Graduate careers website

Helping one of the most successful technology solutions companies in the UK to raise its profile

Since its founding in 1993, Softcat has been a phenomenal success story. It now has an annual turnover of £1b, employs over 1,200 people across 7 offices in the UK and has recently opened its first overseas operation in Dublin with plans for more to follow. Now they wanted a careers website that truly reflected that status and would appeal to graduates, experienced hires and apprentices from a highly diverse and inclusive background.

Challenge

Softcat are one of the UK’s leading IT infrastructure providers offering workplace, datacentre, networking and security solutions. It’s a vibrant sales-led culture and the company regularly appears in the Best Places to Work in the UK awards. The problem however, was that particularly graduates had very little pre-awareness of them with the careers website being dated and very non-user friendly in terms poor navigation and the sheer volume of content it carried. A further goal was to raise the number of females applying for and joining them; something that the IT sector traditionally struggled with.

Solution

WDAD Communications pitched for the business and were appointed to develop a new employer brand including a careers website to provide clear, easy to access and digest information around the sales and other career opportunities on offer. As well as selling the usps of the organisation which remains a fun and invigorating work environment, the website also needed to convey the reality that Softcat had matured as a business and had serious career opportunities for those that had the cultural fit and could rise to the challenge.

Results

After an internal and external programme of research, we identified a core EVP and took this forward into our creative thinking. The resultant careers website – jobs.softcat.com – was just part of the employer brand roll out. The site itself:

  • was designed and built from mobile ‘upwards’
  • was image-led with minimal copy
  • designed with clear navigation and user journeys in mind so that relevant content was easy to find
  • uses video prominently throughout the careers website
  • makes use of staff profiles and embeds social media content to inform and engage visitors
  • vastly improved the user interface with the existing ATS.