Cisco has gone live with a new career site, one deliberately put together with the idea that job candidates want to hear first and foremost about a company from current employees.
The company started talking internally three years ago about the problems with its career site. It felt the experience was disjointed for candidates, and didn’t move them cleanly and clearly from one place to another, providing a good experience in which they knew where they were at any given time, how to apply for a job, or how to learn more about Cisco Systems from its own workforce.
About nine months ago the company began on changing that. The major players included branding team members like Macy Andrews and Raymond Leung, as well as a couple of outside firms: Tolleson, and The1stMovement.
The new experience has more information, more visuals, and fewer pages to get through to go from point A to point B and find your way to a job.
There’s plenty of social media (you might remember Cisco’s Snapchat launch), and a seemingly equal emphasis on fun as well as on the company’s ambitious goals (like “transform the world”).
As the company went live with the new career site, it also moved to a new applicant tracking system, this one from Avature.
Cisco, like some other companies, tried to use its employees as much as possible in the site. In fact, all the photos were either of employees, or taken by employees. “No stock photography was harmed in the making of our career website,” Andrews jokes. “Our employees represent our company, not marketing, not PR.”