Career Sites that Convert: Lumen’s Candidate Experience Tell-All

Career sites that deliver a personalized, engaging candidate experience are the ones that consistently convert — but creating one requires the right foundational elements and recruitment technology.

During our ‘Crush Worthy Career Sites that Convert’ livestream, Annie Roberts, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition Operations & Marketing, and Emalee Pokos, Lead Recruitment Marketing Analyst from Lumen shared firsthand insights into everything that’s working for them and why.

View the entire on-demand career site tour here, or read on for the highlights!

Where Lumen Started

About four years ago, Lumen underwent a company acquisition, engaging in a comprehensive rebranding initiative that involved changing the company name. This transformation resulted in the emergence of a completely new employer identity.

“Our career site at the time was static. It was difficult and expensive to update, it lacked modern functionality, and we didn't have the ability to personalize the candidate's experience,” said Roberts.

In the dynamic landscape of talent acquisition, the team was grappling with another common pain point: disconnected technologies. Their tech stack included a CRM, events tools, and sourcing tools — some of which were inherited from prior acquisitions, resulting in integrations that were far from seamless.

In the quest for a solution, Phenom’s holistic platform emerged as the standout choice for Lumen. Recognized as an agile partner capable of keeping up with rapid transformations and innovations, Phenom aligned perfectly with Lumen's emphasis on enhancing the candidate experience. The partnership promised to be a key driver in propelling Lumen's talent acquisition endeavors to new heights.

Find out their results in the full case study!

Addressing Candidate Experience Challenges

Job seekers want to know what they’re going to get themselves into before they apply for a job. One quick look at a job description on a job board rarely provides enough context to tell if it’s worth an application.

Companies are increasingly acknowledging this reality and are using artificial intelligence to help delight job seekers with:

Job recommendations based on browsing history
Conversational chatbots to serve up the right job and answer relevant questions
An omnichannel experience that immerses candidates in the employer brand while directing them where they want to go quickly and seamlessly

Innovators like Lumen are using a combination of all three. The sooner job seekers find what they’re looking for, the faster they apply (provided the apply process isn’t arduous) — and the more connected they feel with the company.

A “One-stop shop” Career Site

For Lumen, the first order of business was the launch of their new external Phenom Career Site.

The site not only met their criteria for a personalized job search and apply process but exceeded expectations with features like an intuitive, no-code Content Management System (CMS) and a convenient chatbot that engages job seekers according to their preferences.

Top priorities for Lumen?

Brand consistency. The CMS was instrumental in maintaining consistency between their corporate brand and employer brand, right down to the color palette being used across the career site.

“So they're out there as a consumer. They see those corporate consumer brand colors, then they see a job opening, and that color is different. They might think, ‘Is this the same company’? It starts to create doubt versus building credibility and maintaining consistency,” noted Pokos.

The ease of updating their career site proved instrumental for Lumen's recruitment marketing team. This agility allowed them to keep pace with the rapid evolution of business dynamics and align with the ever-changing branding elements of the time.

Enhanced job descriptions. Job descriptions don’t always paint an accurate picture of day-to-day responsibilities, which can lead to unrealistic expectations before and after the apply. To address this, Lumen added valuable context about each role, including pay transparency, benefits details, and more.

“This strategy keeps them on that jobs page. It brings everything to the forefront. Helping keep candidates comfortable in taking that next step and hitting that apply button versus really bouncing off of the site or routing to other pages and maybe not coming back to your job search results page,“ said Pokos. (See the example of pay transparency from their career site below)

More job category pages. To ensure candidates don't have to go through extensive searches to find what they're looking for, Lumen easily created more job category pages for their most popular roles including HR, marketing, finance, operations and engineering, and others are featured as dropdowns outside of the navigation. This ensures candidates don't have to go through extensive searches to find what they're looking for. It's all about enhancing the user experience, making relevant information readily available and simplifying the job search journey for candidates.

Other Essential Tech To Reach Their Goals

To streamline their operations further, Lumen integrated the Phenom CRM into their Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This seamless integration empowered their teams to efficiently manage candidates from the initial stages right through the entire hiring process. With the ability to make hiring status changes and the utilization of a status integration, Lumen's teams could rest easy, confident that information flowed between the ATS and CRM, ensuring both systems stayed perfectly aligned.

Reaching candidates right where they are — on their phones — was a crucial aspect of Lumen's candidate-centric approach. Recognizing this, they opted for Phenom Campaigns as the ideal solution. This allowed them to easily communicate with active and passive job seekers through text messages and emails, ensuring a more personalized and accessible connection.

As part of this comprehensive strategy, Phenom Talent Analytics was a game-changer, enabling Lumen to effortlessly delve into pre-funnel candidate activities for deeper insights into what was happening before candidates entered the formal recruitment process. According to Roberts, this enhanced Lumen’s sourcing capabilities and drove a significant boost in their recruiters' productivity by being able to quickly pinpoint the right candidates.

Critical time savers also came in the form of Phenom AI Scheduling and Phenom Hiring Manager, which automated interview scheduling and optimized hiring team alignment. Once all of these tools were set in motion, the results spoke volumes, with high adoption rates signaling their effectiveness.

Bringing the Same Unrivaled Experience To Employees

Building on this success, Lumen introduced Phenom’s Employee Experience, including an internal talent marketplace for employees.

Now, Lumen's employees can effortlessly navigate through all available opportunities for their next career step. What's more, they receive timely alerts when new opportunities arise, can easily share them externally, and even submit employee referrals — all conveniently accessible in one centralized platform.

This holistic approach not only enhances employee engagement but also reinforces Lumen's commitment to providing a seamless and rewarding journey for their workforce.

What’s on the Horizon

From a TA lens, this year Lumen will be focused on automation and simplification:

Building and implementing automation into processes and tools with their CRM
Using their new Hiring Manager portal to enable managers to move through the hiring process in a self-service motion without recruiter support
Revamping the career site — including the pages, content, and images using feedback from candidates and data on page views, clicks, and time on page

Check out Lumen’s full case study here.

Ready to see how you can convert best-fit candidates into hires faster, too?
See Phenom’s Candidate Experience in action

Joanna Keel