Top Ways To Convert Candidates: A Career Site Tour With Regions Bank

Career sites that deliver a personalized, engaging candidate experience are the ones that consistently convert job seekers into hires. So what’s the secret behind creating and maintaining one that’s best in class?

Recent CandE award winner Regions Bank walked us through a tour of their own career site, and showed us the features that helped grow and diversify their talent community with 8X more job seekers for 20% faster hires.

View the entire on-demand tour with Region’s Scott Ewert, SVP, Talent Acquisition Senior Manager - Innovation & Strategy, and Melinda Littleton, Vice President, Talent Sourcing Lead, here — or catch the highlights below!

An Iterative Journey

Before you can optimize your career site to consistently convert, you’ve got to make sure it has the capabilities to do the things you want it to do in the first place (think holistic solution that can grow with you versus another fragmented point solution).

That said, you can only bite off so much at one time. “Elevating that candidate experience is an iterative process because the way in which your company is working and the way in which you're trying to attract talent, is going to be an evolution,” pointed out Phenom’s VP of Strategy Lindsay Mareau, during the tour. So, start by considering your top goals.

Two major goals guided Regions’ career site update, according to Ewert:

Create a best-in-class candidate experience that would keep site visitors engaged and exploring.
Attract the right talent. “To us it wasn’t about more candidates — it was more of the right candidates,” Ewert said. That meant designing a home page that would transparently convey Regions’ culture and employee value proposition.

With this in mind, Regions rolled out different career site features in a phased approach and took invaluable learnings from their Phenom Talent Analytics to build out a content strategy candidates can’t resist.

Career Site 1.0

Regions knew a superior user experience would hinge on strong personalization and easy search capabilities. The homepage prioritizes intuitive navigation and spotlights individualized job recommendations in a number of different ways. The common thread? Phenom AI, which gives an effortless front-end experience for candidates and an equally effortless back-end experience for talent teams.

Job categories. With as many as 1,500 jobs open at a time, Littleton and Ewert wanted job seekers to be able to easily filter through relevant options, regardless of whether they’re actively searching, passively browsing, or just looking for a friend.“

Job categories were huge because we're a bank, so we're probably most known for hiring bankers — but we hire for much more than that,” shared Littleton. Using job categories to house various groups and divisions within the company (e.g., accounting, risk management, corporate banking) provides a more intuitive way for candidates — who may have no idea how the organization is structured — to search.“

Having those job categories laid out is critical to help connect candidates with the right opportunities based on what they're looking for and what their interests are,” she continued.

Talent community. The ability to easily create a talent community is an important career site feature. “This was a huge opportunity for us to engage and convert candidates truly based on what their interests are,” Littleton said, adding that it’s a value-add for recruiters, too, empowering them to stay connected to right-fit talent.

Call-to-actions throughout the site invite candidates to join the talent community or set customized job alerts, which has been highly effective in driving conversion. “To have a place to send candidates and connect with them has been really invaluable,” she shared. In fact, with Phenom, they now have 8X the number of candidates they had previously.

Chatbot. Ewert, who calls the career site chatbot a “game changer,” credits the tool with setting the foundation of an easy candidate experience. The chatbot drives conversion, keeping candidates moving nimbly through the site and application process. It also serves as a 24/7 resource for candidate FAQs.

To get the most out of the chatbot, Ewert encourages reviewing unanswered questions. This helps you “train” the tool to get smarter, he said. The library of questions also serves as a great resource for career site content development.

Skills-based search and job recommendations. “[Skills] is where recruiting is going,” Littleton noted. That’s why personalized job recommendations are based around skills — and not just the skills a candidate brings to the table. Job recommendations also consider how skills gained from one role might transfer to another, and how required job skills might connect to a candidate’s interests. “That’s been a huge win for us as it relates to candidates and converting them into those right jobs,” she noted.

Career Site 2.0

Once the groundwork was laid on the homepage, Regions worked to build out their employer brand more extensively with additional content. The best part? Being able to then proactively market to active and passive leads based on their actions via the Phenom CRM.

Landing pages. Regions developed robust landing pages for each job category. The Phenom CMS makes it simple to drop in images, testimonials, videos, and other information to convey how each group is constructed and where a candidate’s skills might fit.

“Because each job category is distinct, we can really customize and personalize the story based on where a candidate clicks,” Littleton said. “We’re able to craft that message at the job category level to help connect and convert those candidates.”

Using job category page links in email and text campaigns is also a great way to point candidates to information relevant to their job search. “It’s been a really nice enhancement in the candidate experience,” Littleton emphasized.

Multi-touch engagement (and re-engagement) strategies. Regions embeds a variety of touchpoints on their career site, so candidates have a choice in how they want to interact regardless of which page their experience starts on.

“Regardless of what stage they’re at — Are they actively looking? Are they browsing? Maybe they're wanting to make a move in the future — we can stay connected to them, and we didn't have a way to do this before Phenom and this career site,” said Littleton. “It’s a way we differentiate ourselves in being able to tell our story proactively and intentionally.”

Header update. Candidate expectations have evolved post-pandemic — career decisions now rest on organizational culture and the day-to-day employee experience rather than just a list of job role responsibilities.

To address this, Regions updated the header which lives at the top of every page of their career site to expand on the “why” behind the company’s employer brand. From culture and benefits to DE&I, the header centralizes key information.

Career Site 3.0: Microsites

Microsites. The TA team created microsites to give candidates even more detailed information about Regions’ job groups and teams. “This is a place where we hope candidates can get lost, but in a good way,” Ewert said. “I think it’s really elevated our EVP because not a lot of companies are doing this level of transparent employer branding.”

“The functionality of these microsites is just really impressive,” Littleton agreed. “We’re also able to embed featured jobs for that category. Again, we’re wanting candidates to get excited about the story that we tell, and be able to provide those conversion opportunities all in the same place.”

Regions also uses their microsite pages in automated Phenom Campaigns, Littleton added. Since the pages are standalone links, they’re able to easily share on social, in emails, and via text. This empowers recruiters to easily maintain relevant connections with high-quality talent, matching outreach to the stage of the job search journey and candidates’ interests and skills.

“We know candidates have a lot of touches before they actually apply. And so by being aware of that and crafting these microsites with that in mind, has been a really great way for us to connect with candidates in a way they want to hear from employers,” Littleton said.

Career Site 4.0

Despite all they’ve already accomplished, Regions is already pursuing what’s next for the career site.

Customized job postings. Because candidates that come in through job boards land directly on the job posting page itself, they end up bypassing all of the carefully curated content across the rest of the site. Ewert explained how they’re starting to compensate for this:

More video. Embedding video showing authentic stories from leaders and employees throughout the site is definitely part of future plans. “That’s a huge win in being able to tell our story … video is really an impactful content channel, and something we’re really leaning into,” Littleton said.

Hosted apply. By implementing Phenom Hosted Apply, not only will every step of the application process stay within the Phenom platform for a truly seamless candidate experience, the team will now have access to more powerful analytics.