How Land O’Lakes and the Fortune 500 Create Successful Candidate Journeys

In today's fluctuating labor market, a positive candidate experience is crucial for organizations to stand out and secure top talent. An effective recruitment process that attracts, engages, and converts candidates can significantly impact a company's ability to fill critical roles and maintain a competitive edge. By prioritizing a seamless and compelling candidate journey, employers can not only improve their hiring outcomes but also enhance their employer brand, leading to long-term benefits in talent acquisition and retention.

We sat down with Dobby Gibson, Senior Manager of Digital Experience at Land O'Lakes, to explore innovative strategies for enhancing the candidate experience and driving recruitment success. This conversation features Gibson’s experience improving the candidate experience at Land O’Lakes as well as data and takeaways from Phenom’s State of Candidate Experience: 2024 Benchmarks Report.

Access the full webinar here or read on for the highlights!

6 Key Takeaways:

The conversation yielded six main reasons why companies must focus on improving their candidate journey:

Increased conversion rates: Businesses can increase conversion rates of job visits to applications after implementing advanced search, personalization (like job recommendations or job-specific videos), and chatbot on their career site.
Improved engagement: Land O'Lakes experienced over a 150% increase in candidate engagement and 30% increase in applications after optimizing their career site with an AI-powered chatbot and personalized content
Enhanced employer brand: Strong, consistent employer branding can lead to a positive candidate experience which in turn contributes to increased interest and applications from high-quality candidates.
Personalization is crucial: Candidates expect a personalized experience when engaging with career sites. Land O'Lakes saw significant improvements in engagement by implementing persona-based content and customized job pages. In comparison, according to the State of Candidate Experience Report, only 17% of Fortune 500 companies displayed recently viewed jobs, and just 12% presented job recommendations based on a candidate's profile and browsing history.
Video content drives engagement: 82% of Fortune 500 companies displayed videos featuring employee testimonials. Land O'Lakes found that incorporating video content, especially for frontline and entry-level roles, significantly improved candidate engagement and conversion rates.
A mobile-first approach is essential: Land O'Lakes emphasized optimizing the career site and application process for mobile devices to cater to frontline worker preferences.

“For your career site, the hero is not your brand. It's actually the job seeker,” Gibson said, emphasizing the importance of putting the candidate at the center of the experience rather than focusing solely on the company brand.

Check out Land O'Lakes' amazing hiring success here

Learnings from Land O’Lakes Detailed Summary:

Experimentation is critical. To optimize the experience, Land O’Lakes uses the Phenom Content Management System (CMS) and Phenom Talent Analytics to test different approaches to displaying content to understand how candidates interact with their career site.
Land O’Lakes' candidate experience strategy is based on a deep understanding of what job seekers are looking for, learned through conversations and person-to-person connections between recruiters and candidates. For instance, Land O’Lakes learned their early talent strategy, including attending and hosting events, was listed as one of the most impactful experiences when gathering feedback from candidates and employees. They also learned from focus groups and interviews that candidates in certain job categories were craving video content to better understand what a given role would look like for them.
Land O'Lakes saw significant improvements in engagement by implementing persona-based content, customized job pages, and video content. Adding video content to job description pages led to an increase of up to 7% in conversion.
Their introduction of a conversational AI chatbot with visually interesting job cards increased interactions by over 150%, with a 130% spike in leads and a 30% increase in application clicks through the chatbot. While they hypothesized this would primarily increase engagement for frontline job categories, they saw more interactions with corporate candidates as well.
Land O’Lakes strikes a balance between a streamlined application that delights candidates and reduces time-to-apply, while also capturing necessary information for compliance purposes as a government contractor. They reduced their application time by 45 seconds, leading to fewer drop-offs and improved conversion rates.
Land O'Lakes uses a combination of AI and human interaction in their recruitment process, leveraging technology for initial engagement while preserving human touch for critical stages like interviews.
Land O'Lakes scored exceptionally well in the State of Candidate Experience Report, with an overall score of 80 out of 100, including scores of 89 in Attraction, 79 in Engagement, 70 in Conversion, and 97 in Artificial Intelligence.

Sneak Peek into the State of Candidate Experience Report:

To understand how well some of the world’s leading brands are attracting, engaging, and ultimately converting candidates, Phenom audited the candidate experiences of the Fortune 500 — with an additional analysis on their use of AI. Here’s a preview of what we found:

The average score for Fortune 500 companies in the report was an unsatisfactory score of 51 out of 100, indicating significant room for improvement in all areas of attracting, engaging, and converting candidates.
97% of Fortune 500 career sites did not have social media embedded in the job seeker experience.
89% of Fortune 500 companies failed to provide job recommendations based on candidates' experience level or job titles.
20% had a chatbot
44% had a social application option that parsed data correctly
89% used six or more job aggregators, such as LinkedIn, Indeed, or Monster

If you want to see how your company compares to the Fortune 500, request a personalized candidate experience audit here.

Kevin Binko