GroupM’s Predictions for the Best Career Sites

As part of our Talent Blazers series, we spoke with Michael Wright, GroupM’s Global Head of Talent Acquisition, to find out what the best career sites are doing to stay ahead of the game.

When you’re competing for highly skilled candidates against the likes of Deloitte, PwC, Google and Twitter, you’ve got to have a killer career site. 

Michael Wright, GroupM’s Global Head of Talent Acquisition, talks about what the media agency does to stand out among giants, and outlines his predictions for how high-performing career sites will evolve in the near future.

The best career sites are interactive

Despite already having one of the best interactive career sites around, GroupM is constantly looking for ways to improve it. After all, this is where potential candidates come to get a sense of the company, so the site needs to be as engaging as possible. 

One way they achieve this is by using employee stories and video job ads – the two highest-ranked video types in the State of Video in Talent (SOVT) 2021 report – to communicate GroupM’s core values, who the company is, and what it does. 

“Through a clever integration of our application tracking system and VideoMyJob, we’re able to showcase videos within the actual job posting itself on the career site. We have multiple videos that we’ll use for different locations, for different types of positions,” Michael says. 

“It’s still quite novel, I think, for people to see videos embedded within the HTML of a job posting, and it doesn’t hurt the speed of the page rendering on a browser. So even if you don’t have amazing internet, you’ll still find the page renders quickly.”

In the SOVT, 86% of surveyed respondents said one of the benefits of their video strategy was an increase in job ad reach or views – something Michael has witnessed firsthand at GroupM.

Boosting interactivity with virtual reality-style job ads

Another innovative feature of GroupM’s career site is a 3D virtual tour of the agency’s office, which they’ve also integrated into the job ads.

“We took some high-quality pictures of the office space and included them in the ads. Our thinking was that people could picture themselves working at Group M,” Michael says. 

“We dropped audio and video files inside that virtual tour too, so it’s not just pretty pictures – it gives people more ways to interact with the content.”

Wondering if all these video strategies work? The proof is in the pudding – or, rather, the metrics, which Michael and his team keep a close eye on. He says the average dwell time on their site is solid – around three minutes, while the bounce rate is typically below 50%.  

This experience tracks with findings in the SOVT, where advanced video users saw more traffic to and time spent on their company careers site, as well as an increased volume of applicants.

How will high-performing career sites evolve in the near future?

Fast-forward two or three years and what does Michael expect the best career sites to have in common? Well, they’ll have gotten rid of cumbersome logins, for starters, and there will be better personalization.

“We’re seeing, I think, lightweight personalization on sites. For example, if I’m a software engineer, I’ll see stuff that’s relevant to the work that I do,” Michael says. “If I’m a digital analytics person, I’ll see things on the site when I return to it that speaks to me and my skill set, and perhaps my level as well. So you’ll start to see more thoughtful segmentation about the content presented to people.”

What Michael also suspects – and hopes – to see more of, are personalized video responses. That is, real people answering common questions that currently go unaddressed in what he calls the “thin content copy that exists on the traditional career sites”.

“What I’m referring to here is not necessarily people like me – we get lots of face time with the candidates anyway – but hiring managers and people that are more relevant to answer the question,” Michael says. “We want people in the organization presenting answers to questions and having those answers easily discoverable.” 

Just over a third (35%) of surveyed respondents in the SOVT have already amplified job ads with videos that feature a recruiter or hiring manager. As the war for talent ramps up, could the personalized video responses Michael describes be the next tactic that helps companies cut through and supercharge their storytelling? Watch this space.

Want to learn more?

Watch the full interview with GroupM’s Michael Wright.