Designing and developing a specialist recruitment website with API and CRM integration.

The Challenge

Hunter Dunning approached us back in 2014 with an outdated website that was extremely content heavy, leaving users feeling confused and unsatisfied. At the time, Hunter Dunning was in the process of rebranding and naturally wanted their new website to reflect the new direction of their business.

Hunter Dunning specialises in property design and maintenance recruitment. Their existing site showcased the jobs on offer, but there was no functionality for applicants to apply online, meaning the process was offline and manual. One of the main features we had to work on with this redesign and development was creating the functionality for users to apply for jobs online, making the process easier for everyone.

The Solution

We wanted to create a website for Hunter Dunning that allowed their team to easily add new job listings, but also create a great experience for potential candidates searching and applying for jobs on the site.

Home Page

To achieve this we needed to strip back the amount of content that was being displayed on the home page and focus on making search a priority. After carrying out research into competitors, it’s a running trend that search is a prominent feature on the home page of recruitment websites. Making this a priority on the home page means that users instantly know what they need to do. On the old version of the site, there was a lot of content and the search wasn’t prominent enough.

Below the search, we’ve introduced a featured jobs block, which was an important feature that needed to remain on the home page. The layout is clear and allows users to apply directly to those jobs in 1 click or find out more.

Jobs Page

With the redesigned job listings page we’ve made sure that there is clear call to actions for each job. The old website relied on users clicking on the job title and this wasn’t always immediately obvious, especially on touch devices. The filtering on this page has also been improved and now stands out more for users instead of being hidden in lots of content.

Application Process

Making sure that the redesign included an application process was a huge part of improving the user experience. After users had found a job they liked we’ve created an application screen where they fill out relevant details, upload a variety of documents and apply for specific jobs. We’ve made sure that users can navigate back to the job listings page at any point by including breadcrumb navigation. This makes it easy for users to explore a variety of jobs quickly.

Development Challenges

Hunter Dunning make use of a cloud based CRM system called Colleague that helps them keep track and manage the recruitment process of jobs they have on their books. Although the website we developed was built on WordPress and their functionality to manually add new jobs a key requirement was to have Colleague talk to WordPress because Hunter Dunning didn’t want to have to post a job to Colleague and then to their website, this would be duplicating the amount of work they needed to do.

We created functionality that enabled Colleague to communicate with WordPress through custom API development that would automate the process of adding a job to WordPress so that they only had to add it once through the Colleague CRM.

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