Taking a job like no other.
The Challenge: InterVarsity had been experiencing a decline in new staff applying. Leadership believed that the website didn’t cast enough vision for coming on staff as a campus minister.
The Goal: Design a webpage that would better convey the vision and benefits of coming on staff.
My Role: Web Designer
Discover
The Recruit Staff Taskforce was told to update the Work With Us section of our website to increase incoming field staff.
Original
Update
It wasn’t working.
Can you see why?
Users were looking for National positions.
Potential campus minister candidates arrived via a personal invitation from their staff worker who directly emailed them an application. The InterVarsity National site almost never factored into the process.
It didn’t matter what was done on this section of the website — it would never move the needle to increase incoming field staff.
Define
We needed a new strategy.
I met with the taskforce to share with them what I had discovered. Going at a layer above the website, I asked the taskforce to rethink the task entirely — How might we increase the number of qualified applicants outside of our usual process?
Together, the Director of Marketing, HR Director, and a Field Area Director ideated:
Some really fascinating ideas bubbled up:
Create a much more high-quality set of recruiting materials that Area Directors can use.
Go after super dedicated students — recruit hard at the upcoming Ambition conference that I was helping to design.
Focus on external candidates in certain geographic regions that are more desperate for staff — work through a market funnel and learn from the pilot.
Investigate & Interrogate the ideas
What makes this a winning option?
What would have to be true for this to work?
How will we know it worked?
What barriers will we face?
What unknowns do we need to find out?
We took every single concept above, started asking questions of them, and I synthesized the top 3.
Choose
It was a good thing we asked what the barriers were, because those became the deciding factors. Because of the timeline, we chose to “Focus on External Candidates living in Desperate Geographies who agree to receive them”. Probably could have come up with a catchier title 😅
Other than timing, there were other reasons to try this strategy first.
Not all geographies needed staff — why do a blanket strategy?
We were also trying out a whole new process, having 2–3 pilot geographies would help keep the effort smaller.
Sadly, some geographies weren’t open to external candidates even if they were desperate.
Define
We had some things figured out, but now it was time to get really specific.
I put together a blank visualization of a marketing funnel, and with several collaborative working sessions, we started filling in the steps a candidate and HR partner would walk through.
With that roughed out, we had figured out exactly what we needed to make:
Ads
Landing Page
Webinar Registration Page
Discernment Form
Automatic follow-up email after submission of discernment form
Phone-call screening questions
Move on congratulations email
No thanks email
Application packet to pass on to the Regional Director.
With that list of deliverables in place, we could start the downhill slide to getting the marketing funnel running.
Marketing testing is tricky.
Deliver
I nearly always have user testing in my projects, but marketing funnels are a little bit of a different story. Your best feedback will actually be from putting it into production and letting the market tell you in as cost & time effective ways if you’ve made the right decisions.
Through this short term test, we saw 5% of people convert at the top, and very few make it to the absolutely bottom.
We learned that the discernment form was being interpretred as “I need to apply to apply.” In today’s job market, you can’t do that.
We learned that online webinars weren’t compelling.
We learned that the new design on the landing page was more effective than what was currently on Work With Us page.