SIAST Careers: A case study in web strategy

A better online experience was the prerogative for SIAST’s career redesign. This stemmed from an off-line mandate to increase job applications and awareness of career opportunities. As an educational institute, the focus of their web audience is, appropriately, students and prospective students. In order to properly target a career-seeking audience, we recommended a site separate from the main, student-focused site.

The navigation drives home SIAST’s primary messages of diversity and workplace rewards suited to individuals. The primary needs of site users—viewing current opportunities, and finding SIAST careers—are also addressed at this top level.

With the site as part of SIAST’s “Total Rewards” campaign, the accompanying content was put at the forefront. Integral to the campaign are the stories and testimonials of current employees. Knowing that pages titled “testimonials” get very little traffic (users see them as inauthentic and overly promotional), we instead designed the site’s architecture around providing the stories as a primary part of the site design, available on every page. The implementation keeps the stories close at hand and avoids constantly overwhelming the user with text. Typical user apprehensions over testimonials are lessened by the sincerity of the stories, which focus more on personal growth than on marketing catch-phrases, and are augmented by the photography, which is professional but not polished and uses actual employees rather than unrealistic stock photo models.

SIAST’s stories of Total Rewards have been worked consistently throughout the site, with the diversity of experiences in the testimonials tying in to the overall message. Unlike many corporate careers sites, SIAST has kept the content fresh by adding new testimonials regularly, ensuring that anyone repeatedly checking career postings will see a new story every time.

Common to many institutions, SIAST is tied to an existing careers system that has been outside the scope of the website work to date. Job postings are currently viewed as PDFs, creating problems with searchability and reuse. An eventual reworking of this system will facilitate the spread of job postings to aggregators and allow individual job postings to be dynamically pulled to relevant areas of other SIAST websites.