Communication Through Websites

Recruitment Website - Morrisons

As the fourth largest supermarket in the UK, Morrisons employs around 110,000 people and serves 11 million customers each week. They’re on a never-ending journey to redefine and strengthen who they are, and to speed up and simplify the way they work. Their careers website plays a huge role in doing just that.

We built the first iteration of Morrisons’ site back in 2016. Since then, the business has grown and changed. We’ve discovered that some parts of the site needed to work much harder. We’ve discovered that areas like colleague recruitment and hourly paid manufacturing and logistics needed to be more front and centre. And we’ve discovered that there needed to be a much bigger platform for talking about what Morrisons do – and how they do it.

With the introduction of a new ATS, a less devolved recruitment process for store colleagues, and a brand new TV campaign all happening in a short time frame, we spotted our opportunity.

Our challenge was to develop Morrisons’ talent brand and build on the ‘farm to fork’ ethos, while making sure the brand was flexible enough to attract different audience groups. We also had to make everything work across a busy and highly functional new website.

THE IDEA

We based our creative on a line that captured Morrisons’ hundred-odd year heritage. It had to communicate humanity, friendship, relationships and authenticity. It had to tell the world that Morrisons are still food makers and shopkeepers at heart.

If Morrisons make it, then We Make Morrisons.

We developed a photographic style that mirrored the TV campaign, which was itself inspired by Paul Harvey’s 1978 ‘So God Made a Farmer’ speech. We worked with Morrisons’ brand team to shoot around the UK – Derby, Grimsby, London, Liverpool, Bradford, Newcastle, Huddersfield, Wakefield and more.

Then we put it all to work across the website.

Of course, the look and feel was important. But the functionality was really important.

We incorporated geolocation to clearly and simply point candidates to ‘roles near me’. We focused on content around business priorities such as candidate support and D&I. We added call out promotional boxes that drive traffic to key roles like finance, female store managers, and early talent. We developed a brand new blended search that delivers results as candidates type – directing them to specific content as well as roles. We introduced a social mobility angle with an incredibly innovative CV Builder Bot that helps candidates to quickly and easily build a professional, downloadable, unbranded CV in PDF format.

THE RESULTS

From launch in December 2018, we’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate from 54% to 37%. Visitors now spend an average of 3 minutes 35 seconds on site, up from 2 minutes 20 seconds. And we’ve also managed to achieve a gender split of 56% female to 44% male and a 50/50 split for applications.