Our audience was becoming more globally diverse, and we recognised that to remain the first choice job board for academics and researchers we needed to expand our selection of services and roles available. We already had a strong database of overseas clients but felt we need to clearly understand their needs to best serve our jobseekers, so we went global!
We sent staff off overseas to expand our global reach and build relationships with international academics. Our staff have jetted off all over the globe, including much of Europe, Dubai, China, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Russia and Hong Kong, as well as many visits to Australia and New Zealand.
This enabled us to fully understand the recruitment processes and challenges in each country we visited, and work directly with recruiters to tailor jobs.ac.uk advertising to attract the best talent to apply through our website.
Building close relationships with all our international clients helped us to not only address specific customer needs but has led to many of our site improvements, such as displaying employer videos, building employer profile pages and hosting dedicated mini-sites for larger recruitment needs.
Not only were these improvements an excellent way for universities, institutions and businesses to showcase what they can offer, they provided the perfect opportunity for jobseekers to get a feel of the employer and potential workplace before applying for roles. Jobseekers were also able to see which thought leaders in their field worked in which University and offered an invaluable insight into the culture. Using video technology meant, for example, that a disabled jobseeker could see how accessible a campus or workplace was before arranging a visit.
This was a very exciting time for the team, developing innovative products and coming up with new entrepreneurial ways of helping the right candidates find their perfect job.
We feel that jobs.ac.uk remains a fantastic interface between growing organisations and people who want to develop and explore their careers. It is still an amazing experience for our staff to meet people at conferences who have found their jobs through this website and still view it as their first choice when looking for jobs in the Higher Education sector.
If you found your job through our website, please get in touch and let us know how it’s going? We’d love to hear and share your stories!
Send your story to: paula@jobs.ac.uk and we’ll be in touch!
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