Hays dates back to the 17th century. It originally owned wharves and warehouses on the south bank of the River Thames. One of these was called Hays Wharf, and was rebuilt as an enclosed dock after the Great Fire of Southwark in 1861. This still exists, and was converted by Twigg Brown Architects into an office, shopping and catering centre called Hay's Galleria in the 1980s.

Following a strategic review, the company decided in 2003 to become a specialist recruitment and human resources services business by disposing of all its businesses other than Hays Personnel. Hays has a turnover of over £2 billion with the vast majority of its business driven through its website. So the site had to be good.

Flow Interactive and Splendid were asked to tender for the design of the user experience for the new Hays, we won the competitive pitch and started the research and design phase in 2005.

The brief

To redesign the Hays PLC website for jobseekers, companies and Hays consultants with a focus on increasing the amount of relevant job applications.

The solution

The spark that started the Hays project was a large-scale review of the customer experience when dealing with Hays, from the website through to the high street. There were two areas of focus; create a simple way for jobseekers to find the right job for them and to provide an easy mechanism for Hays consultants to create the right job description and find the right candidate for any give position.

• This gave us some areas to focus on
• Create a work class job seeking experience
• Increase the quality of applicants for jobs posted online
• Reduce the amount "chance" applications where people were applying for jobs they were not suited/qualified to do

These target improvements were proven by the research undertaken and this showed us some distinct areas we could improve both from a functionality and content perspective.

We followed our proven user centred design and development process over 4 months (for both the booking engine and the website) and included the following activities.

• Research and heuristic reviews of competitor sites as well as detailed interviews with stakeholders such as each division within Hays, such as Accountancy, Construction as each has its own job seeking needs
• Planning sessions with the technical team at Hays (as the development was to be in-house)
• User testing of the Hays site and those of its competitors by Flow Interactive
• Rapid interaction design and prototyping of the concept and interface, each phase increasing in detail and scope
• Visual design with a focus on expanding the Hays brand palette to create a unique colour way within the recruitment market (research showed the previous blue and orange was used by a large number of recruiters)
• Development of standards compliant HTML and CSS code with full documentation
• A full brand and visual design guidelines document

The development of the user experience for the new Hays website took the best part of 4 months and then a year to develop, some main areas of improvement were;

• Giving job seekers better job descriptions so they didn't apply for the wrong job, thus creating disappointment when they don't get considered
• The ability to see where a job is using Virtual Earth so people can se the location of jobs to determine whether to apply
• A point of contact on every job so eliminating dead ends on the website

The site was launched in 2007 and has been a great success, hitting all its targets and giving some great reasons to undertake a user centered design process.

• A 16-25% increase in relevant candidates registering with Hays and contacting consultants
• A 12% decrease in irrelevant applications, thus freeing up Hays consultants to do a better job

Thanks go to Paul Bishop and Mark Leeks at Splendid for their design work. It is no mean feat to impress the management board of Hays, and with something that is bold, dynamic and takes our online brand to another dimension

Gary Hughes Group Marketing Director, Hays plc