In addition to making you hungry, the Smokey Bones website accomplished something else: it was one of the sites that helped one company’s recruiting department when it was looking for models for a new career site.
The company is Geneca, which happens to be a software developer. Its career site is up after a year of work, and features employee photos and a chance to ask the questions you were afraid to.
Like Bloomingdale’s, the site uses “responsive design.”
“All the photos and videos are of, by, and about our people,” says Jess Chipkin, public and community relations director for Geneca. “It’s very personal … and hopefully, very funny.” (Note the graphic I took from the site and put up on the top right.)
Chipkin says the site was more or less Recruiting Director Mike Denton’s baby. Denton tells me tonight in an email that Geneca spent about $5,000 on a designer, but otherwise did the project in house. Once it really started cracking on the actual work, it took three to five people about four months to code it, test it, and fix it.
“We knew we wanted to break the mold of your standard careers site,” Denton says. “Ninety percent of the recruiting sites offer the same information — and there is often little difference in how that information is presented. During our projects requirements phase, we realized we were going down the path frequently traveled. So we scrapped the original design, adapted the content, and built a single page application meant to be highly interactive for the candidate.”
Geneca wanted to build a site, Denton says, that software developers would want to build. In other words, it knew its target market would be looking at the site in a different way than perhaps a typical, non-IT job applicant. “In the end,” he says, “it was a fun, sexy project using current (hot) technologies that shows off our capabilities building complex highly interactive applications, built by software folks for software folks.”