How Recruitment Marketing empowered this University to showcase its EVP and attract more high-quality talent.
The challenge:
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a large school system comprising 13 schools. The University is home to almost 50,000 students and 25,000 team members employed across faculty and support staff. With such a wide-spanning school system, the administrative and HR functions operate under a largely decentraliseddecentralized model. Each division and college handles its own hiring, while the central talent acquisition team act as consultants to offer advice and support.
With up to 4000 requisitions each year, the University needs a steady inflow of high-quality applicants. During the pandemic, the team noticed a decline in applicant volume —with applications per role dropping by almost 65%. While post-pandemic, this has started to rebound, the team started seeking ways to strengthen their hiring strategy, improve applicant quality and compete for talent in a tight talent market. With low unemployment, strong competition from local corporations and more candidates seeking flexible or remote working arrangements, the University needed to revamp its offering to stand out and attract top talent.
The central HR team revamped the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s EVP, highlighting the University’s unique culture and benefits, while leveraging the school’s reputation to entrench its position as an employer of choice in the city of Madison. From here the real challenge began: the team needed a way to showcase this refreshed unified employer brand on its career site, and to create a site that was highly engaging for jobseekers.
The focus:
To create a world-class, user-friendly career site, the team did some research. Using heat mapping, they were able to identify the key elements of the career site that jobseekers were looking for. This showed that jobseekers valued the ability to search or filter roles above all else —so this became a priority in the career site UI development.
When looking for a new career site solution, the team were searching for some key inclusions. The solution needed to be user-friendly and empower the central HR to manage, update and deploy changes to the career site quickly —without web development involvement or high-tech coding skills. They wanted a nimble approach to keep up with the rapid pace of today’s talent market. As the market changed, so should the career site.
A secondary focus was increasing value to the decentraliseddecentralized HR teams. A solution to help build talent pipelines, engage, nurture and convert candidates was among the top priorities.
The solution:
The team opted to use PageUp Recruitment Marketing to transform and uplift their career site. From this, they were able to craft an on-brand, web and mobile-friendly site filled with features designed to convert interest into applications.
The career site features simple navigation, job search functionality and custom CTA’s to encourage jobseekers to hit ‘apply’. Dedicated landing pages can help the University to target jobseekers for its hard-to-fill roles, and custom ‘set-and-forget’ workflows can re-engage candidates throughout the journey through incomplete application reminders and targeted job alerts.
Using Recruitment Marketing, the team have access to in-depth analytics including heat mapping to help fine-tune their approach and understand what content is resonating with jobseekers, and what should be swapped out. The solution pairs seamlessly through 2-way integration with their PageUp ATS, giving a greater insight into the effectiveness of hiring processes, end-to-end.
Within the first week of going live the University saw an 83% start-to-completed application rate, and 24% returning visitors —providing a clear benchmark to monitor future progress. 6 months in, the team have seen a 30% year-on-year increase in submitted applications.
From here the team aim to further enhance their career site with additional landing pages, and employee stories and explore the solution’s personalisationpersonalization features to provide candidates with an unbeatable on-site experience. A careers site optimisedoptimized for conversions is the first step in their goal of using Recruitment Marketing to build robust talent pipelines and drive greater candidate engagement through nurtures, campaigns and ongoing content updates.
Delivering an engaging recruiting experience with the University of Wisconsin-Madison
We’ve launched the PageUp system, a careers website that has a stronger presence and it’s consistent in the way we are posting our jobs.
Christine Ray ,
Onboarding and New Employee Programs Consultant, University of Wisconsin-Madison
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provides organisationsorganizations with greater recruitment efficiencies. But how do they track the applicant experience? Christine Ray, Onboarding and New Employee Programs Consultant, University of Wisconsin-Madison takes a proactive approach by surveying applicants about their experience.
Highly-rated applicant experience
Introducing PageUp has been a positive experience for the University, and this is evident in the feedback it receives from its applicants. “We actually survey our applicants as soon as they submit an application. One of the things we ask is to rate their experience on a one star to five star experience. We overwhelmingly receive either 5-star or 4-star ratings through that survey,” says Ray. What is it about the PageUp system that people love to use? “They love that it’s a quick and easy system, they love that they’re able to upload their material. We’ve had comments about the scheduling of the interviews and allowing them to pick their own times: they really love that feature. They also appreciate that at any point they can see the status of their application. We’ve got great feedback from our applicants,” says Ray.
Best-in-class features
A crucial part of the recruitment process is providing a great candidate experience at every touchpoint. The automated communications feature of the PageUp ATS is proving highly beneficial for the University. “The features that I really like in the system are the automatic communications that are available in the system, which allow us to communicate with our applicants in a timely and a very consistent fashion across campus. We also really like the events scheduling feature and working with our applicants to allow them to choose their interview times and what works best in their schedule.”
A powerful careers site
A user-friendly online job board is imperative for organisationsorganizations to attract top candidates. Thanks to PageUp, Ray and her team have noticed an uplift in the overall end-to-end recruitment experience. “We’ve launched the PageUp system, a careers website that has a stronger presence and it’s consistent in the way we are posting our jobs, which allows our applicants to understand the process,” says Ray. “It’s really provided a better experience for our applicants. We also love the consistent communication that’s able to go out through the system automatically, so we’re in better touch with our applicants.”
Working collaboratively
The foundation for a great partnership between a talent management provider and its users is two-way communication and collaboration. “We love working with PageUp, says Ray. “We have a very large campus and we have a lot of interesting, unique needs. We’ve always been able to work creatively with our Technical Account Manager to make those things happen, and pushed the system in different directions. We’re able to get the information we need and provide a great system for our campus for them to use as well.” Ray describes the relationship with PageUp as “super creative and super collaborative.” “We look forward to our phone calls so we can work out the little questions we may have, and new directions that we may want to move in.”
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