Sportsbet

What makes someone want to work for you? Is it your perks and benefits, the top-tier teams you build, your culture, or your reputation as a great employer? For Sportsbet, answering this question meant defining their target talent segments and discovering what made them tick —then building a careers site just for them. 

It was a project that paid off. At the 2022 ITA awards, Sportsbet took home the award for ‘Best Careers Site’, thanks to its personalisedpersonalized content, targeted landing pages, and authentic employee testimonials. 

Here’s how the team created a careers site that attracts talent in a competitive market, nurtures them along their journey, and convinces them to apply. 

The Challenge

Today’s jobseekers do their homework. They don’t just apply to any company —they want to make sure a potential employer aligns with their values and offers the right growth opportunities. Rather than proving to an employer why they should be hired, today’s jobseeker asks, “What’s in it for me?” 

This presented a challenge for Sportsbet, which at the time had a foundational employer brand offering. Working in the digital e-commerce space in the online wagering sector presented additional considerations, and Sportsbet had to work hard to prove it had a compelling offering. 

For Simone Strachan, these challenges were “part of the appeal” for taking the role as Head of Talent at Sportsbet as well as the ambition to build a high performing team —but there was lots of work to be done. In a highly competitive market, Sportsbet was finding it incredibly difficult to attract quality talent, especially in the tech and data fields. 

“We loosely dabbled in bits and pieces, but there was no employer brand strategy and no true employer brand service offering,” explains Strachan. “I thought of the careers website as our shop front and it hadn’t moved with the times. It wasn’t providing a good experience and didn’t really show an insight into what working at Sportsbet was really like and our awesome Employee Value Proposition.”

“I knew that if we were to have a chance of competing in the market and attracting talent —especially tech talent —that was something we needed to be game-changing in. We needed to get really serious about it.”

The Focus

“The first step was to define how our talent function service offering needed to evolve so that we could understand what capability was required,” explains Strachan. 

“Establishing this enabled us to create a new talent acquisition operating model at Sportsbet and in doing so invest in a permanent resource for the employer brand space. The amazing Quila Cervelli joined us in late January 2022.” 

In September 2021 Strachan also prepared the business case for a career site revamp to justify the costs required for the project. 

“It’s a key challenge many organisationsorganizations face: building the business case for new technology. It sounds easy but it’s difficult to do well,” Strachan explains. 

To build a compelling business case, Strachan first asked “What does Sportsbet want to achieve, what are our business strategic objectives and how does talent acquisition as well as employer branding play into that?” 

This helped her confidently paint the picture for business leaders: “Here are the key employer brand activities we need to perform to be able to attract the talent we need. Here is how it directly relates to enabling the business to achieve its strategic objectives. Here are the metrics and KPIs associated with those initiatives, so we can prove ROI.” 

With the business case built, Strachan knew she needed the right technology to create a compelling careers site and to ensure a more proactive approach to engaging talent. Sportsbet already used the PageUp ATS for recruitment activities, but it needed a top of funnel talent attraction tool to drive increased awareness and consideration of its employer brand. This tool would strengthen proactive sourcing and draw in new applicants.

Enter PageUp Recruitment Marketing: one of the fundamental tools Strachan knew would be “a key contributor to enabling our employer brand strategy to evolve.” 

“When I joined, I knew we needed to change not just how we attracted, but how we engaged talent. Our prior approach was putting ads up on a main job board and getting inundated with often low-quality CVs, or no applications as the roles were so niche: it was labour intensive. We wanted to shift to a proactive sourcing and headhunting approach more broadly, but especially within the tech and data spaces.” 

Strachan’s team prioritisedprioritized launching the “shop front” careers site in December 2021 — as well as the personalisedpersonalized candidate experience that accompanied it —and began to proactively drive traffic to this site. Driving traffic to the Sportsbet careers site was a key strategy to amplify direct sourcing, rather than relying solely on job boards to source talent. 

“The idea was to implement the careers site in late 2021 and then iterate over 2022 with ongoing enhancements. We would subsequently switch on the CRM component when we were in a mature state to meaningfully engage talent,” says Strachan. 

“We needed it to look impressive and authentically show what it’s really like to work at Sportsbet, but importantly we also needed to be able to implement and enhance in an iterative way.” Strachan says. 

“It also needed to talk to the key talent segments we were interested in recruiting and be able to give these visitors relevant up to date info anywhere, any time. Through job boards, events, advertising and social media, we were constantly funnelling traffic back to our careers site. It had to look awesome, and the career site journey needed to match. Quila’s done an awesome job evolving the content on the career website over 2022, and the ability to easily make changes has been critical.”  

The Solution

After implementing PageUp Recruitment Marketing to build an engaging, on-brand careers site, Sportsbet now relies less on recruitment agencies and job boards to source talent. They’re getting higher-quality, more engaged applicants, and have seen a reduction in time and cost metrics. 

“The careers website has been fabulous because I was able to implement it on a short timeline. It was —and I don’t say this lightly —awesome. I was really supported along the way, we had a lot of access to both the careers website and CRM SMEs, and distinct timelines,” says Strachan.

“Since then, we have reduced our Sportsbet average time to fill a role by an average of 13 days, and this has been through tech stack enhancements and a lot of hard work by the talent team. We’ve also dramatically reduced our use of third parties through halving agency placements in six short months.”

A recruitment campaign focussed on early career and career switcher candidates called ‘The Draft’ — “driven by the amazing Sportsbet talent team and project managed by Brooke Siedel” —resulted in 550 applications and five hires for tech, data and analyst roles. These applications were primarily captured through Sportsbet’s new career site, with the team creating a dedicated sub landing page for the program. The page proactively encouraged jobseekers to sign up for Sportsbet’s talent community by expressing interest in ‘The Draft’ 2023. 

Implementing PageUp Recruitment Marketing has also enabled Sportsbet to shift its source of hire to more strategic channels. After revamping its referral program both in terms of the rewards offered and the introduction of a high-touch process, the team relaunched this program internally and through the careers site in March. Since then, Sportsbet has seen the number of hires via referrals increase by 400%.

ROI at a glance

“Post-implementing the careers site, we have seen a substantial lift in all our recruitment metrics and that’s by no coincidence,” Strachan says. “The dashboard both for the CRM and the careers website is really good: it gives you a lot of insights.”

To attract the right applicants, Sportsbet creates dedicated sub-landing pages for key talent segments. Software engineers get served content around Sportsbet’s modern tech stack, and the exciting projects in development. Data Scientists see thought leadership content and testimonials from passionate team members. In the backend, Strachan’s team can quickly create sub-pages and edit content on the fly. 

“I love the fact you can jump in yourself without any tech experience and build the components yourself. At times I was on at night, logged onto the backend and changing images and fonts, uploading content. That empowers smaller teams to do it without a dedicated systems specialist,” she says. 

Sportsbet uses these landing pages to attract their target talent segments to the careers site, then invites participation with custom calls to action (CTAs) to opt in like “Join our talent community”, where individuals can share basic details and remain in touch. Upon receiving these candidate details, the team can place them in a talent pool and nurture them with relevant, engaging content until a suitable role arises. 

“The simplicity of the talent pools and the ability to customisecustomize workflows and automate content going out is such a critical requirement,” Strachan says. 

“We use PageUp Recruitment Marketing as an awareness and consideration tool. The careers site shopfront draws people in, and the CRM gives us a chance to influence perceptions, build awareness of Sportsbet as an employer, increase consideration, and encourage jobseekers to throw their hat in the ring.”