Mars’ Playbook for a Global Career Site Redesign

One career site isn’t enough — not for multinational companies who want to truly customize the candidate experience, anyway. Case in point: Global confectionery leader Mars, who sweetened their employer rebrand with a global career site and 18 localized sites in 8 different languages.

We got an inside look at exactly what that translates to from Mars' Alex Horner, Head of Employer Brand and Talent Sourcing, Americas.

Horner joined us on Talent Experience Live to share tips on how to launch a successful career site redesign, and gave us a tour of the coolest career site features driving candidate (and employee) engagement today — engagement that increased Mars' apply-click conversion rates from 7.5% to as much as 50% on some pages.

See the full tour here ↓ or grab inspiration from our recap below!

A Candidate-First Experience

When Mars undertook a full corporate rebranding three years ago, the employer brand team was also pressed to overhaul their digital properties — including the career site. Despite challenging timelines, Horner and his team launched their first global career site "crazy fast" in just 6 to 7 weeks. Their localized sites would soon follow.

The overarching priority? To provide a much richer candidate experience (CX), transforming the old site from little more than a job board to a destination of engaging, personalized content with first-hand employee perspectives and a smoother application process.

Going Global

From the beginning, Mars also knew it was critical to give local teams the freedom to individualize websites to reflect their geographic region and market while ensuring a consistent experience.

“We wanted to have 'freedom within a framework' — we wanted to have a certain level of governance globally, so that most of the structures of the sites in most tenants are similar,” Horner said. But content and photography can be changed to represent geographic regions and cultures for better engagement. “We wanted to do it in a way that you could differentiate but not so it was becoming the Wild, Wild West,” he explained.

In addition to leveraging a talent experience provider that can provide global and localized career sites with translation support, project leaders also leaned on the following tools to ensure governance while also empowering local teams:

Employer brand guidelines (e.g., acceptable logos, color palettes, fonts)
A clear site map identifying what could be flexible and what couldn’t change

Wow-Worthy Career Site Features

Along with a more intuitive user experience and content tailored to geographic regions, the newly designed career sites includes some pretty stunning features, including:

Employee-generated video. Storytelling videos were a priority on Mars’ new site. “We wanted to leverage it in a way where having a short video could probably tell the same stories as having two or three pages of copy.” For maximum authenticity, they turned to their employees for simple, homemade videos of their unique stories shot on their laptops against inexpensive green screens supplied by Mars.

For one particularly engaging section of the site, employees had the opportunity to document and share their own work history at Mars. With an interactive video creator, internal associates captured their career highlights and accomplishments, and then posted the video to social media sites. More than 1,500 employees participated, according to Horner.

Interactive FAQs. Complementing their chatbot, the UK career site is also piloting a unique way to handle FAQs. Via an integrated platform, candidates get to ask questions and receive answers from specific Mars associates in the UK. The result? A truly personalized repository of information to support candidate decision making, Horner noted.

Get a closer look at career site must-haves: New Year, New Career Site

Real-Time Content Control

You may think that adding or editing such robust features translates to heavy-lifting for the employer brand team. But, the day-to-day demands are low maintenance thanks to their Phenom content management system (CMS). With it, Horner’s team has the ability to work in real-time and make seamless on-the-fly changes.

“That’s one of the benefits of the Phenom system: the CMS is actually very easy to use, so when it comes to changing images, photos, videos, text, or even building the landing pages … you can do things very easily yourself,” Horner said.

Global & Local DE&I Support

Making sure their career sites reflect Mars’ commitment to Inclusion & Diversity goals was another major aspect of the project. And the "freedom-within-a-framework" model is ideal for this need, Horner said. While the global page focuses on company-wide goals, local teams can display content showing candidates the specific Associate Resource Groups (ARGs) available within that market.

Also top of mind? Discouraging bias. To address, Mars focused on two main areas: accessibility for all web users and an accurate representation of the total workforce, not just a segment of it.

Tips for a Successful Career Site Redesign

Horner had these tips for organizations looking to revamp their own career site(s):

1. Focus on high-priority goals first

Ensure you have the main tools that will convert visitors into applicants first (think CRM, a seamless hosted-apply process, chatbot, and talent community). You can always add bells and whistles later.

2. View the site through candidates’ eyes

Ask yourself these questions: What’s most important to job seekers when they land on a career site? What will keep them there longer? What will encourage an apply? And what will keep them engaged with your brand after they leave the site?

3. Accurately represent your organization

Stick to your employee value proposition (EVP) when composing content to entice candidates to join your organization. It should be your guiding light.

4. Follow the data

You’ll get a LOT of requests for upgrades to specific pages. Look at historical data on how much traffic those pages actually get to set priorities. Talent analytics should be an essential part of the process.

“Think about the career site as any kind of consumer website, like Amazon or anywhere where it’s really easy to go in and buy something with one click,” Horner encouraged. “Candidates expect the same now.”

Get a closer look at the tech you need for your own career site redesign:
New Year, New Career Site

Or sign up for a demo to see how Phenom can help!

Jenn Thomas