Careers Experience Refresh
The jobs were on a different website.
Context
Workhuman’s careers experience was a thin layer over Workday. Candidates landed, clicked a job title, and left immediately for the application system. Seven in ten sessions ended right there. This left Marketing with no journey data and candidates with no context.
The content to fix it already existed. It just wasn’t reachable during a job search.
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Problem
In September 2025, 2,110 people reached the careers page. Five hundred and eighty-two went anywhere else on workhuman.com. The other 72.4% left, most over to Workday, where the jobs actually lived.
The jobs section barely registered because it wasn’t there: /company/careers/list/ recorded zero pageviews in late August and 269 in September. Everything a candidate came for sat on another company’s domain, which meant no context on the way in and no journey data on the way out.
“Candidates treat us like a job board, not an employer brand experience.”
HEAP, September 2025 — 2,110 careers-homepage visitors, 582 continued on site, 72.4% exit rate.
That cost showed up in three places at once. Candidates evaluated Workhuman on job titles alone, with no culture context to self-select against. Recruiters absorbed the gap and the same questions surfaced again in first interviews. Marketing could not attribute a single application to a campaign, which meant it could not defend the recruiting budget.
“We have no idea what content drives applications.”
Marketing, stakeholder interviews
HX Careers Homepage Exit Rate
HX Careers Homepage Exit Rate
Solution
Candidates need different information at different moments, and the old page failed because it delivered all of it flat, at once, in no particular order. The redesign worked backward from the drop-off data: What were people looking for when they arrived, and where did the page fail?
Sequencing the answer to three questions
Lead with what Workhuman actually is as a place to work, give candidates a reason to believe it, then make the right role easy to find. Three layers, each answering one question before handing off to the next:
“Why Workhuman?”
Careers Homepage:
Reading order is the design: Testimonial video → Who we are → What we value → Ways of working → Jobs. Benefits and team profiles moved down a level onto the job detail tabs, where they answer a question the candidate is actually asking at that point.
“What roles are available?”
Open Positions page:
Filters stay optional while the tags do the scanning. Ex.: Product roles are pink everywhere they appear.
“Is this specific role for me?”
Job Detail page:
Three recommendations, persistent across every tab. This is where sessions stopped ending at one page.
Five tabs, five candidate questions: Role Description, Meet the Team, Culture, Benefits, Location.
Make filtering the primary way in, or keep it optional?
Most of the ten careers sites we audited led with filters, Canva, Figma, Stripe, Notion, Shopify and Atlassian among them. Filter-first was the safe pattern and nobody would have questioned it but filters serve the candidate who already knows they want Product in Dublin, and that wasn’t who we were losing. Almost nobody reached a job listing at all, so the failure sat upstream of search. Filters stayed optional and colour-coded department tags carried the scan, then the targeted searcher scrolls further than they would elsewhere.
The filters are still the first thing on Open Positions but the difference is that nothing is gated behind them. The list renders in full on arrival, and the colour-coded department tags carry the scan.
Five tabs, five candidate questions
The job detail page splits into Role Description, Meet the Team, Culture, Benefits, and Location, each tab mapped to a question a candidate actually asks. What’s the job? Who will I work with? Will I fit in? What’s in it for me? Where and how do I work? Tabs also made content depth independent: the Benefits tab could carry video and four regional card variants without making the Role Description tab heavier.
Each tab is its own URL rather than client-side state. That made the content independently linkable, cacheable and editable by content ops without a deploy.
There’s a structural reason the job page has to carry all of this rather than point back up at it. Across October to December, 16,503 sessions entered the careers section and only 4,436 of them started at the careers homepage, or 27%. Most candidates arrive at Open Positions or at a single job from search or LinkedIn and never see the values, the video or the team content upstream. For these users, the job page isn’t a supplement to the employer brand surface — it IS the employer brand surface.
Recommendations that removed the back button
A persistent right rail, Candidates Also Viewed, carries three related roles across every tab, matched on department first, then location, then seniority, with a recency fallback when a department has fewer than three open roles, which at our headcount was most of the time. The rail is honest about being a category browse, not a match. Pages per session in the jobs section went from 1.0 to three or four.
Ship the simple matching rule, or build the recommendation engine?
Candidates Also Viewed runs on three rules: same department, then same location, then similar seniority. A real model was the more interesting problem and the better answer, and it would have pushed launch by weeks. The crude version shipped on time, tripled pages per session, and produced the click data a real model would need anyway. It recommends by category, not by candidate, so browsing sideways gets you more of what you just looked at.
Impact
Launched 1 October 2025. Measured in HEAP against September 2025.
72.4% → 26.0%
2m 13s → 42s
1m 28s
5,973
2.0
28.9%
Time on page fell with it, from 2m 13s to 42 seconds. People spent two minutes on the old careers page because they were hunting for jobs that weren’t on it, and then seven in ten of them left. In contrast, the new page does its work in forty seconds and hands off.
The old careers page was a doorway to Workday: a candidate clicked a job title and left the site to read it. The whole visit averaged under two minutes and produced no journey data at all. Candidates now spend nearly that long on a single job page, on workhuman.com, with the team, benefits and location content one tab away.
The audience didn’t change size. September drew 2,110 people to the careers homepage; October to December averaged 2,013 a month. Same traffic, two and a half times as many of them going somewhere next.
What these numbers don’t say. Open Positions didn’t exist before October and recorded zero pageviews in August. So this isn’t a page that got better but it’s a step in the journey that moved on-site, and traffic to it is new by definition. Part of September’s exit rate is that same structure: the only next step was Workday, and leaving for Workday is an exit. What I’d defend as the design outcome is that there is now an on-site next step, that Open Positions became the most-entered page on the whole surface, and that the candidates who open a job stay on it for close to a minute and a half. One note on method: HEAP reports this page’s exit rate two ways, and both captures are here: 72.4% to 26.0% user-based in the funnel, 69.2% to 28.4% session-based in the page table. I’ve quoted the funnel throughout; the gap between the two is the counting, not the result.
October carried launch promotion behind it and November carried a LinkedIn push, so neither month is a clean read alone. The number I don’t have is applications — they live in Workday, outside HEAP, and I never got the join. That’s the real gap in this project and the first thing I’d instrument on the next one.
HX Total Careers Page Performance
HX Total Careers Page Performance
Learning
Content is a design constraint, not a production step. The architecture assumed team profiles, benefit copy and video that didn’t exist yet, and content strategy arrived after the structure was set. The structure was right; the schedule paid for it. On anything content-shaped I now bring content in at architecture, not production.
Role Description sits first among the five tabs because I assumed it mattered most. I went back to the tab analytics. Role first was right, across seventy-three roles it outdrew the other four tabs combined, four to one. What I got wrong is the order after it; culture shipped third and finished last, at thirty-seven seconds of dwell against fifty-eight for the tabs either side of it. Given that 73% of sessions never touched the careers homepage, I can’t tell myself candidates got the culture story upstream. They just didn’t want it there. Meet the Team and Benefits are what a candidate opens when they’re deciding, and that’s the order I’d ship now.
Instrument for the business question, not the design question. I built the measurement plan around what HEAP could already see, pageviews on paths I controlled, and ended up with numbers that describe my own architecture as much as they describe candidate behavior. The question Marketing actually asked was which content drives applications. I should have started there and worked backwards to the events, even though it meant a Workday join I’d have had to fight for.
Credits
I owned design end to end — research, architecture, and every screen — inside a group that made the calls together: Amanda on positioning, David on what candidates actually ask and what Workday would allow, Cameron on everything the architecture assumed would exist. Where this case study says ‘we,’ the decision was the group’s.