BC Water Jobs

Brown and Caldwell is a global operation that helps cities, companies, and government agencies overcome challenges related to water and the environment. In addition to their “boots-on-the-ground” efforts, Brown and Caldwell runs a robust job placement and recruiting website.

Brown and Caldwell already had a functioning jobs website, but the design was stuck in the 1990s and it lacked modern functionality. They needed a partner who could bring them into the 21st century from both a visual and technical perspective.

The existing site only allowed users the ability to create an account and create and publish job listings. Additionally, Brown and Caldwell only had the ability to offer jobs at one price, so sales lacked the flexibility to offer packages or incentives, and the resume builder was unsophisticated and offered a frustrating user experience.

Overlap brought significant value from a strategy perspective to address all project objectives. We had to map data from the existing site to the new site to deliver the level of analytics requested, and we had to implement a cross-connection between BC Water Jobs and Brown and Caldwell’s news and media site, BC Water News. Connecting the two sites involved pulling content from one site to another and collecting user behavior data to serve relevant, dynamic email campaigns. Transactional and automated dynamic emails are now being sent to every user tailored to their profile preferences.

We prioritized building features that would directly improve UX for job seekers, and those that would expand engagement opportunities for Brown and Caldwell. A new resume builder allows for LinkedIn-like profile capabilities where candidates can add work experience and certifications, and the new job matching feature serves jobs to seekers based on their profile and the job description. The job matching functionality serves highly-curated jobs through the candidate dashboard and directly via email. Improved search gives both recruiters and job seekers the ability to favorite candidates and jobs, both on the website and through the dashboard.

The new dashboard offers the most prominent UX improvements for both job seekers and recruiters alike. Recruiters can organize jobs into status (draft, expired, active, etc.), and they can easily create job duplicates and renew jobs straight from the dashboard. From here, they can also save favorite resumes and easily search through them to find candidate contact information. New features also enable Brown and Caldwell to incentivize purchases with job packages and add-on features to make job listings more prominent for seekers, and the capability to auto-renew jobs so they never expire from the site benefits recruiters and Brown and Caldwell’s bottom line.

Collecting valuable data was a huge project priority for Brown and Caldwell, so Overlap worked to increase the amount of data being stored on the backend. They can now see the entire history of a job, including its path, the credit used to purchase it, when and who filled the job, how it was active, and much more. Brown and Caldwell plan to use this information to continue to invest in and evolve the system moving forward, so we ensured they had the reporting capabilities to understand the functionality and how people are using it.