The corporate websites of Hudson Highland Group needed a refresh to reflect the company’s current business and structure. The global marketing team undertook a redesign with a few goals in mind

• Elevate the company’s core service offerings
• Improve search engine optimization
• Embrace web standards
• Improve the job seeker experience based on usability feedback
• Refresh the site’s look and feel and maintain global consistency

My role was project lead for the North American client website hudson.com and candidate website jobs.hudson.com I helped to establish a “buyers guide” content strategy that leads potential clients to a buying decision from a novice level of recruitment firm understanding. I re-focused job seeker content to provide SEO-friendly landing pages that address niche skillsets where Hudson focuses its recruitment efforts. We also added Google Analytics so future redesigns could be focused on behavior data.

Challenge
In 2004, the Hudson Employment Index^sm was established as a key Public Relations tool for Hudson North America. After a year, it had gained a foothold in the media community as a valuable indicator of job market strength. Originally, the data was delivered with a barebones website, rudimentary database, and static press releases from our PR Agency. In 2005, to further penetrate key markets where Hudson desired visibility, the Index survey information was sliced into 11 metropolitan market, 8 state, and 7 occupational categories. The website now needed to accomodate 26X the amount of information it had in the past, while making it manageable for a small internal staff to keep updated.

Strategy
Our strategy streamlined nearly every step of the Index delivery process to maximize efficiency including:

• Creating a Data Loader to parse incoming Excel sheets from our data gathering vendor into a SQL database that could drive multiple html page views.
• Building more attractive Flash based graphs derived from XML views of the raw data.
• Restructuring site navigation to provide fast access to information by market
• Integrating the Lyris ListManager email marketing engine to handle subscriptions to the monthly online media kit
• Templating the pages within our CMS so that they could be easily updated from month to month.

Results
Since the site re-launch the Hudson Employment Index has had a steady increase in covereage by major national and regional media outlets including TV, radio, newspaper, and internet. Within 3 months the internal delivery process became a well-oiled machine. The Hudson Employment Index^sm and its associated website received many industry accolades including:

• 2006 PR Week Award for Best Use of Research or Measurement
• 2006 Platinum PR Award Research & Measurement
• 2006 Gold Sabre Award - Professional Services Category
• 2005 IABC Spectra Award of Excellence

The research and website were discontinued in February 2008.

Challenge
In 2000 Jones International University was one of many in a new crop of for profit, all-online universities offering real degrees over the internet. By 2002, the simple hook of getting a degree online wasn’t enough to increase enrollment numbers. JIU wanted to use e-mail marketing to reach potential students and give them the experience of interacting with its sophisticated online learning system. Coupled with the emergence of online chat, the University asked TMP to help deliver a compelling Open House experience online to reach the most prospects as cost effectively as possible.

Strategy
The core IT team at JIU built and supported an Online Learning System that the entire student body and faculty used for class registration, participation, and graduation. The admissions marketing team proposed using this same system to interact with prospects in an Open House. TMP needed to build an Open House information site, registration and e-mail marketing system to get prospects to the event. On the date and time of the event, prospects would then use the Online Learning system to chat and interact with admissions staff, current students, faculty, and alumni in Q&A sessions. The entire experience was designed to introduce candidates to the online learning experience and convince them that an MBA could be attained online at a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of attending an offline campus.

I worked as the project’s Information Architect to assist the creative and development teams build a solution with the following components:

• Information website with only the “right” content to motivate a student to explore more via an open house
• Custom e-mail marketing engine that took qualified names from the admissions marketing database and solicited registration for the open house
• Back-end user interface to allow JIU Admissions staff to easily setup new events, track registrations, and send reminders.
• Online Open House User Interface within the Online Learning System to facilitate the chat and provide information to the prospects, then ultimately motivating students to Enroll.

The client did the project right by funding proper usability testing so that we could ensure the workflow for both admissions staff and propsects was as natural as possible. As we predicted, many kinks were worked out during testing and it made the staff much more confortable in administering the real open houses.

Results
Online Open Houses became a fixture of the admissions marketing process at JIU. The client experienced excellent enrollment rates after them. Continued enhancements to the e-mail marketing and registration systems were created to allow more frequent events to drive even more conversions.

Challenge
Recruitment presentations by Fortune 500 companies are often delivered in front of large open-house audiences. Recruiting teams put together custom PowerPoint presentations on the businesses they are recruiting for, many times with outdated information and inconsistent branding. We wanted to help our clients maintain a consistent and professional employer brand in front of these important audiences.

Strategy
We designed and built a web based PowerPoint Presentation Builder from the ground up with a very ambitious feature set. The idea was to provide a single place for recruiters to access pre-approved presentations, build new presentations from collections of PowerPoint slides and media files, and provide a best practice knowledge sharing community to help recruiters put their best foot forward when presenting. My role was information architect and web designer on a small team of programmers who overcame many technical hurdles. The site allowed for:

• A searchable database of completed presentations and individual PowerPoint slides classified with metadata like audience type, presentation length, and topic
• An automated builder that could recombine user-selected slides into a new presentation within the web interface
• User profiles that tied assets in the system back to individuals, including ‘favorites lists’ for storage of frequently used presentations
• FAQ’s and articles on how to use the system and public speaking skills

The intent of the platform was for it to become a product that TMP could sell via an ASP model to a variety of clients that shared these challenges.

Results
A major recruitment client purchased and embraced the system, giving it high marks for streamlining their presentation delivery. Within a year Microsoft’s own technology (Sharepoint) advanced beyond the system’s capabilities, slowing demand for the product.