The Challenge

When it comes to job seekers, your employer brand is everything. Just ask Brother International Corporation. They should know. The premier provider of home office and business products went through a highly anticipated rebrand of their career site. In just three weeks, their talent analytics showed a major lift in key success metrics — including total job seekers, page views, and completed applications — used to validate the rebrand and their decision to choose Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform in the first place.

Despite a long history of making innovative and diverse products for homes and businesses, most job seekers either never heard of Brother, or only loosely associated the brand with its printers, fax machines and now retired typewriters. The small snippet about careers on their corporate site was hardly doing the electronics company justice.

Brother’s talent acquisition team needed to reach as many candidates as possible and educate them on Brother’s unique employee value proposition, “at your side” philosophy, and mission: to simplify and enrich the lives of their customers, employees, and communities.

But how do you sell an employer brand with no place to showcase it? The Brother team knew that a new and improved career site — designed to engage passive leads and drive applies with an easy online application process — would help build strong talent pipelines and quality candidates.

The Solution

Brother began researching talent experience solution providers that could expertly — yet quickly — equip them with a career site and meaningful analytics that would inform important talent marketing decisions and eventually justify the purchase. Prerequisites included:

• Workday Certified Select Partner

• Hyper-personalized career site with intelligent search capabilities

• CMS to easily edit and manage their employer brand

• Insightful talent analytics for continuous optimization Phenom was the only provider that was able to do everything they needed, the team shared.

A big selling point was the fact that Phenom is certified to integrate with their Workday Recruiting ATS to provide candidates with a seamless application experience. In addition, the ability to manage their own content and easily make edits to the career site without coding knowledge was important. “Being able to maintain the website internally was a huge piece of what sold us,” they said.

The Results

The Phenom Career Site Brother launched is exactly what Brother’s Director of Talent Marketing and Employee Engagement, Darius Smith, had in mind when planning the rebrand. Between visuals and content, the site impactfully articulates everything a candidate wants to know when considering employment at a company: mission, values, social initiatives — and of course, targeted job opportunities, benefits, and FAQs.

“Our new career site brings our ‘at your side’ philosophy to life, allowing us to communicate our employer brand and attract talent to our organization in the best way possible,” said Smith. “Now, it’s clear to see that Brother is an innovative and forward looking company with a diverse set of products and services.”

The combination of engaging, transparent content such as employee testimonials and videos, coupled with personalized job recommendations and a seamless apply process is driving traffic, engagement, and conversions across the board.

“In just three short weeks, we’re seeing a huge lift in total job seekers, page views, completed applications, and more,” noted Smith. In addition, people are spending significantly more time on Brother’s About Us and Employee Experience pages, with only 5% leaving the career site from those pages. “This shows us that the content on these pages is really being consumed and keeping people interested in learning more.”

In addition to using Phenom Talent Analytics to refine career site content, Brother is able to apply data insights to optimize apply options for candidates. For example, the team noticed that a majority of applicants for their manufacturing roles come from Indeed, rather than LinkedIn. Although Phenom offers candidates the ability to prefill applications by linking various social profiles, Brother was only accommodating LinkedIn on their career site. The new information gleaned from analytics informed their decision to give applicants the ability to apply through their Indeed account as well. The addition of this option decreased apply times for manufacturing applicants and is meeting them where they feel comfortable.

One of the most impactful capabilities of all? Phenom’s hosted apply. “Choosing a Workday-certified solution provider was a must,” said Smith. “And when we decided to run the application process through Phenom, our conversion rates skyrocketed,” he revealed, reporting an average application completion rate of 85% since the rebrand.

Speaking to the powerful AI capabilities Phenom affords Brother, the team had this to say: “Phenom’s AI is brilliant for recruitment marketing — the personalized job recommendations based on skills, interests and browsing history, the website and chatbot remembering visitors’ names — it delights candidates instead of making them feel like they’re just another number.” And it’s not just job seekers who are providing positive feedback. It’s their recruiters, too.

Without it, they wouldn’t be capturing any leads from the chatbot, similar job subscriptions, or partial applications. In addition to using the Phenom CRM to screen passive candidates — which more than doubles the talent pool to put in front of hiring managers — they’re also using it to proactively source for future positions. Before a position is even posted, recruiters can quickly produce a list of qualified candidates to contact. This type of efficiency is extremely helpful, especially for their higher volume positions in sales and marketing.

Efficiency strides can also be attributed to their Phenom Chatbot “Ays” (short for “at your side”). Since the rebrand, Brother is experiencing a 20% lift in unique job seekers engaging with their chatbot. In addition, completed applications from chatbot users is up from 40% to 69%. Apparently, job seekers aren’t the only people taking advantage of the chatbot. The team also noticed an uptick in users looking for customer service and product support — and the Phenom chatbot helped guide Brother in launching a chatbot for their corporate site.

The Future

Moving forward, Brother is eager to start leveraging Phenom Campaigns to engage and nurture more candidates through targeted emails and SMS messages. Considering two-thirds of Brother’s chatbot traffic is coming from mobile, the team plans to do more with Phenom’s texting capabilities to reach even more people as they build out their new employer brand.

On a larger scale, Brother also sees extreme value in Phenom’s Employee Experience to give employees the same experience they give candidates. Today, it’s clear to see Brother is an innovative and forward looking company with a diverse set of products and services. And their success story drives home an important point for all employer brand professionals:

When you’re hiring for one position, 99 percent of people will walk away without the job. But by giving every applicant an amazing candidate experience, they won’t forget your company or their desire to work for you if a future opportunity arises. “That’s the heart of employer branding,” their team shared. “And thanks to help from Phenom, we’re able to deliver.”