Award winning stuff

I've got a bit of a grin on today as I've been told the last project I worked on at ThirtyThree, Claire’s Careers won this month’s Ri5 award for creativity/excellence in recruitment communications.

 You can see the Ri5 award here: http://www.ri5.co.uk/site/news/article/the-ri-fiver-the-summers-musthave-accessory/

Here's what they had to say:
"In the end, however, a clear majority voted for Claire’s website. “There was some impressive competition in this particular batch of entries, but I like the bravery of the Claire’s campaign in that it hands creative control over to the employees,” said freelance writer Phil Woodford. Mark Braun of 360º was impressed too: “Great engagement and it portrays a real sense of diversity as well as individuality.” And Mark Horley, soon to join TMP Worldwide as head of creative, loved it: “I think this a fantastic example of the employer brand being embedded deep into the organisation. Seeing how the spirit of the brand lives from the UK, to Spain, to Germany, to the Chinnigans (watch the movies) is fantastic. It’s a wonderful example of employee engagement and a real draw for prospective joiners.” And finally, freelance art director Ed Collingwood had this to say: “A nice, welcoming, interactive site that's really on-brand. I particularly like the fact that the video interviews provide a transcript of the dialogue. This attention to accessibility is something which I think is often overlooked when including this kind of content on websites.”

And the site in all it's glory here: http://www.clairescareers.co.uk/

Well done to everyone who worked on this one!

Bringing UGC to recruitment comms

It's been seen before with such campaigns as T-Mobile's Life's for sharing. Instead of going out there and producing expensive content you get your audience to engage with the brand and create their own. It's a concept that has been copied many times - sometimes successfully, e.g. the Milky Bar kid campaign and sometimes unsuccessfully e.g. the Wella upload your own swish campagin.

To my knowlege it's a concept that has never been brought over to the world of Recruitment Comms. So I'm rather pleased to have been involved in a recent project where we did just that.

The idea is simple - via internal comms we asked Claire's employees to upload videos of themselves saying why they loved working @Claire's (with a prize incentive of course). These videos are uploaded to the site, the employee's informed, and they are encouraged to share across their social networks.

The uptake by employee's has been great. I recommending checking out the site www.clairescareers.co.uk/atclaires. At the time of writing we have yet to see if the site will create the viral noise we want. I feel certain that the videos generated by the employees are more than entertaining enough to get attention. Certainly the recruitment comms organisations will be paying attention to this project. It has already acchieved many of it's initial goals - to create something unique (in recruitment) that will show off Claire's as an employer from the ground up. These people aren't directed, their thoughts are their own! Another goal - to create a pan-european experience; this is the first project Claire's have worked on which works across all of their countries. This has defintely been acchieved, we've had videos from Spain, France, UK, Ireland, Germany and more.

There were a few technical problems to overcome - such as how to get the content (a simple upload form solved this) and how to convert the videos; keeping in mind that mobiles and handy cams use a plethera of formats. YouTube provided the answers, every video we've received has been uploaded to YouTube which sorts out issues of compatibility and hosting. Hoorah! Not to mention uploading it to the Claire's YouTube channel means we've been making use of a so far largely neglected social media channel.

I look forward to seeing how the campaign unfolds this year and what noise and attention it receives.

Brand new shiny website for Claire's

Blood, sweat, tears, glitter and sequins! It's been a busy fair few months, but after writing a painstakingly organised 29 page "Website and Technical Solution" document (it was mostly wireframes and designs with explanatory text), producing some very refined and carefully constructed Visio wireframes, many iterations of  interface design, a 50 page copy deck, several meetings and a thorough build and QA cycle the reward is here - a brand new careers website for Claire's - see www.clairescareers.co.uk. (Which they love!)

The old site (see below) was off brand and clunky. While a great piece of work when it was launched it had dated.  The biggest challenge I saw were bring a fashion brand like Claire's to life online while at the same time providing a clean and quick user experience for what is essentially a very content heavy site. The solution, jumbo-drop down.

The new site features at the top level large seasonally updated background imagery to position Claire's Careers not just as a recruitment site but to highlight it's a recruitment site for a fashion brand! As you drill deeper into the content the images become banner headers, randomly selected on page load, so that it is the copy and not the image that dominates. Still, Claire's products and seasonal photography dominate every element of the site from the backgrounds, page heading to the drivers that help guide users to related content on the right hand side of every page.

The jumbo nav lets users drill down to the content most relevant to them in one click rather than a convoluted search through landing pages and various navigation elements.

We wanted to introduce a social element to the site so every page features the latest tweets from the Claire's Career's twitter account. Every page, including job postings, contain share this links to Twitter and Facebook and "Add this" which covers most of the other major social networks.

 

To encourage engagement with the Claire's Careers channels every page also gives the user the ability to quickly join their Twitter, YouTube or Facebook channels. 

The site has been built to be as accessible as possible. While it is not mobile optimised, the way it has been developed means it will work on most smartphones to a degree. Every element of the site has been built with a layer of graceful degradation in mind. If you don't have JavaScript, no problem - you can still use the nav, you can still view video, and any flash components are not core to the journey and are politely hidden from sight. The navigation will need some tweaking to get it fully working on an iPhone, but not much.

To offer a level of interactivity, and to make a break from the tedium of reading through reams of copy, we've introduced video profiles to give an insight into what some Claire's employee's do. To avoid hosting costs, and because it just works, we decided to use YouTube instead of building a bespoke player. By default you will see the video played in full, for example see Glenn Pollards video profile, but you can skip to individual questions from a menu below (our MD's idea, a source of much grumpiness from me, but worth it). Each segment is supported by a transcript for those who are hard of hearing or just sneaking a look while at work.

All drivers are content managed from a central library and all the random seasonal images pull from a set folder. When we want to add the next seasons imagery it will take 5 minutes rather than running through everypage changing individual images.

The homepage features a carousel of drivers, easily content managed, to promote urgent roles and key content in the site. To make it flexible there are different driver types - big image with a link, big image with text and a link (two layouts), or a flash box (with an image fallback). Watch that space for some creative promotions in the future.

Online application - of course one of the biggest parts of the old and this site is the ability to apply entirely online using ThirtyThree's very powerful, and all ours, Applicant Tracking System. And if you don't find what you want today you can sign up for job alerts - forgotten your password, that's a new feature too (surprisingly!).

What else? A global search, links to the many European sister sites (Claire's a transnational company btw), site help, application help and a plan to roll this site out across Europe.

Perhaps the most exciting part of this project is Phase 2. I can't tell you much, it's a big secret at the moment! What I can say is we'll be trying something that, to my knowledge, has never been tried in the recruitment comms industry before. Fingers crossed it'll be a rip-roaring success and we'll be seeing some big accolades for Claire's Careers and ThirtyThree.

UN sustainability campaign wins best website award

I'm very pleased to see that a little website I worked on earlier this year has won an international best website award. http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=647&ArticleID=6761&l=en