The Challenge

When you hear the name Land O’Lakes, Inc., you probably think butter. The company, founded in 1921 by a group of Minnesota dairy farmers, set the standard for butter quality with its sweet cream recipe which forever changed America’s cooking and eating habits.

But with more than 9,000 workers across 50 states and 50 countries around the world, Land O’Lakes does a lot more than make great butter. Today, it’s a Fortune 250 agriculture, manufacturing and technology giant supporting brands including Purina, WinField United, and Truterra. It’s a company committed to advancing technology to solve critical food challenges.

So when COVID hit in March 2020, and the demand for many of their core consumer products spiked, there was an urgency to support their hardworking manufacturing facilities — and in turn, help secure the nation’s food supply.

“We needed to fill open roles immediately and ensure we had robust talent pipelines in place to support our supply chain during such a critical time,” says Dobby Gibson, Digital Communications Manager at Land O’Lakes. Compounding the challenge was the fact that most roles were in remote locations, which can be notoriously hard to fill. “We needed a talent marketing strategy, and we needed one fast,” he recalls.

The Solution

A Phenom customer that went live with the Intelligent Talent Experience platform not even two months prior, Land O’Lakes originally purchased the all-in-one AI solution to improve their employer branding and candidate experience. The Talent Acquisition team was committed to transforming their previous career site from a static page with minimal content and poor search functionality to a lead-generating talent magnet that reflected the company’s amazing brands.

At the time, the company had yet to fully leverage their new Talent CRM, but the pandemic presented the perfect situation to use Phenom’s robust campaigns functionality. In addition, Phenom AI’s ability to identify job seekers’ locations and then serve up the jobs closest to them proved crucial to candidate engagement.

"Our CEO Beth Ford’s message during COVID was clear: We are vital to the nation’s food supply. We wanted to align our career site and talent marketing behind that purpose-driven message,” recounts Gibson. “Given our business, our brands, and our farmer-to-fork scope, we quite literally feed the nation. It’s a big reason why people are excited to come work for us.”

“Feed the Nation” became the theme of Land O’Lakes first end-to-end digital talent marketing campaign, utilizing the Phenom CMS, CRM, and Campaigns. “Instead of having to wait weeks to update our career site, we were in a position to move quickly and adapt,” says Gibson, who put the campaign’s landing page together in less than an hour with drag-and-drop copy, video, and graphics. “None of that’s possible without a tool that allows for it,” he remarks. “Phenom was the guide that set us up to be the hero in this success story.”

After the landing page launched, Gibson sent a campaign launch email to everyone in the talent database. The email drove job seekers to the landing page, which displayed available jobs closest to them, and featured an impactful video of CEO Beth Ford on CNN discussing Land O’Lakes’ vital role in the nation’s food supply.

Land O’Lakes used a number of supporting tactics to drive new job seeker traffic to the landing page. In addition to paid geo-targeted social ads in the ZIP codes surrounding key manufacturing facilities, they also promoted the page via their corporate social channels, and tracked performance using UTM codes via Phenom Analytics. “This allowed us to see how many leads and applications we were driving with each ad unit. Then we were able to adjust creative and spend on-the-fly to optimize ad performance and budget,” reports Gibson.

The Results

In April 2020, Land O’Lakes’ “Feed the Nation” landing page became the second most visited page on their career site, generating almost 16K page views in 11 days — and almost surpassing their home page in traffic. “It was incredible,” says Gibson. “The traffic spikes from both new job seekers and returning job seekers were substantial.”

The campaign email they sent to their Talent Community drove 48 applications, and their geo-targeted paid Facebook ads elicited 19,000 new job seekers from key locations, resulting in 162 leads and 25 applications.

“These results alone made it a successful campaign,” notes Gibson. “But then our CEO shared the landing page on her LinkedIn feed, which amplified our reach even further.” In fact, enough people took notice that Land O’Lakes earned a No. 1 spot for several days in a highly publicized LinkedIn article: Did you Just Lose Your Job? Here’s 10 Brands that Are Hiring.

"I think we were number one because we were fastest — and we were fast because Phenom makes us fast,” said Gibson. “The fact that we were able to get that landing page up the moment we thought of it really paid off.”

The Future

“This campaign has provided us with a repeatable template, so regardless of what we’re trying to do, this combination of Phenom, the right paid social, and our owned channels is an adjustable formula we can use going forward,” says Gibson.

Future campaigns have already been pushed out, built around custom landing pages dedicated to specific locations and talent markets, as well as efforts focused on hard-to-fill positions like animal nutrition scientists.

The team has also begun harnessing the power of Phenom SMS to text candidates and nurture them along in their journey. “Our manufacturing and hourly workers want to text with us from their mobile phone, and we want to meet them where they’re at and give them an outstanding candidate experience.” says Gibson.

From an internal talent perspective, Land O’Lakes is currently piloting Phenom Gigs to explore how the platform can improve workforce mobilization and optimization. By giving employees easy access to project-based opportunities inside the company, the goal is to provide the upskilling, reskilling, and career pathing necessary to grow within the Land O’Lakes ecosystem.

As the pandemic continues to evolve, Land O’Lakes is prepared to handle whatever hiring challenges may come their way. Being able to create culturally relevant campaigns with speed and agility puts the power in the hands of the TA department — exactly where it belongs.