Too Many Clicks (Day 2 at HR Tech)

How many clicks does it take an applicant to find jobs on your website? How many clicks does it take to apply for a job? If the answer to the first question is 17 and the answer to the second is 8, do you think this is too long? On paper, it might not seem like it. However, in reality 17 clicks can take up to over 20 minutes of time. As Maureen Solero, Head of Global Staffing at Novartis joked in her presentation at the HR Technology Conference of how Novartis re-evaluated their applicant website, no one spends 17 clicks doing anything besides choosing an airline seat. So why would you expect an applicant to spend that amount of time searching for your jobs?

Solero noted in her presentation that Novartis’ website was achieving 6 million hits a year with 54% of those visitors being self-professed job seekers. With the experience of also navigating through Novartis herself as a pseudo-candidate, Solero realized that big changes needed to occur.

Collaborating with Kenexa, Novartis began the renovation by engaging their current workforce to get their feedback as to what the staffing needs are. They handed out flip cameras to employees all over the globe to record their beliefs. After legal approval, videos were posted internally and voted on by staff. With over 1500 votes from 135 countries, select videos were used for their external website to promote their recruiting efforts. Other changes besides video presentations including streamlining the visitor experience by reevaluating what screens and steps were necessary, removing the log-in requirement, and using Google maps to help a visitor identify the geographic areas.

Even though Novartis is a huge global company with the need to hire 10,000 people in the coming year, the approach that was undertaken relied on some basic common sense notions like surveying current staff, listening to their needs, and utilizing the results. Novartis is still retooling their website especially in the area of Social Media. However, they have achieved the goals of redesigning employee branding and candidate access. In my opinion, they were able to achieve this with better technology. However conceptually they did not need to reinvent the wheel.

One last note: what was interesting for me about this presentation is Novartis’ accomplishments could easily be adopted by a small or medium sized business. Despite the scope of their goals and mission, it still came down to the basics of employee engagement: ask, listen and implement.

Click here to see Novartis' YouTube channel.