Amy Winebright shares how Dell overhauled their career sites to improve and measure their candidate experience

As the Global Employment Brand Project Manager, Amy Winebright supports Dell's global team of recruiters and the initiatives that fall under the talent acquisition umbrella. That includes hiring ramp campaigns, building tools and collateral for recruiters, and messaging strategies across their social and media channels.

But since early this year, Amy, along with colleague Cristina Pereira, have been spearheading a project aimed at improving a major aspect of Dell recruiting: career sites. Up until a few months ago, Dell had their careers content on two separate platforms — Dell.com/careers housed all of the content about working at Dell, while an external tool, jobs.dell.com, powered their job search.

Amy's first step to overhauling the career sites was to move everything onto one platform: jobs.dell.com.

According to Amy, this shift was crucial to improving their candidate experience and making sure they could communicate seamlessly with potential candidates. She and her team were able to make the candidate experience more personal through dedicated pages for veterans, differently-abled candidates, female STEM candidates, campus hires, and their Dell Restart program, which focuses on men and women who are re-entering the workforce.

Amy shares that their second motivation for moving their content to one location was to improve their mobile optimization. “We knew that upwards of 70 percent of our candidates look for jobs on their mobile devices,” said Amy. “So, it was imperative for us to complete that optimization and make improvements there.”

They also implemented metrics management so they have better tracking going forward of how candidates are finding them and what tools, media, and best practices are working.

Next, Amy and her team focused their attention to the Dell Technologies portfolio of brands.

“When Dell acquired EMC two years ago, we formed the new umbrella company, Dell Technologies, and we've had to work to incorporate our new family of seven different brands into our career sites,” explains Amy.

Leveraging TalentBrew — the platform they partnered with to create jobs.dell.com — Amy and her team established jobs.delltechnologies.com, which gives the candidate the ability to search across all seven of their brands.

“Every brand has their unique branding within the site,” says Amy. “It's been very well received among our candidates as well as all of our partner brands underneath Dell Technologies.”

During the establishment of their new platforms, Amy and her team wanted to redesign the sites to make them more fun and engaging for candidates.

“We made our sites more visually appealing and user friendly, and we only feature our team members,” explains Amy. “We want the candidate to see the true picture of life at Dell and the best way to do that is to feature our team members, not stock photography or actors.”

To curate their new assets, Amy and her team did video series with their video partners, Media Agents and Stories, Inc. Then, during the video process, they make sure to take high-resolution images of the participants to use throughout the site.

In addition to the videos, they partnered with their internal communications team to create another source of content: employee-submitted images.

“We wanted to focus on our culture code attributes and sharing how team members have taken care of a customer or shown integrity,” explains Amy. “We had them share images and stories that we could promote.”

So far, through this campaign, they've had upwards of 300 images of team members from across the globe.

In all, the process of rebuilding and redesigning the sites took about seven months, and they were rolled out starting in July of this year.

“I made sure all our stakeholders were a part of the process every step of the way,” says Amy. “Everybody — from our talent management and development team, to our diversity and inclusion team, to our university relations team — had the opportunity to make sure that the content was to their liking. I especially enjoyed working with my internal partners on the Dell Technology site, because I really got to branch out and forge new relationships within the other companies in our family of brands.”

Once they started rolling out and testing the new sites, Amy partnered with TMP Worldwide for ongoing metrics management to identify where the engagement is on the site, allowing for fine tuning along the way.

Amy shares that they're excited to incorporate more strategy and metrics with their sites moving forward. “We're excited to be more proactive in our hiring campaigns, using metrics to identify our areas of success and define our strategies,” explains Amy.

For next steps, Amy and her team are planning to incorporate a more customized experience that will change based on what they learn from the candidate.

We're going to be looking for a location or a focus of interest they're searching by,” says Amy. And then personalize the imagery the candidate sees on the site based on that information.

Finally, they plan to launch the site in different languages. “Right now the site is only in English,” explains Amy. “But we are finalizing several different languages to roll out, with Japanese and Chinese being our top priorities.”

Right now, Amy and her team are looking at their budget for next year and deciding what their media buying plan will look like with regards to the new sites.

“With these new sites and the metrics management behind them, we're going to be able to justify a lot more regional focused media,” says Amy. “We want to be more ingrained in each of our individual markets moving forward, with our global employment brand supporting the overall message.”

As for advice, Amy shares that identifying and communicating with her partners throughout the process was a big key to their success.

“I was amazed at how quickly we were able to redesign and launch the sites because it was a big undertaking, but things really fell into place,” says Amy. “TMP was a great partner, and we worked well as a team to be very reactive and adhere to deadlines. The project ran very smoothly.”

Amy recommends identifying your stakeholders before you do anything else. “Keep them in the loop the entire time, because what will impede a deadline will be those last-minute changes from a stakeholder that was brought in too late,” explains Amy. “Then keep them engaged — you'll not only have greater success meeting your deadlines, but you'll create advocates in the end that are invested in its success.”

Amy Winebright has been a member of the Talent Marketing Board since 2018. You can connect with her on LinkedIn here.