IHG needed a way for their franchisees to securely post open positions on the IHG global careers site, while letting the postings connect back to an individual franchise’s website for application completion or next steps. To ensure consistency and appropriate usage, IHG also needed corporate functionality to view metrics by franchise, charge for job postings and more. As IHG is a global company, the solution for franchise partners needed to be available in 5 different languages for HR employees and support job postings in 15 different languages.
How could InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) leverage their brand and heavily-trafficked website to help fill job openings at franchised locations? See how Sanger & Eby utilized rapid prototyping to successfully and securely connect IHG with franchise partners.
Challenge
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®), is an industry-leading hospitality brand with hotels in more than 100 countries. While the IHG website’s career section is highly trafficked by individuals looking for jobs, many of the company’s hotels are franchises and not owned by the corporate structure. Franchisees do not have access to the main IHG careers site or the IHG internal applicant tracking system. This presented a challenge: How could IHG leverage their well-known brand and busy website to help fill job openings at their franchised locations?
Services:
User experience planning Responsive website design & development Custom application development Accessibility testing & compliance Multilingual implementation Data architecture & systems integration Ongoing maintenance & support E-Commerce integration
How could InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) leverage their brand and heavily-trafficked website to help fill job openings at franchised locations? See how Sanger & Eby utilized rapid prototyping to successfully and securely connect IHG with franchise partners.
Services:
User experience planning Responsive website design & development Custom application development Accessibility testing & compliance Multilingual implementation Data architecture & systems integration Ongoing maintenance & support E-Commerce integrationChallenge
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®), is an industry-leading hospitality brand with hotels in more than 100 countries. While the IHG website’s career section is highly trafficked by individuals looking for jobs, many of the company’s hotels are franchises and not owned by the corporate structure. Franchisees do not have access to the main IHG careers site or the IHG internal applicant tracking system. This presented a challenge: How could IHG leverage their well-known brand and busy website to help fill job openings at their franchised locations?
Strategy
Due to the complex project requirements and a short timeline, Sanger & Eby knew that gathering real-time user feedback from IHG corporate and franchisee users would be critical to the successful launch of the IHG Franchise Careers Portal project.
To ensure we kept the IHG business needs at the center and were efficient with time, we implemented a phased approach with milestone check-ins. With each phase, an interactive prototype was developed to illustrate new functionality and user experience prior to web development. The prototypes produced allowed the client to provide very specific, accurate feedback and enabled us to deliver an end product with no surprises.
As security was a top priority, Sanger & Eby worked closely with IHG’s Global Technology team to implement a Single-Sign-On (SSO) process for franchise users to access the system.
In order to securely take online payments, a custom integration with Elavon's Converge Payment Gateway was developed. Since IHG is a global organization with hotels around the world, the credit card processing required a multi-currency option where franchises could pay in over 15 different local currencies based on their country.
Once an MVP (Minimally Viable Product) was established, we piloted the Portal with a small group of hotels. Knowledge gained from the pilot was utilized to make decisions and enhancements to functionality for subsequent releases based on IHG business needs and participant feedback.
Tech stack
The following languages and platforms were used to bring this project to life:
Languages
HTML5
CSS
Frameworks/tools
ASP.NET
Bootstrap
MS SQL Server
Axure R/P
APIs/integrations
SAML 2.0 Single Sign On (SSO)
Azure Web App
Converge Payment Gateway
Results
The IHG Franchise Careers Portal was custom developed and is hosted in Microsoft’s cloud environment. It allows IHG’s franchisees to access the company’s web traffic to fill open positions while maintaining the brand’s consistency and site security.
Through the series of phased releases, the portal was efficiently designed and built working collaboratively with IHG. The response to the new platform has been overwhelmingly successful, with more than a thousand franchises to date utilizing the functionality.