The challenge
Shoe Carnival is a well-known family footwear retailer with over 400 stores spanning across the US and Puerto Rico. The Indiana-founded company supports over 5500 employees and continues to grow.
After acquiring Shoe Station, Shoe Carnival’s Talent Acquisition Team was tasked to recruit across both brands. With each brand maintaining its own brand and name, the team needed a way to attract and engage talent across the two subsidiaries and provide a positive candidate experience, at scale.
A lean talent team supports sourcing across three channels: retail stores, the distribution center, and two corporate offices. With more new stores opening as the company continues to expand, they needed to attract a large volume of passionate, high-quality applicants. To stay agile in a fast-moving retail environment, finding ways to streamline the hiring process was crucial for success.
The focus
Shoe Carnival’s Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition, Stacey Lloyd, and Talent Acquisition Specialist, Dana Pool, knew that revisiting their career site was the first place to start.
As a Clinch customer, the team at Shoe Carnival knew that a great candidate journey starts at the career site. The team drew a parallel between an in-store experience and a career site experience: if customers go into a store and can’t find what they’re looking for, they leave — and candidates would do the same. Their career site was set up in a way that encouraged site visitors to ‘browse’, quickly find what they needed —and ultimately, compel them to hit ‘apply’.
But, the acquisition of Shoe Station meant the career site needed an update: to help candidates search across brands, locations, and channels on the site. The revamped site needed to incorporate both Shoe Station and Shoe Carnival, while ensuring jobseekers could find exactly what they were searching for.
After we acquired Shoe Station, we were tasked with recruiting for both brands but we also needed to be able to distinguish between the two brands, because they were going to keep their operating names. So, Shoe Station was still going to be known as Shoe Station and Shoe Carnival as Shoe Carnival. Getting this right was a big push for the website revamp.
—Dana Pool, Talent Acquisition Specialist
As a highly recognizable company with a strong consumer-facing brand, the team also needed the career site to blend in with other company material—like the e-commerce site and in-store collateral. For a site visitor, it needed to be a seamless transition between one site and the other. The partnership with Shoe Carnival’s ecommerce and marketing teams enabled them to create a site that was a perfect blend of both brands. Going forward, images and language can easily be updated on-the-fly.
The solution
Shoe Carnival used the power of Clinch’s intelligent career site and self-service CMS to quickly update and customize the branding on the career site, to blend perfectly with their consumer-facing collateral. Through this new career site, the team have updated their virtual ‘store-front’, making it simple for jobseekers to find what they’re looking for across brands, channels and locations.
Whether they want to work in our stores, distribution center or offices, jobseekers can easily find positions of interest. They can search based on location, channel, or even the brand that they would want to work for: whether it be Shoe Carnival or Shoe Station.
—Stacey Lloyd, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition
Armed with the highly configurable site builder, the team can also create targeted landing pages to support talent acquisition initiatives —like recruiting for new store openings.
We were able to create a “new store” landing page on our career site. On that page, we provide information on the new stores that will be opening and it includes the location and the proposed start date. Then we list positions that are open and it has direct links to apply to those positions.
—Dana Pool, Talent Acquisition Specialist
The intelligent career site is also able to retarget visitors to help convert ‘browsers’ into applicants. Using targeted calls-to-action to capture visitor interest helps the team to build out talent communities —jobseekers they can nurture and re-engage for future roles. Harnessing this functionality is the next area of focus for Stacey and the Shoe Carnival team.
We are also excited to better utilize the CRM functionality moving forward. We can reach out to those candidates who are part of our talent community already. We’re wanting to engage that pool of talent this year with all of the new stores that we’re going to be opening.
—Dana Pool, Talent Acquisition Specialist
Clinch worked alongside the Shoe Carnival team every step of the way to get the site, and the backend solutions set up without delay. This partnership approach is a game-changer for a small hiring team, to get the maximum return from their solution.
Clinch is not just a vendor, they’re a partner. They do care about our business. We’re pretty lean, so we like having partners that act as an extension of our team. They provide amazing support.
—Stacey
Within 6 months, Shoe Carnival’s newly rebranded career site helped the company to:
- Successfully hire over 1400 new employees.
- Convert 54% of career site visitors into warm, engaged leads.
- Use custom landing pages to target specific talent and build out high-quality talent communities. 81% of potential candidates started an application and 12 were hired for a recent store opening by using the custom landing page.
Want to see Clinch in action? Get in touch today to see how leading companies are taking control of their career site with great results.
