Recruitment Strategy
Taking a website design request and turning it into an opportunity to put strategy design into action.
For the last 4 years, InterVarsity has been experiencing a math problem where things aren’t adding up well.
Current Field Staff Retained + Field Staff Added = Total Field StaffWe were losing staff in both parts of that equation. Staff were leaving the field at higher rates than in past years, and the number of staff being added was dropping.
The reasons for this happening and strategies to fix it were being explored by 2 taskforces.
Problem
Initial Efforts
Recruit Staff Taskforce
I never found out who decided this, but the Recruit Staff Taskforce before I joined was told to update the Work With Us section of our website as a tactic to recruit staff.
They made some initial changes, adding content about the mission and about what campus staff do.
The hypothesis was that the website wasn’t very good at explaining what campus ministry was and so people weren’t interested.
Original
Update
Discovery
It wasn’t working.
On the surface, I could see a few things:
The action to take was pushed waaaaay down the page with no way, with no way to get to it early if you knew what you wanted to do.
While all the right content was there, it was a lot and could be trimmed and better visualized.
But there was something deeper at play.
The audience arriving here was looking for National positions. Generally students leaders came on staff through 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 without other system changes.
Define
We needed a new strategy.
I met with the taskforce to share with them what I had discovered. I also shared that had recently finished the “Designing Strategy” course through IDEOU and asked if they would be willing to let me try out what I had learned.
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?
Ideate
Some really fascinating ideas bubbled up:
Give National boost to internal recruiting– 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.
Host special spring retreats for identified staff candidates
Focus on Christian colleges and universities
All of these were viable — how do you choose?
Investigate
In my course, I learned you have to ask the right questions of your ideas.
What makes this a winning strategy?
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 and 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. Given that it was November, we didn’t think we could have things in place for the January Ambition conference, and we didn’t have the Creative services team time to create a new set of recruiting materials by January either.
So, by default we began the “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.
Design
The next layer of detail.
I am a huge fan of the “Hills” figuring it out + making it happen framework.
While we had figured out an overarching plan, we needed to start filling in the next layer of details.
We were building a marketing funnel
I put together a blank visualization, and with several working sessions, we started filling in the steps a candidate 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.
Deliver
Listen, I need you to know that I try very hard to get InterVarsity to cut text.
Believe me, this is a trimmed version.
Testing & Results
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.
Marketing testing is tricky.
Even though the results weren’t what we’d hope, absolutely.
My partners on the taskforce, HR, Marketing, and the Area Director, had never been part of a process like this– a process that was collaborative, iterative, and adaptive. Even though it wasn’t successful, we did have failures that we turned into lessons that we could pass along to the new Director of Recruiting:
We learned that we were asking candidates to apply before applying and that was causing them to drop out.
We learned that online webinars as we had marketed it 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.
I remain firmly convinced that even if a project isn’t successful in the short-term, the long-term fruit of learning to work together in a user-centered, agile, and collaborative way paves the way for us to do better next time.