In 2008, UnitedHealth Group was hiring roughly 25,000 people per year to support its U.S.-based operations. While those numbers are certainly impressive, the company’s digital experience was impersonal and not equipped to scale with future growth. See how Horizontal radically reimagined UnitedHealth Group’s hiring process to position them for lasting global success.
Despite their ranking as a top 5 Fortune 500 company, UnitedHealth Group is not a consumer-facing brand. Yet in 2008, they targeted prospective health care professionals — ranging from highly skilled physicians to call-center employees — through traditional, mass media channels including newspaper ads, radio and more. These media channels drove candidates to a single landing jobs-related page which then directed candidates to a generic Taleo solution to track applications and manage communications. The results:
We quickly realized that we UnitedHealth Group needed more than a technical solution — they needed both a foundation to build their digital experience upon and a plan to personally engage candidates throughout the hiring process and beyond. This meant recontextualizing hiring from an HR-only task and thinking of it as a digital marketing platform instead.
To help job candidates better understand the potential of working for UnitedHealth Group, we conducted extensive research into what these audiences wanted from an employer of the organization’s magnitude. And we gained a valuable insight: our ideal candidates were Type A personalities who considered their career a vital part of both their professional and personal lives. To seize the potential of this mentality, we partnered with an advertising agency to develop the employee value proposition that would tether our digital communications going forward.
We developed a new Careers website via Sitecore that became the centerpiece of our digital marketing strategy. Specifically, we created digital content based on:
This resulted in more personal insights about each and every prospect — information we then used to tailor communications that spoke to candidates on a 1:1 level. We also incorporated the data that Taleo originally controlled and brought it within our solution for even more clarity about our audiences.
We combined these efforts by creating a massive segment of the 2 million most valuable prospects and, through Salesforce Marketing Cloud, identified their individual workstyle which we distilled into six distinct persona types. Based on these inputs, UnitedHealth Group is now able to target dynamic content based on personas for even more engaging 1:1 communications.
That was only the beginning. As a proponent of end-to-end experiences, we created a personal dashboard for every applicant and served them tailored content that provided more transparency across every step of the hiring process — including culture articles, interview and advice blogs, benefits information and much more.
The team responsible for implementing our digital marketing strategy was savvy...but as hiring needs skyrocketed, they found themselves looking for updated approaches to accommodate demands. We created a 10-week training program to help UnitedHealth Group’s digital marketers optimize their communication efforts via Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
100%
Salesforce certified
22%
Open rate increase
75%
Improved click rate
Through this experience-driven approach, we’ve empowered marketers to own the entire hiring process and make stronger connections with their most valuable prospects by speaking to both their professional and cultural mindset. The net result has been a massively successful ROI — with a 50% reduction in cost per hire. In addition, our solution has scaled seamlessly as UnitedHealth Group has expanded operations to South America, India and the Philippines. — with career site visits topping over 24 million users per year, supporting 80,000 new hires annually.
The site has been ranked as the #1 job portal by Finley and #14 by Forbes. In addition, it has won the 2011 eHealthcare Leadership Award for Best Recruiting and was awarded Sitecore’s Site of the Year for Best Recruiting Website in 2012.