Objective
Beacon Hill Staffing was seeking to position themselves as a leader in workforce staffing and recruitment services while highlighting its comprehensive services suite across a wide range of industries.
Process
Below is a summary of the Discovery Phase of the Beacon Hill website redesign. If you would like to see the entire projects summary from plan, design, and build check out this link here to IMarc's portfolio.
Stakeholder Interviews
Our process always started with interviewing senior stakeholders. After the project is sold the UX Strategy department needs to understand the full scope of our clients expectations and what they claim they are really trying to solve for. We identified from the C-Suite and Department Directors the:
- Core drivers of the business
- Unique workforce consulting partnerships
- Meaningful employment
- High-quality candidates
- Business goals
- Tell it’s divisions story better
- Provide to its visitors the website as a “tool”
- Present Beacon Hill as “Pioneers of employment in the global economy”
- Audience
- Job seekers looking for a temp or perm job
- Employers looking to hire one to hundreds of people
- New employees of Beacon Hill
- Current contractors on assignment
Competitors
We then identified the competitors of the business, but chose to group them according to how Beacon Hill claimed to want to reach their goals. It's not helpful to a client to remind them of who they compete against every day, so we framed our approach as: “Here are your competitors that":
- Tell the company story
- Have a rock solid Information Architecture
- Use the websites functions as a tool
Analytics
While digging into Beacon Hill's analytics platforms we shared with them that during 2020:
- Over 40% of the websites total traffic was centered around 5 pages. There were 182 pages in the sitemap. 2% of the website saw over 40% of the traffic.
- The job seekers (b2c) part of the website had usurped the homepage of the website in visits and page views (potentially pandemic related)
- The employers page (b2b) part of the website had seen a 200% increase in traffic YoY indicating there should have been a large influx in leads to their most valuable part of the business
- Business to business work accounted for 80%+ of revenue. If the website on initial landing was talking to a different audience, or a business lead generating page was hard to reach/poorly designed/functioning improperly, the missed opportunity for $ was enormous.
- We were seeing a consolidation in page traffic. All pages after their fifth most viewed page “find an office near you” were drastically falling off in visits.
- The mobile experience was cannibalizing the desktops share of visits. The mobile experience was quite poor and second priority for the business. Underserving this new now-majority audience was only hurting the business.
Themes
The last piece of our Discovery process was to present themes. Themes help guide the Strategy part of the project because as we make interations with the client on the Sitemap and eventually Wireframes, it's helpful to remind ourselves what we are marching towards with our work. Here were the themes:
- Design for mobile-first
- Build user flows for our two primary persona's Job Seekers + Employers
- Support a content strategy that speaks the customers language (this means rely on your copywriters, not your managers)
- Only drill down into the website when needed, customers are laser focused when they arrive with their needs - get out of their way
- Using the website, support how the sales team talks to customers on the phone
- Make lead generating locations easy to reach - catch and convert customers asap
- Define clear market areas serviced and use customers own stories to define how their unique problems were solved
Result
The results of the website redesign were fantastic. Two metrics that I am personally proud of was month over month there was an increase in job applications of 1500+ and a 130k increase in pageviews. According to the client this is double their normal intake. After my tenure with the agency ended, the new website we had built enabled our exceptional Digital Marketing team to put in place a strategy using two detailed persona's I built during Discovery that increased Beacon Hill's overall conversion rate by 434%.
Appendix
Process images can be seen below.
