if we don’t manage them properly, costs can run away.”

The new site is due to launch in October and, like the G4S Global Careers Centre reported on by Recruiter in August, it looks like being one of the first of a new generation of careers sites by employers looking for better ways to engage with candidates and reduce reliance on agencies.

Like the G4S site, it will also follow through once a candidate has joined the company into areas such as onboarding and career development. Templeman said: “So it’s not just about initial attraction but giving people a good experience the whole way through the process of joining.”

www.npower.com

www.4MAT.com