With more than 160,000 associates across its nationwide organization ranging from corporate staff to merchandising to technology to store associates to college interns to holiday seasonal workers, Macy’s, Inc. has a very wide range of target audiences, each with specific needs, and a massive hiring need.
They’re also competing for the best and brightest candidates with other major employers, including Google, Ernst & Young, Facebook, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Apple. Macy’s needed a way to differentiate itself with these highly desirable candidates, and also to clearly communicate the message that working in the retail industry is more than folding t-shirts in the stores.
To effectively communicate and engage with these disparate audiences, Sanger & Eby and Macy’s partnered to create the Macy’s family of employment brands, clearly differentiating the Macy’s organization as a whole as well as crafting targeted messaging designed to meet the needs of each group.
We designed an overall Macy’s Recruiting brand, with macysJOBS.com as its centerpoint. This umbrella site includes overall information about the organization, as well as housing the company’s Taleo-based application and candidate tracking system. Under this umbrella, we created a series of highly targeted recruiting microsites, each strategically focused on the needs of its specific audience.
To highlight the wide range of career path opportunities and the incredible flexibility Macy’s provides its associates in growing their careers, we created the Career Path Builder tool. Users can select a range of jobs and follow potential career opportunities throughout the organization; a streamlined and sophisticated backend admin system enables the Macy’s team to easily add new career paths or make adjustments to existing ones as the business changes and evolves and careers paths follow.
Social media recruiting is another key element of the Macy’s employer branding strategy. An overarching social media strategy outlined the “big picture” for the organization’s recruiting presence and employer brand in the social mediasphere, with targeted sub-strategies focusing on specific audience needs, utilizing different platforms, messaging, and voice for each audience. Platforms include one of the first implementations of LinkedIn Career Pages, as well as LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, and Twitter.
In 2009, a record 5.5 million candidates visited these sites, resulting in 69,000 new hires. Macy’s was ranked by BusinessWeek as one of the “50 Best Places to Launch a Career” based upon responses from college career advisors and students, and its success continues to grow. 780,000 people visit macysJobs.com each month, and traffic to the mobile site, which features a fully functional job application, is growing exponentially.
Beyond the inspiring success of their recruiting program, we partner with Macy’s on the development of their employment branding and creation of their print and electronic employment advertising nationwide. By any measure, our work has been a key driver in their ability to attract, develop and retain one of the most talented teams in retailing today.
As the fastest growing part of Macy’s, the macys.com organization needed to launch a massive hiring effort, hiring for 700 new positions in less than two years. Four functions in two primary locations (technology and marketing in San Francisco; merchants and creative in NYC) make up the majority of the macys.com team, and Macy’s needed to build this organization, fast.
Sanger & Eby conducted focus groups with each of the four target audiences, determining their interests, how they use online tools in the job search process, and what information they were most looking for—as well as what didn’t ring true or have credibility for them.
From the research, we develop key strategic insights into the target audience, and created a highly focused, highly strategic design to meet those needs.
The solution is a branded, single-page microsite highlighting the two locations where macys.com employees are located: San Francisco and New York. Links from each area go directly to a pre-filtered search in the macysJOBS.com application system, and a highly search-optimized profile of each area is highlighted in the site’s unique but highly usable navigation structure. Because the needs and interests of each of the four target groups is so different, the site features a custom culture video for each group.
An integrated social media strategy utilizes custom targeted career pages on LinkedIn and a targeted Twitter feed, which goes well beyond targeted job postings to feature conversations, ideas, and engagement targets each group’s unique interests.
The beauty business is one of the most profitable businesses in the retail industry, and a key driver for foot traffic in-store. Evolution in the retail beauty industry with the rise of experiential retailers like Sephora and Ulta has transformed the shopping experience, drawing in customers who want to touch and play with the products.
To meet that strong customer need and level the playing field, Macy’s rolled out its Impulse Beauty experience, with open kiosks and an experiential approach on par with these specialty retailers. To complete this experience, Macy’s needed to recruit talented, experienced beauty advisors and counter managers—fast.
Based on strategic research and key insights, Sanger & Eby created a highly visual, aspirational beauty recruiting microsite, the focus of which is to communicate the culture and value of a beauty career at Macy’s. Leveraging culture-focused videos shot in-store and featuring interviews with actual beauty advisors, the fast-paced, gorgeously shot videos bring the beauty career to life.
The resulting site leverages a unique but highly usable navigational paradigm, with clear calls to action for specific content. The primary call to action is to learn more about beauty careers at Macy’s rather than driving users directly through to apply.
A targeted Facebook account with integrated job postings and Twitter feed support the site, with culture, engagement, and frequent job postings for priority roles.
Users have the option to click through to the Macy’s jobs site, where beauty opportunities across the country are listed by state and by store, and candidates can apply online directly into the organization’s applicant tracking and management system.
In 2000, Federated Department Stores (Macy’s) realized that to reach top talent and create depth in their workforce of 167,000+, they needed to tackle the lack of understanding of the retail industry head on. They also knew they’d need to go where that audience was to reach them in a way they would understand and relate to – and this meant primarily through interactive.
The initial recruiting program was dubbed “Retailology,” a label that masterfully legitimized the “science” of a career in retail. Sanger & Eby developed a brand identity, a website at Retailology.com, and a microsite focused on the college market at Retailology.com/college. At the college site, visitors could take interactive store tours, view “week at a glance” calendars for clues about the pace and activities of associates and watch videos of people talking about authentic, on-the-job experiences as well as their hopes and concerns.
With groundbreaking functionality and bold imagery, the site won the Technical Innovation award from the National Association of Colleges & Employers. Featuring a blog, interactive timelines that traced the career profiles of executives, videotaped interviews with key leaders, and photos and videos of people who looked and sounded like the audience on the other side of the screen, the site was designed to attract and educate the caliber of candidates Macy’s sought.