Best practice for firms’ graduate recruitment sites
Monday, 24 May 2010Euro RSCG Riley's latest breakfast seminar chose to focus on the issue of graduate website usability, combining a range of useful pointers based on new qualitative research with a case-study from Deloitte.
Held in ‘Bobb's Bar' at the agency's London HQ on Thursday 20th May and introduced by sales & marketing director Tim Lotherington, the well-attended session provided a logical sequel to the previous graduate-focused event back in December (which had concentrated on campus marketing) by looking at how graduates responded to the next stage of the communications process - the online user journey.
Strategy & efficiency director Michael Hoskinson shared the new qualitative research, which had looked into graduates' use of a number of major corporates' sites, including their ability to complete specific tasks, find relevant data, make appropriate decisions and so on. The ‘guinea pigs' were a clutch of students studying a range of disciplines at various Russell Group universities, and the research produced a range of interesting and, in some cases, unexpected insights.
Graduates were characterised as both nervous and naïve in their approach: nervous in that they tended to flip quickly from site to site to find out whether there was any chance of a job, rather than working their way through them more assiduously; and surprisingly naïve in terms of their ability to navigate corporate sites effectively (in contrast to their adept use of more familiar channels such as Facebook).
Another issue to emerge was that of focus: graduates appreciated material that was specifically directed to their needs and easily accessible, with little appetite for - and indeed huge scepticism towards - any form of corporate ‘blurb'. Videos were preferred to text-based profiles (largely on the basis that students thought they could tell "if people were lying" or not), and there was also enthusiasm for graduate-specific microsites and wizards. On the vexed question of social networks, the general view was that these were acceptable if confined to engagement rather than more overtly corporate purposes.
Michael then concluded his presentation with a summary of practical tips covering all aspects of corporate graduate sites.
The second part of the seminar was given over to a case-study by Deloitte graduate recruitment marketing manager Sarah Penrose, who covered among other things the different challenges of pre-and post-recession graduate marketing and the pros and cons of being linked to a major global professional services website.
Her ‘back to basics' approach included enhancing clarity, copy quality, navigation and usability in general, drawing on internal resources wherever possible. In addition, she has now won the internal battle to establish a social media presence for the firm. (Facebook provides the key focus for this, with Twitter not seen to have achieved anything noteworthy to date.)
