“ We believe our web-based product portfolio makes up the best set of online jobseeker and recruiter tools in the world. Sitecore gives us the ability to promote these tools more effectively, helping our jobseekers and recruiters get the maximum value from these world class products. „

- Oliver Burns, Technical Architecture Team Lead, Totaljobs Group

Challenge

Build a flexible and robust website primed for future growth

Each of the Totaljobs Group’s websites had been established using the same custom-built CMS platform.  However, following massive growth in the amount of content and the volume of transactions, the original solution had become overloaded and difficult to maintain. 

Ensure fast and easy website maintenance

The different components making up the website had become so over extended that rolling out new products and developing new content was proving very time consuming and costly. 

Deliver stronger more recognisable branding on websites

The websites were not being updated in a consistent manner, giving visitors a disjointed and confusing brand experience. Totaljobs Group wanted their new platform to be much more flexible and to manage the constant flow of updates much more efficiently.  

Empower Business Stakeholders to control and maintain website content and branding

A key objective was to empower non-technical business units with the ability to provide up-to-date and high-quality recruitment related information, and to maintain brand consistency across all of the group’s websites.  

Agile delivery support

Totaljobs Group is passionate about using agile, iterative delivery. Sitecore’s flexibility and integration options allowed multiple delivery teams to work on implementing Sitecore CMS into existing applications through multiple iterations. By being able to implement Sitecore through agile methodology, the teams could migrate existing pages one at a time, regularly releasing the migrated pages into production, delivering return on investment (ROI) as early as possible.

Solution

To empower non-technical business stakeholders to easily maintain website content, reducing the reliance on specialist developers, Totaljobs Group needed to select the right Web CMS.  The chosen Web CMS solution would need to be flexible enough to integrate with Totaljobs Group’s existing applications and be capable of powering all 12 websites using a single instance of the software.

Codehouse recommended Sitecore Web CMS on the basis of its API, the extensibility of the user interface and the richness of its content-editing interfaces.  Based on the Microsoft .NET-based development platform, Sitecore is much simpler to operate and a lot less costly to maintain than the old-dated Totaljobs.com bespoke system that had been developed with ASP.NET and SQL Server. 

Sitecore’s range of pre-built connectors and data abstraction layers helped to give visitors a more consistent experience, while its ability to keep website content separate from the technical functionality allowed non-technical personnel uninterrupted access to the websites to work on editing and updating the content. 

Some of the Sitecore features that have brought additional benefits to the Totaljobs Group websites are:

• Create brand consistency across all websites: Branding can be loaded according to where the page lives in the Sitecore content tree. Customised branding need only be created for one part of the site and all of the pages underneath will automatically pick it up.
• Cache repository for the most frequently requested pages: Sitecore caches content for the highest volume pages so the pages don’t have to go through the complete pipeline. The benefit is that content can be kept in Sitecore without affecting the high-performance rendering pipeline.
• Extended workflows feature to enhance editorial policies: Totaljobs Group implemented extended workflows with Sitecore to improve the turn-around time for content updates by allowing content editors to approve each other's work, but not their own.  The extended workflows enable Totaljobs Group to enforce a policy that every change is checked before being published.  Content editors can create different content items on the page that automatically display content in pre-defined places. The number and order of items on a page can be easily changed without having to resort to technical help. 
• Inclusion of a debug mode for spotting content not migrated into the CMS: The Sitecore solution has a debug mode that highlights all of the CMS controlled content, allowing  developers to see if any content has been left out.  The solution enforces the URL being used for a particular page. If someone links to a slight variation of the URL (different casing, .aspx extension) the pipeline processor redirects to the default Sitecore generated URL.  Some pages enable content editors to edit the URL used in Sitecore.
• Sitecore Advanced System Reporter: The Sitecore Advanced System Reporter enables Totaljobs Group to efficiently and quickly produce many types of reports for analysis from the wide range of usage statistics available - from recently modified entries to items with validation or other errors.

Result

The implementation of Sitecore has successfully empowered non-technical team members to implement website content changes. In the twelve months following launch of Sitecore Web CMS, the content team published over 900 careers advice articles across the different sites. The shift in responsibility for managing website content from the technical team to the business stakeholders has reduced development costs substantially. In addition to more rapidly delivering beneficial content to jobseekers and recruiters, the website traffic generated by Sitecore’s SEO structure, continues to grow each month.  Totaljobs Group began seeing a return on investment within two months of the project launch. Totaljobs Group has saved approximately £250,000 a year on website content maintenance costs alone since the new website went live.

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Sitecore Web CMS
• Bespoke ASP.Net and SQL Server applications
• Tag based services like WebTrends, Eloqua and EDigital rendered via Sitecore.