Case Study: AT&T. AT&T has taken its Recruitment Brand Back

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1 AT&T has taken its Recruitment Brand Back Industry Communications Location Headquartered in Dallas, TX Employees Approximately 250,000.JOBS Microsite Implementation March 2011 Did you know? Facts about AT&T Covering 220 Countries Eight Nobel Prizes Fortune 11 Company Serving corporations in six continents $126.7M in Revenue Listed No. 4 in Diversity Inc. s 2012 Top 50 Companies for Diversity AT&T, like many successful companies, has had a long history of adapting with the ever-changing recruitment landscape. Mergers Create Multiple Companies; Multiple Web Presence; and Multiple Messages This need to adapt was a huge priority in At that point AT&T and Cingular were merging, producing the need for lots of change. There were three different places to apply, little job seeker interaction and they were putting out different messages across their three separate career websites. These three things forced AT&T to rethink their online recruitment strategy. This led them to invest in a new marketing and online recruitment tool, the.jobs top-level domain, creating the website ATT.jobs. Making it Easier for Job Seekers to Find AT&T Jobs AT&T utilized the.jobs URL as an easy to remember destination for job seekers. They knew that if job seekers saw ATT.jobs they would intuitively know that the website was completely tailored to AT&T s employment opportunities. This type of marketing-centered thinking was at the heart of everything they did. AT&T wanted a website that would engage the job seeker and enable them to capture more of the candidates coming to their website. The finished product was a dynamic website with interconnected content that was regularly updated. Job Seekers Shift to Using Search Engines With the launch of ATT.jobs in 2008 it took only four months for the website to surpass 2 million visits and almost 7 million page views. The website was a success, however they realized there was a shift occurring in the behavior of internet job seekers. More and more job seekers were turning to the search engines to find job opportunities. Instead of relying on job boards and aggregators to drive search engine traffic to AT&T jobs, they decided to create their own infrastructure with ATT.jobs at its core. Creating A Search Engine Strategy The first step in this process was developing nine core job groups that would be used as the base of their search engine strategy. The nine core job groups included was the following: Retail Information Technology Engineering/technology Call-center College Technician Segmenting their job groups enabled them to build out specific pages for the search engines to index related to each of the job groups (Figure 1). The marketing focus of ATT.jobs was able to build a dynamic SEO platform with great results. The result was better search engine optimization to the ATT.jobs career portal through grouping jobs in buckets by location and job group categories; ensuring that individual requisitions will show up in search results; driving candidates to jobs where there is no competition like a vendor or job board. CaseStudy.jobs 1

2 Figure 1 This infrastructure build has been a process, but AT&T have been able to see some amazing results. During the first quarter of 2011, ATT.jobs had over 50,000 pages indexed by Google. This led to 95,000 non-paid visits to the site and from those visits 11,000 hit the apply button. This was an increase of 118.7% from quarter one of Taking Their Recruitment Brand Back AT&T was pleased to see quick and positive results from its initial search engine strategy, although recognized very early the untapped potential to control their brand..jobs Microsites Offer a New Solution AT&T recognized very early the untapped potential to control their brand DirectEmployers Association launched the.jobs Microsite platform for companies looking to build online recruiting infrastructure and dominate branded and unbranded search. This revolutionary concept could potentially aid AT&T in reaching millions of candidates, while putting them in a dominate position over competitors by securing many results on relevant search pages instead of winning merely one or two results through traditional search strategies..jobs Microsite domains are chosen by job categories or occupations, locations or keywords. If you have a hot job that you are continually filling or hot locations you have the ability to build a microsite around it and drive targeted niche candidate traffic. In the case of AT&T (Figure 2), they have close to 2,500 jobs open on any given day. These jobs are distributed to relevant microsites through automated technology powered by the.jobs Universe. For example, a Customer Service Representative position in Cerritos, CA will be automatically pushed to ATT-CerritosCallCenter.jobs and a Senior Systems Engineer position will be pushed to ATT- Engineering.jobs. AT&T chose 69 of these different terms to create branded and customized.jobs Microsites. These 69 different microsites are indexable by the search engines and will show up in the organic search engine results. Search engines are able to dive deeper into these microsites finding each new page or job added. The 69 additional.jobs Microsites were launched at the end of February 2011 and by the end of quarter one AT&T s microsites had over 17,000 pages indexed. In about one months time the microsites added 17,000 pages to AT&T s SEO footprint. Figure 2 First Quarter numbers taken from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. CaseStudy.jobs 2

3 After search engines index the pages, they begin to move into search engine results pages (SERPS). The pages then start generating impressions as they are presented to Google. Therefore, these pages were able to generate 30,000 impressions in just over one month (Figure 3). 130 visits were captured from these impressions and once these visitors hit the platform there was a conversion rate of 10% (Figure 4). Just over one month s timeframe 69.JOBS Microsites yielded 30,000 impressions on Google, 130 visits and a 10% conversion rate! Just over one month timeframe yielded 69.JOBS Microsites; 30,000 impressions on Google; 130 visits; 10% conversion rate! Figure 3 The number of pages indexed by search engines is growing from week to week. Since these platforms are optimized for search engines, you will see an initial spike as the websites are launched where search engines are beginning their indexing process. After the initial launch, search engines begin reducing the visits to your website and the upward climb begins. These are the initial pages indexed, before linking strategies are implemented and job categories are built out on each page. Figure 4 Visual of how the sites are trending. Figures 5 and 6 are screenshots of actual proof of how these microsites work. Before launching the microsites, DirectEmployers Association took screenshots of SERPS that.jobs Microsites could potentially win. Before.JOBS Microsites, certain branded searches and very niche branded searches were completely dominated by job boards and aggregators. After only one month of launching the.jobs Microsites, a very different picture is visible. AT&T is starting to compete for these SERPS. CaseStudy.jobs 3

4 Case Study: AT&T Figure 5 Before.JOBS Microsites Figure 6 After JOBS Microsites CaseStudy.jobs 4

5 Figure 7 shows what sort of Google searches lead to the.jobs Microsites. These are all real searches and each one of these job seekers hit apply when they visited the microsite. For example a job seeker searched Wireless Technician Jobs in Washington. This job seeker was presented with ATT-Wireless.jobs and they clicked on it. From there they were able to find a relevant job and hit apply. Figure 7 Real searches returning AT&T.JOBS Microsites and resulting in click to apply. Future Initiatives Recognizing the connect between relevant content and search engine ranking, AT&T will further enhance the design of the.jobs Microsites by adding their employment branding (Figure 8), social components and videos. While the design and additional components are being added to the microsites, AT&T can evaluate analytics and monitor the keywords (illustrated in Figure9) being searched. After a period of evaluation, they can take the keywords that are trending high to create more.jobs Microsites that will capture their targeted candidates. AT&T and DirectEmployers Association will also begin building strategies to interlink the.jobs Microsites to their corporate career website, providing better link relevance for their microsite and higher search engine rankings. Figure 8 AT&T.JOBS Microsite CaseStudy.jobs 5

6 Conclusion SEO Matters!!! Interested in increasing your SEO footprint? Contact a Digital Strategist for more information. Call (866) today! Consider what it would be like to have a building with no windows, no signs and no advertising. Potential candidates will drive past your business, not even realizing you are there. The same thing can happen to your corporate career website if people cannot easily locate it by simply searching online. Certainly those looking for your company should be able to find you without much difficulty, but this may not be the case. With more than a trillion websites now competing for Google s favor, it takes more than a quality website to get noticed. If your company is not visible, you could be missing out on several candidates. Looking for jobs can be a daunting task and despite the wealth of resources available, most candidates rely on major search engines like Google to make the process easier. Here s a fun fact...most job seekers rarely search by company name. Instead, they look for jobs based on location, occupation or title nearly 85% of the time. Try this: Enter a search for software sales jobs in Chicago on Google and see what you find. That s right, pages upon pages of job boards and aggregators and not a single direct-hire company in sight. So the question becomes how does the employer win back this space and become relevant enough to show up first? AT&T AT&T is a global communications Fortune 11 company that has a presence in 220 countries with $126.7M in revenue. They have eight Nobel prizes, 250,000 employees and are serving corporations in six continents. They hire programmers, auditors, installers, developers, supply chain, retail, sales, technicians, engineers, customer service, marketing, supply chain, analysts, and many more. Like most corporations, their Human Resources department focuses on Organizational Design, Training, Benefits, AT&T University, Staffing, Diversity & Inclusion, Compensation, HR Information Systems and HR Business Partners. DIRECTEMPLOYERS ASSOCIATION DirectEmployers Association is a nonprofit HR consortium of leading global employers formed to improve labor market efficiency through the sharing of best practices, research and the development of technology. In accordance with its Corporate By-Laws, the business and affairs of the Association are managed by a Board of Directors consisting of member company representatives. Daily operations are managed by an Executive Director and operations staff at the direction of the President and Board of Directors DirectEmployers Association, Inc., a nonprofit HR consortium of leading global employers. CaseStudy.jobs 6