Key takeaways:
- Candidate-Centric Focus: Tisha Backer spearheaded the revamp of C.H. Robinson’s career site, prioritizing job seekers’ needs over company-centric information, ensuring authenticity through real employee stories and testimonials.
- Global Collaboration: The project involved input from C.H. Robinson’s global TA teams, marking a significant shift in their talent acquisition strategy towards a more inclusive and diverse approach to cater to job seekers worldwide.
- Partnership for Long-Term Success: Tisha’s team partnered with TMP Worldwide for expertise and long-term support, ensuring alignment with their goals and leveraging external resources to implement a modern, user-friendly job search functionality.
C.H. Robinson HR Director for Talent Acquisition Tisha Backer and her team started revamping their career site when they recognized it was no longer meeting their needs.
They identified that the site could be better optimized to share information job seekers want to know about working there versus trying to provide an in-depth overview of everything C.H. Robinson does.
They needed better job search functionality.
“We wanted to optimize the job-seeker experience to make sure C.H. Robinson was meeting candidates in the way in which they wanted to engage and consume information,” said Tisha. “We needed our job search function to be mobile-friendly and concise, and we wanted it to have the right information.”
Tisha said they also needed it to represent the company’s global footprint, as the previous site was North America-centric.
“We took this opportunity to make sure the images, the testimonials, and our job search tool worked for our global audience,” said Tisha. “Finally, we wanted it to be a modern representation of our brand.”
She said they worked with TMP Worldwide to help them redesign and implement their new job search functionality.
In 2019, the project moved forward.
Tisha’s team partnered with the company’s marketing department and jointly made the decision to outsource the career site redesign and utilize a recruitment marketing platform.
“We scoped out our problem statement, gathered all of our criteria, and did research on what we needed both on our sites and from a partner platform perspective,” she said. “We also talked to other companies about how they were managing their career sites.”
C.H. Robinson considered platform-based companies, design firms (who would have designed it, but not maintained the site), and the possibility of hiring someone to build the platform in-house. Tisha said they ultimately decided to expand their partnership with TMP.
The process included building out the business case, going through the RFI, and making the final decision.
“While we initially chose TMP to help with our job search functionality portion of the project, it became clear in the early stages that we wanted them to be a long-term vendor for us,” Tisha said. “We knew they were experts in this space and could help us make sure our site stays best in class, relevant, and a good experience for job-seekers.”
One of the goals was to design a site for C.H. Robinson’s increasingly diverse roles and candidate pool.
“Our employee population for technology talent has grown exponentially,” Tisha said. “We have this growing need for experienced, professional, and technical talent. We also have large employee hiring populations in customer service and sales roles.”
She said it was important for them to organize the content so any of those candidates could get to the information they needed easily. “Our new homepage is focused on our employee value proposition, what it’s like to work here, and what our culture and values are,” she said.
They also made sure to use photos and quotations from real employees as they were building out specific pages for their different job functions because they knew through their research that authenticity was an important factor for job seekers.
She said they’ve also collaborated more than ever across their global TA teams in Europe, South Asia, Australia, and North Asia.
“Every component of the design included input from all of our regional recruitment teams to ensure the content would be valuable for job seekers across the globe,” she said. “This was the first time we had a project on such a global scale within talent acquisition.”
This project helped Tisha and her team discover what the right career site strategy was for C.H. Robinson as a BtoB brand.
“From a BtoB perspective, we want to tell this elaborate story on what we do, because not everyone knows C.H. Robinson,” she said. “But what we were finding is that we were going too far into that journey. We were saying what we thought we needed to tell the candidates, instead of focusing on what the candidates need and what they’re looking for. Now, we’re moving forward with that focus in mind and are seeing promising results.”
As of right now, the homepage and job search function are live.
Phase two of the site rollout will happen in the next month and is all about C.H. Robinson’s individual job and candidate-persona pages, where they’ll be talking more about what the role involves and how it adds value to the organization.
“Our next step will be measuring what’s working and what’s not,” she said. “We don’t want to put a career site out there and just let it sit. We need to look at the analytics and understand what’s effective, where job seekers are dropping off, and what content are they spending more time on. Then we’ll move things around as we learn.”
Phase three will involve investing more time into refining their job postings.
“Through our research, we found that job seekers spend no more than three minutes on the site,” Tisha said. “So, talent acquisition teams don’t have a lot of time — especially when job seekers are on mobile. We need to make sure they’re getting the most relevant information they need immediately from those postings.”
Tisha recommends staying true to the objective of each company’s (values or work experience).
“As part of this process, we wanted to make sure our career site was a true representation of what it’s like to work at C.H. Robinson,” Tisha said. “The most credible way to tell that authentic story is through the words, images, and testimonials of our own employees.”
