DaVita will be rolling out a new career website this week, one that’ll showcase its workplace as a very strong community, not just a company.
As I said when DaVita was named an award finalist this year, DaVita, in the kidney dialysis field, is in the Southwest Airlines genre in that it has a super-strong culture. It ended up winning that award, for military talent, and was honored as the recruiting department of the year in 2009.
Anyhow, on to DaVita’s new site.
One of the drivers of the project was a desire to give a stronger sense of its culture, something it does on the new site; it says in its interview tips that its culture is the No. 1 reason people join DaVita.
“When we looked at our former careers site and removed the names/logos off ours and our competition, they all looked very similar,” says Kristen DesPalmes, manager, recruiting strategy & innovation. “Since we are such a unique culture and employer, we felt our careers site should reflect that and showcase stories. We also were seeing mobile traffic at 26 percent, so we wanted a responsive careers site.”
“Responsive” meaning it’d translate well on different devices, from desktop to laptop to mobile.
Three people (DesPalmes and two others) worked on the site internally. It also got help from T1M in building the site.
It’ll roll out the site this week by showcasing different parts of the site on social media venues. Sunday it played up its careers map; today the interview tips; Tuesday the culture; Wednesday leadership; Thursday the Buzz and Blogs; Friday more about the culture, and Saturday the DaVita lingo
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DaVita now has analytics that show how people are moving through the site, and what’s clicked on and viewed the most. DaVita actually soft-launched the site in April. Since April 4, people are spending 7.8 percent more time (3 minutes and 19 seconds, on average) on the site than they were last year. Twenty nine percent are coming via mobile devices, compared to 19 percent last year, with a sample size of 54,048. DesPalmes says that “visitors are spending almost a minute longer when they come on a mobile device compared to the old site.”
Saks’ Pages
While we’re talking career pages: also working on its career site these days is Saks Fifth Avenue.
It’s particularly focused on hiring Merchandise and Demand Planners. It has a new video, made for jobs in its Planning Organization, that’s polished and corporate. That video, and the video on the main page of Saks’ new site, certainly are less hip-looking than the Bloomie’s site and certainly offer less of the “we’re a community, not a company” thing than DaVita does.
Saks is looking for people who are motivated; like a fast pace; and have analytical/critical thinking as well as problem-solving skills. Retail experience is not a must.
Saks launched a career page on Facebook last year. The company has stores in 20 states in the U.S. and has five internationally licensed stores.