On Thursday the 27th of January the Royal Geographical Society in Central London played host to the 9th Annual Online Recruitment conference (the biggest in Europe, apparently). There was the usual combination of job boards, consultants, technology vendors and in-house recruiters, and a variety of speakers explaining their approach to online recruitment.
The stand-out performance of the day, and the one I felt that in-house recruiters could pick up some really useful tips from, was delivered by Liz Dougal, Head of E-Recruitment for Boots, the pharmacy-led health and beauty group. Boots have a comprehensive recruitment strategy combining the full range of the media spectrum from press, job boards and radio to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. 
They also make use of technologies such as Bluetooth and third party advertising agencies, creative specialists and headhunters in addition to building their own talent pools. In short, they pretty much leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding the right talent. However the focus of this post is actually going to be on the data and research that Boots carried out to really maximise the ROI of their recruitment strategy.
Just to put things into perspective here are some quick stats on Boots:
- Head Quartered in Nottingham
- Over 2500 stores nationwide
- Approx 115,000 employees
- Diverse recruitment need spanning thousands of pharmacist & Christmas temps to hundreds of support office staff, graduates and niche positions such as optometrists.
The central hub for all of Boots’s recruitment activity is the Boots.jobs careers site. Every candidate is driven to Boots.jobs and everything is tracked from ‘collateral to hire’.
One of the first things Liz touched on, and something more and more companies are realising is that the line between their customers and candidates is becoming blurred “as we move into the same online space”. What Boots are acknowledging here is the candidate experience is of vital importance, and that especially includes rejected candidates as they are potential consumers of Boots products, and therefore should have a positive view of Boots. I personally boycotted a large high street retailer for about 8 years after having such a dull work experience placement back in my early teens.
In order to maximise the effectiveness of their online recruitment strategy, Boots carried out several online surveys to understand the needs of candidates, their job seeking behaviour, and ultimately how they arrived at boots.jobs. Furthermore they also performed extensive usability testing of their careers site to optimise the candidate’s experience. The results were used to tweak and adjust aspects of their recruitment strategy if necessary.
The Surveys
A few of the questions and a summary of the results are listed below.
1) What do candidates want from a Careers Site:
- Almost half of respondents (43%) indicated that an easy to use / navigate site was the most important thing.
- 35% indicated useful/current information, which was followed closely clear presentation with 28%.
- Things like video were not massively important with only 4% of votes,
- Whilst some form of interaction was highlighted with 15% (which is a significant portion)
2) How did you arrive at Boots.jobs today? (2 waves of research)
- The majority of candidates in both waves of research (42% and 38%) indicated they directly typed the URL. This is a positive indication that quite a substantial number of candidates who want to discover jobs at Boots, will literally go straight to their website (so brand recognition is high).
- 29% in both waves arrived via a search engine looking for Boots
- 9-11% arrived via a job board
- 4% via a search engine looking for a particular jobs
- 4-5% via another website (Boots identified this as an opportunity to use social media)
3) Other than a job site or an employer’s own site where would you look for job information? (2 waves of research)
- 12%-14% – Facebook or similar
- 12-14% – Recruitment blog or forum
- 3-5% – LinkedIn or similar
- 1% YouTube or similar
- 1% Twitter or similar
- 1% Podcast or similar
Interestingly the latest NORAS online recruitment survey (an online survey of 315,000 job seekers) suggests that the majority of candidates look to social media during the first week of their job search.
Usability Testing
Back in 2009 Boots invited candidates to participate in a research trial to explore the Boots.jobs site while being monitored by specialist software to track both their eye, and mouse cursor movements. 
Liz actually played a video demonstrating some of the sessions and admittedly mentioned it originally made for uncomfortable viewing. It was clear that certain aspects of the site were a bit confusing for candidates or certain areas were not clear. Test subjects are asked to rank their experience afterwards and initially the site didn’t fair too well. However taking into account what they had learned from the first round of testing, a series of changes were introduced from September 2009 leading to a marked increase in the usability scores.
Even if you do a basic exercise yourself, and navigate around your careers site. You’ll probably be surprised at the number of times you unexpectedly leave the site or just simply get confused.
Liz later shared some of the Google Analytics results for the Boots.Jobs site between Aug 2010 & Dec 2010 to illustrate the success they have achieved as a result of all the above efforts.
Google Analytics Dashboard Example (Not Boots)
Boots.jobs received 3,500,000 visits to their site (over 50% of which were new visitors) with over 52 million page views during this period. The most impressive aspect of the stats however was the low bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave without viewing additional pages) which was less than 12%. The average visitor visited almost 15 pages and spent and spent over 10 minutes on the site! Impressive stuff.
In summary, the research Boots have done has allowed them to refine their online recruitment strategy, resulting in higher quality candidates entering their recruitment process, higher traffic numbers visiting their site, and a more positive employer brand image. In terms of ROI they have seen a 30% saving on recruitment spend, 20% reduction in time to hire and approximately 80% of their support staff are recruited directly.
Leveraging your own candidate and careers site data is something I think a lot of direct employers could do better. The insight you can gain from simple candidate surveys, career site visitor surveys, and Google analytics can really help to maximise where and how you spend your recruitment budget. Putting this data together does not have to be massively expensive either. The usability testing initiated by Boots was quite advanced stuff, however even if you carried out some basic usability testing in-house, you’re likely to find ways to improve the experience, after all, when was the last time you searched and applied for a job on your own careers site?
By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK
Direct Recruiting 