Do you have a favourite project you’ve worked on at Chatter? 

There's been a fair few digital projects that have been great to work on, and quite a bit of variety, so I think I'll go with one of the most recent, which was the WHSmith careers site. 

The project included the kind of variety that we love - bespoke video and content collation, a chatbot, enriched job listings and some particularly neat functionality designed for their organisation. It was a real cross-collaboration success across digital, creative, client service and the WHSmith team to get everything aligned and over the line. We work best as a team when a client approaches us with a problem and trusts us to work with them to define a bespoke solution, and this worked really well here.

Some of the other projects that I've really enjoyed being involved in have been working on our own digital products - they get to the heart of a solution for clients, whether that’s readability and accessibility, or career development, or even consistent social and collateral comms production.

What advice would you give to clients when looking to create a new careers site?

Put yourself in the shoes of your candidates. What do you know about them?  How are they likely to respond to the site, move around it - what are they looking for and what would be useful for them to know? 

Sometimes less is more when it comes to content if it's effectively presented. It's also super important to think about ensuring that the widest audience can access and have a great experience within your digital product. It’s often the first touchpoint to your business and making a great first impression counts, so being accessible with fonts, colours and keyboard navigation should be a priority when the aim is to attract the very best talent. 

Most of our data shows that around 70% of users are now accessing sites on their personal devices, so whatever we create really sings on peoples' mobile phones too, capturing attention and creating the same seamless experience for candidates.

What’s been one of the most complex digital challenges you’ve faced and what was the solution? 

When it comes to building a careers site it’s often quite difficult dealing with the technological elements of an ATS feed. It’s about knowing the questions to ask for filtering from the feed or API we’re receiving, so we’ll work really hard to facilitate conversations and create comprehensive documentation that allows us to manage things in a few ways, creating the best user experience during the project for our clients and for candidates once they land on your site. 

How can AI help with content creation?

We’re beginning to see how AI in content creation can have both advantages and pitfalls for businesses (The Glasgow Willie Wonka experience definitely comes to mind). If used in the right way, there are some great wins that you can make across content creation, but there are occasions where there is little substitute for authentic, human communication. Especially when we’re talking to people about the people experience too. Since the role of brands is to make an emotional connection with their audience, encouraging them to act, it’s worth knowing the right time and place to use AI how it can work as part of the wider mix of communication.

The good stuff:

AI makes a great starting point: AI can automate tasks like generating the initial job description , collating the most basic and perhaps sometimes generic detail to help get up and running more quickly.

There’s also a great opportunity and potential to understand more about candidates who land on website allowing us to personalise content on a more granular scale, and even email communications, or suggest other roles that might be a great fit based on skillset - capturing greater talent for your business or organisation. 

We think AI also has a lot of potential to provide designers with data-driven insights about how websites are used and navigated, analysing large datasets to identify effective language and user-experience improvements that can inform how to build and design websites that can resonate with specific audiences.

The danger zone:

Lack of authenticity can be an issue with AI-generated content. The lack of a genuine voice and culture could hinder attracting candidates to your brand by not seeing themselves as part of your organisation. Or it could be that your company fails to stand out against your competitors, resulting in lost talent. 

AI algorithms trained on already-biased datasets could include discriminatory language in the content it produces so it’s always worth checking across a few sources before rolling out. Sometimes going back and forth on something can incur extra time and resources offsetting the time-saving initially hoped for! 

It’s not a one-size fits all solution and there can be limited creativity -sometimes where you need it most. AI can draft content based on templates or suggested visuals, but it’ll struggle to capture the unique elements that really sell your company and culture, potentially losing the things that spark interest from potential candidates, make a connection and capture their attention.

AI can be a good starting point for content creation, but you should always look to edit and refine AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with your employer brand tone of voice and get across the right messaging. In a world where candidates are increasingly looking for a sense of belonging and worth with their employers, the worst outcome would be for candidates to have a robotic engagement experience. 

Personalised communication showcasing authentic messaging is vital for building a strong employer brand so we recommend that any data you provide for AI to automate is regularly audited to address potential biases, particularly with job description content.

Why should people choose Chatter as a digital partner?

Having a dedicated, in-house digital team really helps us to get to the heart of client solutions and we work really closely with our wider client teams across client service and creative to provide a bespoke service that can flex with what a client might need to get to the very best solution.

We're also on hand and super well-versed when it comes to supporting with technical conversations - whether that’s with in-house teams or even  third party suppliers, creating a smoother process and helping to lift the load from our immediate stakeholders by providing expert and on-demand support. 

And we're pretty fun to work with, too!

What do you enjoy most about working at Chatter?

I love that everyone at Chatter shares the same passion to really deliver the best ideas and solutions for our clients. We're truly a collective team and we’ve been in the recruitment and employer brand arena for a long time - we know our stuff. But we’re also keen to know more and change with the times. Being in-house means we’re able to flex and react to different briefs and changing scopes in a more integrated way.

And I really enjoy being around the team. We’ve fostered a great culture of collaboration and one that really values spending quality time with one another, in and outside of work.