The MeUndies brand is extremely strong. It’s vibrant and playful and has a large following. I mean I’ve been following them on Instagram for years and I hadn’t even purchased their products. Bree already had an idea of some of the elements she wanted to bring into the site that would reflect their brand and started a content project running parallel to the career site project. From the get-go, we knew we would move quickly because they had content, a dedicated point person, and a goal to get a site live before the holidays.

For this project, we chose to create a one-page career site that would incorporate their values, employee testimonials, benefits, and articles. This is a great place to start because it gives candidates access to information they want to know, but doesn’t take along time to develop.

October 25th, 2019: Kick-off Call

Our initial kick-off call started this journey. This is where we went over everything from sections, features, style requirements, and reviewed other websites to get inspiration. The kick-off call gave us an understanding of their likes and dislikes as well as the information we needed to develop a mock-up. The mock-ups we design are not really wireframes. We like to design with as much original content as possible so we determined what assets were available and what assets need to be created. We both walked away from this initial kick-off with a few action items. Bree started activating her team to get employee testimonials, videos and photos, and a copy of the branding guidelines. 

November 1st, 2019: Mock-up

Our goal is to create mock-ups in 3 to 5business days. Once a mockup is complete, we schedule a call to walk through the mockup section by section. We went over the purpose behind the design and discuss the desired candidate behavior. It’s on this call we get the necessary feedback to create a final design. Typically, we would make a second mockup but the design was pretty close so in the interest of time we started developing a clickable site. 

This is also about the time that we sent the instructions to connect the subdomain with our platform. This can be done by a webmaster in about 5 – 10 minutes. Setting up a subdomain allows for a better candidate experience as we can control the nav and remove any sales chatbots etc. Once this is set up, going live is only a hyperlink away! Leading up to the go-live date we had a shortlist of minor changes to make. 

November 11th, 2019: Test Site

We like to send over the clickable site, kind of like a sandbox environment, to let customers click around and show some of their internal team before we jump on a call to talk through edits. It provides an opportunity to write down initial impressions but also take some time to think through the design from the candidate’s perspective. At this point, we still needed some of the final content, but overall we had a good sense of what the site would look like. We were just days away with a few tweaks to make.

November 14th, 2019: Go-live

Our go-live was perfectly timed with a pre-scheduled trip I was making out to LA. It doesn’t always happen but I was able to go into the MeUndies office in Culver City and met with Bree and Ellen Sweeney, the Head of People Operations. We grabbed lunch at Mizlala (still one of my favorite bites in LA so far) and talk about what they love about working at MeUndies and their 2020 plans. With the go-live date just one day away, Bree and I went through the site one last time and found a few things we wanted to update.

With the help of the engineering lead to swap out the old site with our new site, we launched just hours later! 

That’s not to say the site looked perfect. I applaud Bree and her team for not waiting until it was pixel perfect before launching. Why? Because it was better than what they had before and waiting 4 more weeks to get it perfect does more harm than good. 

Lessons

You should definitely go update your career site right this moment, but for the conservative, here are a few more takeaways for you to consider. 

Have a committee:
It’s easier to get buy-in before you start the project. Round up some people who will commit to giving feedback and helping with action items. Bree was able to get things done quickly because she had internal support and commitment. 

Have content:
If you don’t have content, you don’t have a career site. Employees sharing stories and living out your values work best. Photos and videos of your teams working together and being themselves are great too. The content should tell an honest story about what it’s like to work at your company. If you don’t have content, you should plan to create it, but it shouldn’t hold you back from making improvements. You should ask “how can I make my career site better today”?

Minimum Viable Product (MVP):
The real takeaway here is – treat your career site as a product. Build the MVP and adapt a process where you can iterate on your career site to see what resonates with candidates.  You should go live with V1, even if it isn’t perfect. Don’t wait six months to unveil the new site because you’ll be so done with that project that it will sit idle for the next year. If you look at your analytics, you’ll see that there are a lot of repeat visitors. You should be giving them something to get excited about. Go live in one month, updated at 3 months, and perfect at 6 months. 

Your new career site doesn’t need to be 6 or 12 months away. Shoot me a message if you want to talk through your career site design. And don’t forget to visit the MeUndies Career site!