Hodes recently helped revamp FedEx's career website, which is worth checking out for a few reasons. They've developed the site with a clean and very user-friendly design, used flash in a non-obtrusive way and developed a great unifying theme around employees' talents and how they "deliver" for FedEx.
What's more impressive to me as somewhat of a tech-junkie is the level of integration between front-end technologies (content and display) with the back-end database of jobs. For some examples, take a look at the locations rollovers - when you click through it presents you with jobs in that location. When you research a job category, you're linked into hot job postings for that category. It also allows users to "concept search" for jobs, something I predicted might happen several years ago but has been used by only a few companies and job boards (like CareerBuilder) to date. Notice that job search sits side-by-side with content and graphics. As simple as this all sounds, this isn't something most ATS vendors can handle with their systems architecture, yet it can really enhance the user experience and make the site much easier to navigate.
It makes some degree of sense that the tie-in to the front-end exists in HodesiQ considering that Hodes is an advertising agency that happens to have some some back-end technology components. But what they've done with FedEx's career site is nonetheless impressive. While some of the content areas seem like works-in-progress (phase 2?), overall they've done a nice job on the site and are starting to fulfill some of the potential people imagined when they came out with the HodesiQ system in the first place.
Dave, it is very rewarding to read your observations. We're very proud of the work we've done for FedEx and equally proud of FedEx for challenging and allowing us to create this site for them. FedEx is a strong model for how we have believed for years that a good career website needs form an function to work together. And yes, you're correct, more exciting things are coming for FedEx.
Posted by: Loren Nelson | May 18, 2007 at 09:08 AM