“It’s really fulfilling trying to make the job hunting experience for candidates better, and help employers tell their story!”
A Chatterino for 6 years now, Rick is our Head of Digital and Web Development! And with over 20 years of experience developing careers websites and applications across a range of industries and sectors - there’s isn’t anything Rick doesn’t know when it comes to innovative solutions and problem-solving in the digital world!
Do you have a favourite project you’ve worked on at Chatter?
It's like trying to pick your favourite child - they're all great!
I've got a soft spot for the ITV careers website as we learnt *a lot* about accessibility while working with their internal accessibility experts and Shaw Trust. I truly believe the internet should be for everyone, so we apply a lot of that experience to all the websites we build and try to make them as accessible as possible.
The WHSmith’s careers website is pretty swish too - we developed our bespoke 'enriched' job description tech to improve the average ATS job descriptions, encouraging more people to hit ‘apply’.
I'm also really excited about the site we're launching soon for a client (but we’re keeping that one under wraps for now!)
What do clients often forget to consider when briefing a careers website?
The biggest thing is accessibility. You can shout about a great ED&I policy on a website, but if people with accessibility challenges find it difficult to use your website you could be missing out on a lot of great talent too.
Many of the 3rd party 'accessibility' plugins that can be added to websites are somewhat flawed and can often make for a worse experience at times, so at Chatter we're really passionate about proven strategy that creates accessibility and baking it into websites from the ground up.
What’s been one of the most complex digital challenges you’ve faced and what was the solution?
A recent website for the South West Provider Collaborative was a partnership between 8 NHS and private medical companies in the South West covering mental health.
Rather than poach candidates from each other they wanted to 'grow the pot' and encourage more people to move to the South West for a career. The website we built not only inspired and promoted working in the South West but also acts as a job board displaying all the relevant mental health roles from all the providers in one place. It pulls in job feeds from 8 different providers, sourcing the jobs from 4 different ATS systems, and where there’s no API or job feed, we developed a bespoke solution that creates job content by ‘scraping’ the provider websites.
If that wasn't complex enough, since most of the job feeds cover all the roles by that provider and not just the mental health roles, we used AI and developed a code to identify the mental health roles (not easy when the providers name and categorise roles differently!), bringing them together into shared job categories with a helpful and user-friendly job search and job description experience on the website for job hunters.
What exciting things could AI help with in recruitment?
AI has got huge potential to better personalise the experience of candidates. We're already working on tech to better understand what a site visitor is interested in (what jobs and pages they look at, how many times they return to the site etc), but there's a lot of potential for AI to quickly and accurately personalise the site to each individual visitor on a scale not seen before. Helping to find and filter the right candidates for your role.
We could use AI to learn visitors' specific interests and motivations and tailor the website accordingly, for example, suggesting other roles that a candidate might be interested in (either on the site, or even by sending out job alerts). Currently, it’s not entirely accurate, but with AI we could have the ability to better 'understand' all a company's roles and the visitor, and know intelligently which other roles might also be suitable based on things like core skills.
Why should people choose Chatter as a digital partner?
Unlike many of our competitors, our digital team is in-house. It means we’re always on hand and quick to support in any way we can.
And as experts in the people sector, we have a unique understanding and knowledge of what makes for a great careers website and what a good candidate journey looks like in the world of employer branding and recruitment.
We've also got a much better scope for understanding a client's recruitment challenge and objectives, often finding bespoke and effective solutions to resolve them through tech. It may not even be a careers website - we've built all kinds of tools and apps for our clients too, and we love a good challenge!
