Island Health is the regional health authority serving Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, overseeing hospitals, community care, mental health services, primary care services, lab and imaging services, and much more. With over 27,500 employees, it is one of the largest employers in the region. Like many health authorities and other health-care employers in BC and around the world, it is very challenging to recruit staff. The market is extremely competitive, and there are a huge variety of roles to fill, as well as the need to serve both urban and rural communities.
Diagnosis: Recruitment Headaches
The main Island Health site is built with Drupal and is primarily aimed at patients and patient-centred information. As such, information about working at Island Health was often buried within the larger site. The limitations of Drupal made it difficult for the recruiting team to format careers pages in a visually appealing way or create campaign-specific pages to support their recruitment marketing efforts. The team wanted a site they could easily update and edit without needing a developer.
The careers section of the main site had become bloated over the years and needed to be pared down and reorganized to make information easier to find. The recruitment team also wanted a new design that was modern and visually appealing while adhering to the Island Health brand guidelines.
The new site needed a hosting environment separate from the Drupal site but that still complied with security and privacy requirements.
Treatment Plan: A Better Careers Experience
The project started with a detailed planning phase to audit the current site architecture and content, deciding what should be kept, what needed to be removed and how the information could be reorganized to make it easier to find and more appealing to prospective employees.
Once a sitemap and content strategy were in place, Caorda’s graphic designer got to work on a stunning design that honoured the Island Health brand and incorporated beautiful images from the region as well as photos of the different facilities and some staff members. The new design includes plenty of icons, clear calls-to-action, accordions and other types of content containers to help break up information and custom pop up sections for the different locations throughout the region. A slightly different look and feel was created for the campaign landing pages that would be used by the recruitment team.
After the design was finalized, Caorda’s development team developed the site using WordPress and implemented a user-friendly content builder that Island Health could manage going forward. Templates for all of the different content types were set up to make editing and adding content straightforward for their team. A cool interactive map highlights the different regions within Island Health and an easy-to-use page category feature allows the team to indicate whether the page is part of the main site or a campaign page, automatically applying the appropriate header and footer based on the selection.
Caorda’s IT team identified a secure hosting environment for the site, oversaw the seamless migration to new host, and supported the Island Health IT team to do their security reviews and testing.
The Prognosis: Success !
The end result is a beautiful site that showcases the region and highlights the variety of opportunities available at Island Health to prospective employees. It’s easy for the recruiting team to keep the site up to date and create custom campaign pages whenever needed. Caorda continues to manage the hosting environment, keeping the site secure, up to date, and running smoothly. Collaboration with Island Health continues, with post-launch enhancements including a chat bot feature and a new events calendar to highlight job fairs and other recruiting events.
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