Dunelm careers site was designed to deliver a great online candidate experience aligned with target audience and roles. It is intelligently structured for candidates to find the information they need to find and apply for a role, learn about Dunelm, the culture and what makes them tick!
Dunelm is the market leader in the £11bn UK homewares market. The Group operates around
170 stores nationwide as well as an online store. Dunelm is a fast-paced and growing business, typically recruiting for over 3000 roles annually.
Creating careers they’ll love
Recruiting people from all backgrounds for a variety of roles, Dunelm wanted to revamp their careers site to engage with their wide and diverse audience. The tough, competitive industry in which they operate means being ready to constantly innovate and improve – and that’s exactly what they Recruitment Team have done.
The brief was to deliver a great online candidate experience aligned with Dunelm target audience and roles. The careers site needed to show people what it is like to work at Dunelm with information to understand the roles using dynamic content to create a great user-defined experience along with videos and stories of employees. Core to this was the need to consistently communicate the employer brand and culture, delivering an improved experience for candidates, with a high degree of measurability.
The new careers site was designed to reflect the new brand that shared the Dunelm story and ‘becoming part of the family’. It shows bright, entrepreneurial and switched on talent where they can fit right in.
A fresh and dynamic approach
The project objectives were to create a website that:
• Engages with the diverse audience that Dunelm wanted to attract.
• Gives the candidate a more personalised experience – if candidates don’t know what career opportunities are available that would fit the skills they have, they could access the career finder tool to help.
• Is accessible for all candidates through web accessibility tools, provided through Recite Me.
Dunelm worked with partners Eploy and Havas People to connect the brand with talent through effective communication and enhance the candidate journey based on different personas. The new careers site was fully integrated to the Eploy ATS and Recruitment CRM to reduce administration and provide a stellar candidate experience a seamless experience.
Define, Design, Develop
Planning out the structure and elements of the careers site was crucial to creating a candidate centric careers site.
The careers site is intelligently structured for candidates to find the information they need to find
and apply for a role and learn about Dunelm. Candidates can even take a quick online quiz to drill down on skills and interests to provide possible career areas to consider within Dunelm.
The careers site is mobile responsive, optimised for multiple devices - mobile, tablet and desktop to automatically respond to users behaviour and environment. Consideration to an inclusive recruitment process was delivered through removing barriers to ensure opportunities are fully accessible to all. Dunelm turned to Eploy Marketplace Partner, Recite Me, to provide their web accessibility toolbar. The Recite Me toolbar enables candidates to customise their experience of the Dunelm careers site to suit their needs with tools such as text-to-speech, assistive reading aids and translations, ensuring Dunelm can reach the widest possible audience.
The site navigation is flexible and intuitive for candidates which provides an optimum user experience. Job search is now across the site with extensive filtering options and clever searches by keyword, role type and location. Each job has its own page with detailed job descriptions, Google Maps and employee benefits so candidates can apply to be part of the Dunelm success story. The job pages also encourage social sharing to spread the search for talent to become part of the Dunelm family.
The careers site is now in line with the Dunelm brand and values to demonstrate the culture of what it is like to work there. Commenting on the launch, Paul Jenkins, Senior Resourcing Manager at Dunelm said “We have achieved a fresh approach to attracting and engaging with talent who can see what it’s like to work there.
Commenting on the launch, Paul Jenkins, Senior Resourcing Manager at Dunelm said “We have achieved a fresh approach to attracting and engaging with talent who can see what it’s like to be part of the Dunelm family, attracting and immersing candidates in the brand before, during and
after application. Candidates can register easily and control their preferences, personal data and job alerts. Candidate registration also has built-in CV parsing to automatically populate candidate details within our ATS.”
Successfully onboarding new hires
Most recently, Dunelm has improved engagement with new hires through Eploy’s onboarding module, automating a previously manual process. This seamless process brings together the necessary teams to ensure new hires are prepared for their first day – in advance!
The Recruitment Team create the placement which is then picked up by People Services on their dashboard to prepare the offer documentation and contract and email alert the candidate. Candidates can quickly and easily access all the necessary documents through the candidate portal and submit their information online – including e-signing to complete the onboarding process.
Eploy dashboards now show all candidates under offer, contract or offer accepted and contract rejected enabling the recruitment team to monitor the key recruitment performance indicators and track performance over time.
Self-service recruitment analytics
Dunelm has access to real-time analytics which are embedded within the career site to enable tracking and monitoring of the site impact, engagement and conversion. Everything from 
registration to applications measurement and which roles are attracting the most interest means they can continually monitor results and evolve the careers site for the best job seeker experience and results.
Dunelm can clearly see the split of devices that are visiting the careers site which reinforces the requirement for the responsive web design that was used to ensure a consistent candidate experience across devices.
Even in the early stages of the careers site launch, Dunelm recognised the benefits of not only a more brand aligned experience but increased visitors/users and increased sessions.
Total Users (visitors/engagement) increased from 49,907 to 93,747 – a 92% increase.
Using dynamic content has created a user-defined experience that uses videos of employees to share their stories of working at Dunelm. The metrics are beginning to tell a story of an improved experience for candidates that shows increased engagement through a personalised experience. Dunelm has seen an increase in careers site Users, New Users, Sessions and Page Views.
Of those visitors to the careers site who start the registration process, 94% complete registration, of which 95% also apply for a job. The team are continually looking at where improvements can be made based on the analytics available to them.
“The dashboards underpin our activity, providing detailed views of areas for review. For example, we had visibility that less applications were coming through sponsored ads, yet one month after go live of the new careers site we saw a 50% increase in direct applications via the careers site for the same period the prior year”.
“By understanding what was working on the existing Dunelm careers site through Google Analytics and our E-recruitment dashboards, we could drill down on the types of candidates who were applying for jobs that gave us insight to create functionality and content for different user demographics. Using findings from the research, changes were recommended to page layouts, page content, job filtering, calls to action and navigation. A complete redesign was undertaken to make the Dunelm careers site a separate entity to the consumer site to really show the Dunelm personality and authentic story of a career in retail that guides the candidate through the experience”. Paul Jenkins, Senior Resourcing Manager at Dunelm
Chris Bogh, CTO at Eploy commented “Dunelm were fully immersed in the creative process and the results of the careers site speak for themselves. It conveys engaging content, the Dunelm brand and automatically responds to candidates’ preferences. The careers site is supporting the Dunelm market leading brand and we are very much looking forward to working together to innovate and improve”.