Leveraging Your Careers Website to Bring your Company Culture to Life

A year ago, we set a goal to redesign our careers website to become leaner with clean page layouts, fewer clicks, less text and more visuals. We also saw the website as an opportunity to showcase our employer brand pillars – aspects like our family culture and focus on innovation that set Gilbane apart.  Having launched, we want to share our lessons learned in creating a dynamic careers website and leveraging it to bring your company culture to life.

A true collaboration between our Human Resources and Global Sales & Marketing Services departments, our initial brainstorming required us to step back and look at the bigger picture: what do we want someone — be it a recent graduate or intern, experienced professional, craft worker, international prospect,  or military veteran —to learn when they arrive at our site? We put on the hat of each of those personas and wrote to their wants and needs. Under the guidance of our website developer, emagine, we challenged ourselves through open ended questions like:

• ‘What does a day in the life at Gilbane looks like?’ If I come to work, what’s that going to feel like, what kind of community will I have in the office, what is the overall vibe?
• ‘What is special about Gilbane?’
• ‘So what?’

With that, we soon established our theme: World class people… Building remarkable communities. With its emphasis on people first, we built the site around our people to tell their stories. We built the site architecture with fewer, more impactful menu options, like: Family First, Helping You Live Well, Building World-Class Facilities, Our Culture, and Serving the Community — with safety entwined throughout—that are all aspects of life at Gilbane that uniquely make us a great place to work.

The theme is flexible enough to include our structured programs such as career development and benefits, but also intangibles like sustainability and community service. Woven throughout the site are examples of the types of communities we are building:  innovation hubs, universities, schools, hospitals –  structures whose function gives employees meaning and purpose. People come to Gilbane not just for a job, but to give back and be part of the greater good.

A section we are especially proud of is called Remarkable Moments, in which we highlight stories of employees making an impact in our communities. For example, we feature the construction of a memorial for the station club fire in Rhode Island a few years ago, and we will be adding a story about transferring dorms into sickbeds during COVID-19.

Some key guidelines to consider as you rebuild your career page include:

• Use of multi-media, including video
• People and client focused storytelling through testimonials and career spotlights
• Mobile friendly
• Featured quotes to break up the page
• Consistent design elements

Infographics, such as this one showing how Gilbane’s careers align with military experience, was created by our talented designers and give the site continuity while telling a story in a visual way.

Never stagnant, we will look to include new and original content frequently to keep the site fresh. We are proud of how the site reflects our amazing culture. Please take a few minutes to see the people who shared their stories. And then search our job postings: maybe your story might be the next one we feature.

Our next Gilbane Ink blog will be published on Thursday, September 17th focusing on Mental Health Awareness as part of National Construction Safety Week held September 14-18, 2020.

We are excited to giveaway some Gilbane Safety Week shirts and Gilbane Cares tumblers be one of the first 20 people who comment on this blog by September 18 and let us know the section in our new Careers microsite that has caught your attention and why.