Putting careers on the map
Achievements
Career search page has seen 20% increase overall in visits and repeat sessions.
Careers home page 30+% increase in conversion rate to careers search page and 15+% increase in visits and repeat sessions.
Graduates and interns page has seen a 50% increase in conversion rate to career search page and an 80% increase in visits and repeat sessions.
New pages introduced have had excellent traffic and conversions and bounce rate is incredibly low and performs strongly against company targets.
Overview
Working with the careers team and other internal teams at Sage, I designed the new careers section of Sage’s website.
www.sage.com/en-gb/company/careers
Sage is a SaaS product for HR and Accounting software, Sage has over 14,000 employees and they wanted to update the careers section of their site to reflect all the great work they do to make their employees feel supported. They wanted to give careers a clear brand and voice, and in turn see an increase in job applications.
Over the course of the 12-week project the careers section on the Sage site went from 5 pages to 15, with a dedicated navigation.
Benchmarking and research phase
To kick off I gathered all the analytics and usability data on the careers and related pages to benchmark against. I also used click data to determine which content was performing best and which areas of pages were being ignored.
I then launched an in-depth competitor review of both the types of pages available on competitor sites, navigation around them and the kind of content available. This allowed me to suggest a new navigation and page structure and to create page skeletons with suggestions for each one on appropriate information type and stock images, for the team to build upon from a content perspective.
Search page
In order to boost applications, candidates needed to be able to discover available roles quickly and easily. The original job search page was not designed in a mobile-first way, but had a large percentage of mobile traffic. Additionally, a number of industry best practices were not being followed.
I conducted a content audit of all the jobs available on the site to help with structuring new designs so that available jobs and information were easier to find and filter through. This information was then used to help with a wider tidying up of data entry for the careers team. I put together a number of solutions prototypes.
Following feedback, I pitched a new design to the team which solved the issues uncovered. I then worked together with a variety of stakeholders to get the designs approved for development. I worked with design teams to get the designs specced up and then with the development teams to get the designs into production.
Visual design phase
I put together some rough wireframes of the agreed-on pages using Sage’s UI kit so that the careers team could work on the content. I then spent some time with the team’s creative director looking at the visual treatment across all of the pages to give the careers section its own unique feel.
I collaborated with illustration and motion designers to ensure our plans were implementable. With the content completed, I then refined the designs and prepared them for implementation.
Below are the original pages and the new pages.
The result
At the end of the 12 weeks, I handed over all of the work to internal teams to continue implementation. All the work went live quickly and is now being rolled out globally.
The stakeholders were all very happy with the outcome.
"Louise was wonderful to work with! The research phase was super thorough and well articulated. The project delivery was phenomenal, fast and accurate. Louise didn’t need much onboarding and was able to pick up the ins and outs of our UI kit, Design Language System and development needs extremely well. She was able to keep everything on track."
Amanda Francour
Creative Director, Sage