A little background

URL: www.toolstationjobs.com
Content management system: Concrete5
Applicant tracking system: ePloy

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression, so the new Toolstation Jobs 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 retail, call centre, distribution and business support professionals across the UK. The result is the new Toolstation Jobs careers website.

Our approach

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

Brings the Toolstation recruitment proposition to life;
Gets the right people straight to the right jobs;
Reflects the culture of Toolstation;
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 sales assistants to search engine marketers; shift managers to management accountants; PHP developers through to call centre advisors. 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 Toolstation.

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Toolstation - Smartphone Image

A candidate-focused experience

It’s very difficult to build a website that caters for everyone. After all, someone looking for a Warehouse role will be interested in different things to someone looking for a branch-based one. So instead of thinking of the website as a single entity, we treat it as a collection of landing pages aimed at different key employment groups. The content of which is determined by the page that they’re viewing.

The content management system takes each piece of content, colleague profile, blog and job imported from the ePloy ATS and tags it by subject, job family and location. This data is then used to dynamically populate the pages of the website. Matching jobs with blogs, blogs with content, content with profiles.

Currently, there are four unique candidate journeys, each designed to talk to, engage and convert specifically skilled individuals into applicants. But these can be added to as and when new teams or areas of expertise are launched.

Introducing ‘Smart Search’

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 we look to help the right people find the right content, we have introduced a search bar to the homepage that not only searches the live jobs on the website, but also directs the user towards pages and blog articles that it thinks will also be of interest to them. Since adding this feature we have seen a significant increase in traffic towards content pages and blog articles from the homepage.

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Website - Toolstation - Universal Search Image

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Website - Toolstation Tablet Image 1

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Website - Toolstation Tablet Image 2

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Website - Toolstation - Smartphone Image

Integrating with ePloy

We’ve worked with a wide range of application tracking system partners who offer varying approaches to integration, but it was clear from the start that ePloy had a clear focus on the Toolstation candidate experience. To the point where it is almost impossible to see the join between careers website and the ATS. To the point where both platforms sit on the same URL. Which means that it is possible to track the full candidate journey from landing on the site through to completed application no matter which platform they are on. A very elegant piece of work.

The results (so far)

To see the impact of the new Toolstation 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 ePloy application tracking system and directly from Toolstation’s resourcing team.

88%

Increase in website traffic

That Little Agency - Employer Branding - Careers Website - Toolstation - Sourcing Image

65%

Of traffic from non-paid-for sources

29%

Increase in job applications

£1.1 million

Saved on agency fees per year (post employer brand launch)

The final word

“Working with That Little Agency has been a real pleasure. As a sometimes not so easy client who has clear ideas and strong opinions they navigates this (me) like the pros that they are. I don’t feel like I’m working with an ‘agency’, the TLA team are an extension of my in-house team. Really taking the time to get to know our business, they are so passionate about getting it right and I can see that they approaches every client as if it were his own business. They are a tremendous sounding board, whose knowledge seems to know no bounds and their open ears have been crucial to me over the last few months.”

Emma Issitt
Group Head of Talent, DE&I & Wellbeing, Travis Perkins

Ensuring the right people find the right jobs