Seamless candidate experience helps IHG exceed global recruiting goals

A rapidly growing hospitality company with brands all over the world needed to provide a great mobile experience for candidates, including searching for jobs in multiple languages across every corner of the globe.

Challenge

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) is a global hotel company with a broad portfolio of brands and ambitious growth plans. The company needed to enrich the user experience for candidates applying for roles in a way that would resonate with applicants around the world, particularly those searching and applying for jobs via a mobile device.

Services:

User experience planning Responsive website design & development Custom application development Mobile job search & apply functionality Multilingual implementation

A rapidly growing hospitality company with brands all over the world needed to provide a great mobile experience for candidates, including searching for jobs in multiple languages across every corner of the globe.

Services:

User experience planning Responsive website design & development Custom application development Mobile job search & apply functionality Multilingual implementation

Challenge

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) is a global hotel company with a broad portfolio of brands and ambitious growth plans. The company needed to enrich the user experience for candidates applying for roles in a way that would resonate with applicants around the world, particularly those searching and applying for jobs via a mobile device.

Responsive web design on multiple devices
Branded job search experience
IHG's family of hotel brands

The key objective of the project was to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the IHG recruiting process for both the company and applicants. In addition to increasing mobile access, IHG sought ways to better educate and inspire candidates by sharing rich content, making connections, raising awareness of the special culture and rewarding career opportunities at IHG. 

Local language support that enables candidates to search and apply for jobs in their native language was also critical for the project’s success, as was providing candidates with clear understanding of the differentiated brand portfolio for IHG, with individually branded experiences for each of the IHG hotel chains around the world.

Strategy

To provide an engaging branded user experience IHG partnered with recruitment marketing experts, Sanger & Eby, to design and develop a job search and application site for each hotel brand, as well as for IHG corporate office positions.

Sanger & Eby designed the website framework and developed functionality to support 14 languages. 

Content reflecting the global IHG employer brand is integrated across the site, along with customized content for each hotel brand.

Geolocation on the site enables candidates to easily identify open opportunities near them. Customized filters, including business functions, brand, language and location, improve search flexibility for users, as well.

Integrated social sharing lets users quickly and easily share job alerts, maximizing referral potential and extending reach, enabling the company to capitalize on one of the most successful recruiting strategies – referrals by existing employees.

Mobile Job Search User Experience

Tech stack

The following languages and platforms were used to bring this project to life:

Languages

HTML5
CSS

Frameworks/tools

ASP.NET
.NET MVC
MS SQL Server
Bootstrap
jQuery
jQuery UI

CMS

Umbraco CMS

APIs/integrations

Taleo API
Lumesse TalentLink API
Google Analytics

Results

Website traffic increased by 18% in the first three months following launch, and users were more engaged, viewing a variety of pages and spending more time on the site. Mobile traffic climbed sharply, with 52% of all site traffic coming from mobile devices.

The largest increase in mobile traffic was in Asia and South America, where many Internet users are mobile-only. Initial results were so positive that IHG quickly moved to roll out the new mobile job search and application process to the Americas, resulting in a truly global, branded careers website with an outstanding candidate experience.

 

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