A little background

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression, so the new Hastings Direct website has been designed not only to be interesting and informative, but to have a real, lasting impact on the job seeker. To position them as an employer of choice to a wide range of financial and corporate services professionals, as well as those fantastic people who work in customer service. The result is the new Hastings Direct careers website.

Our approach

Our project objectives were clear: design, develop and deliver a website that:

  • Brings the Hastings Direct recruitment proposition to life;
  • Gets the right people straight to the right jobs;
  • Reflects the culture of Hastings Direct;
  • Raises the profile of key information;
  • Is social, engaging and continuously updated;
  • Continues to evolve with the needs of the business;
  • Is accessible across all devices;
  • Is ready to be indexed by ‘Google for Jobs’.

To deliver a website that will engage a wide audience of job seekers – from customer services representatives to senior executives; facility managers to risk managers; actuaries through to technologists. A site where all content is available within a single click. One that uses social media as a way of articulating their culture and is distinctly and unmistakably Hastings Direct.

The website

URL: https://www.hastingsdirectcareers.com
Content management system: Concrete5
Applicant tracking system: EngageATS

Knowing that (on average) 80% of visitors come to a careers website to search for jobs, the website places the search function front and centre. This ensures that the right people quickly find the right jobs. Not only that, the website uses the visitor’s IP address (desktop) or GPS location (tablet and smartphone) to deliver the visitor jobs that are close by.

As well as jobs, the search results direct the visitor towards content that it thinks will be of interest to them. Such as detailed information on the business area and office they would be based in, Twitter updates, blog stories and whether they are LinkedIn with anyone currently working at Hastings Direct.

It is clear that Hastings Direct’s people are their very best advocates, so they are placed at the centre of every aspect of the website. They feature on every page, blog or job and in every piece of video. They help deliver key content and offer a real insight into their culture. And supporting this, the site integrates seamlessly with their social media platforms which help articulate the day-to-day activities of Hastings Direct in real time.

The website is designed to be incredibly visible to the search engines with all pages developed to be successfully indexed. And that includes the jobs pages which have been programmed specifically to be indexed by ‘Google for Jobs’.

Finally, we know that 49% of visits to the Hastings Direct website are on a mobile device, so we worked closely with their ATS supplier, EngageATS, to offer visitors the opportunity to apply via their smartphone. And for those who don’t want to, they can bookmark the vacancy that interests them and apply later via a desktop.

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Websites - Hastings Direct Tablet Image
That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Websites - Hastings Direct Smartphone Image

The impact so far

To see the impact of the new Hastings Direct careers website, we have compared the performance of the new website against that of the previous incarnation. All data has been taken from Google Analytics, the EngageATS application tracking system and directly from Hasting Direct’s resourcing team.

148
increase in visitors to the website
128
increase in average time spent on website
36
increase in completed applications

If you’d like to know more about this piece of work, simply email mark@thatlittleagency.co.uk