Employ
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Introduction
Talent acquisition companies Lever, JazzHR, Jobvite and NXTThing RPO jointly have more than 21,000 customers and operate a network of over 1,200 partners. With over 5.8 million annual unique visitors across their web properties, the pressure was on Employ to find a website operations platform that could deliver governance and scalability in the volatile labor market.
“Depending on the market segment we are serving, the majority of our marketing efforts are online and pointing back to the website to drive conversions,” said Samantha Spano, VP of Marketing at Employ. “If we were down for even a couple of hours during critical traffic times, it could have an impact on our overall business performance.”
Approach
Backed by K1 Investment Management, JazzHR and NXTThing RPO were brought together with Jobvite in 2021. In early 2022, the parent company Employ was founded. Six months later, Employ acquired the industry-leading mid-market applicant tracking system, Lever. Combined, Employ has gained a foothold in the recruitment market as the leading provider of talent acquisition solutions and services for SMBs through global enterprises.
As Employ began internal consolidation efforts to bring these four very separate organizations together, a big focus was on reducing tech debt while scaling operations. At the time of the Lever acquisition, all websites were using WordPress, but only JazzHR and Lever were on Pantheon. The remaining portfolio brands were on WP Engine, Flywheel and GoDaddy. With limited internal resources to manage multiple websites, it was challenging to keep up with web hosting monitoring on top of day-to-day site maintenance and new content deployment.
- $20,000
- in annual cost-savings
- 99
- Core Web Vitals on JazzHR
- 5 Brands
- 1 WebOps Platform
Why Consolidate on Pantheon
With no plans for immediate web property consolidation across the brands, the websites would continue running independently of each other on their legacy platforms. Employ’s web development and digital marketing agency 3 Media Web recommended moving all of Employ’s sites to the Pantheon platform.
From the business perspective, “it was not just about having everything in one place for ease of use and accessibility. It was also a cost-saving exercise for us,” said Spano.
Consolidating on Pantheon with 3 Media Web brought in about $20,000 a year in hosting savings. We also knew Pantheon was best of breed, so it was a real win. On top of that, having all of the hosting monitoring in one centralized location, pushing right into our Slack channels, provided real-time notifications in the event of any downtime.”
- Samantha Spano, VP of Marketing at Employ
From the agency’s perspective, Pantheon was a natural choice because of the superior web development workflows. Some of Employ’s brands have internal development teams so working on the same site using different platforms “can just be chaos,” said Step Schwarz, Director of Technology at 3 Media Web. “Pantheon’s Multidev environments and Dev, Test, Live workflow really simplify the process so multiple teams can work at the same time without stepping on each other’s toes.”
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How Downtime Impacts Marketing
It’s a common misconception that downtime is a web team’s problem. It's everyone's problem. With companies like Employ where the sales pipeline heavily relies on digital marketing campaigns and initiatives, losing traffic in the event of an outage means potential revenue loss.
Previously VP of Marketing at JazzHR, Spano remembers the brand’s bad experience with a legacy provider. “We were having uptime issues with our previous partner. Not only were we missing out on critical demand, but our customers were also having trouble accessing our application because they were used to going to our main marketing site to log in to JazzHR.” That created unnecessary pressure on the customer experience teams to keep their customers happy when they needed critical hiring activities to be completed.
The SMB world moves very quickly so the lead volume through our website was always very high. When we switched to Pantheon with 3 Media Web, JazzHR was suddenly faster to load, and we no longer had uptime hiccups.”
- Samantha Spano, VP of Marketing at Employ
The site scored 99 on Google's Core Web Vitals, some of the most critical metrics around web user experience. To improve the score, 3 Media Web implemented Pantheon’s caching solution, used the content delivery network and optimized imagery that were weighing down the site. The traffic went up from an average of 170,000 to 225,000 monthly users.
3 Media Web’s goal is to replicate these achievements with the rest of the brands under Employ’s umbrella to help the recruiting software enterprise accelerate growth and set the stage for continuous expansion.
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