A leader in the early childhood sector, Story House Early Learning (SHEL) delivers quality services across NSW, VIC, and QLD. With a focus on showcasing their authentic culture and speaking directly to the talent demographics best suited to open roles, SHEL’s TA function has developed a real strength in recruiting and retaining a committed, diverse workforce.
The challenge
Operating in an extremely competitive sector, SHEL needed to stand out as an employer of choice to recruit educators, casual employees, leadership and operational staff across locations. The shortage of early childhood educators, in particular, has been an ongoing challenge for many organisationsorganizations throughout the industry, including SHEL.
As a values-driven organisationorganization, their recruitment team looked to amplify a strong, authentic Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and employer brand across channels—including their careerscareer site—to attract top talent, aligned with their culture and values.
The biggest roadblock? Their careerscareer site was managed by an external company. This severely limited their ability to make timely updates, keep content up to date, and respond quickly to changing recruitment needs. It also lacked analytics for them to optimiseoptimize content, refine the application process, and maintain a high-quality candidate experience.
Other sourcing channels, such as social media, were underutilisedunderutilized to target diverse candidates – including Gen Z, one of SHEL’s primary talent demographics.
The focus
Operating a lean recruitment team, Talent Acquisition Manager Kelly Murphy recognisedrecognized the value of implementing best practice recruitment marketing and analytics to enhance their hiring efforts.
Gaining control over their careerscareer site would enable SHEL’s recruitment team to truly reflect their powerful EVP, employer brand, mission, values, and unique culture to attract top talent. Knowing candidates seek a wealth of information before applying for a role, their goal was to feature a variety of engaging content to aid their decision making – with inclusive design, functionality, and accessibility features to accommodate a diverse range of candidates.
They also looked to revamp their job ads, as well as the questions and mandatory fields required during the application process to ask better interview questions and strengthen connections with candidates during screening.
Real-time analytics would underpin their strategy, allowing them to optimiseoptimize various pages and content, build a robust recruitment marketing content plan, and gain a comprehensive understanding of the candidate journey. They sought strategic insights to identify areas to save costs, and where additional investment was needed to ensure resources were utilisedutilized effectively.
The solution
Kelly and her recruitment team turned to PageUp’s Recruitment Marketing solution to transform their careerscareer site in strategic alignment with their EVP and employer brand. Their new, mobile-optimisedoptimized site enables prospective talent to easily navigate, find key information, and take action.
“We chose PageUp Recruitment Marketing so that we would know where people are coming from and what people are engaging in. It also allows us to make really quick updates and changes as needed.”
Kelly Murphy, Talent Acquisition Manager, SHEL
They also implemented a range of unique calls to action (CTAs) across their site to further engage and capture visitors, including a unique “secret page” to showcase SHEL’s fun, celebratory culture through videos, photos, social posts, testimonials, employee stories, and more.
“Our secret page creates a unique, memorable experience for candidates and fosters deeper engagement with our brand.
Analytics have shown we’ve already achieved a number of successful hires from candidates who were going to exit the site, but found this page and applied.”
SHEL appointed a dedicated Recruitment Marketing Officer to strategically plan and publish content for the site, and tailor posts for key sourcing channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Most notably, SHEL was one of the first early childhood education providers in Australia to adopt TikTok to share recruitment marketing content—some of which has gone viral! This has been a major drawcard for Gen Z talent. This segmented approach balances how different generations and talent demographics consume and engage content, targeting them on their most active channels more effectively and driving them back to their careerscareer site.
The team updated the application process to showcase values and culture from the get-go, reduced mandatory fields, and asked personalisedpersonalized questions to engage candidates throughout the recruitment process.
“Transitioning to PageUp Recruitment Marketing has been a game-changer. We’ve seen the immediate positive impact of our careerscareer site and strategic sourcing initiatives. We’ve been able to use analytics to identify top-performing pages, develop an effective content strategy, and optimiseoptimize resource allocation. Our interview process is far more personalisedpersonalized. So far, candidate feedback has been exceptionally positive.”
SHEL’s proactive recruitment strategy and key sourcing channels are setting the new standard in digital recruitment. SHEL are now seeing their careerscareer site deliver a sourcing channel effectiveness of 6.5 compared to the industry average of 30 (this shows the number of applications from a particular sourcing channel required to secure 1 hire). By partnering with PageUp, the recruitment team is operating with greater efficiency, delivering meaningful, engaging experiences for candidates, and driving faster talent acquisition.
“Everything is about speed in recruitment and the talent market is constantly evolving. Having full control with PageUp Recruitment Marketing means we can move faster. Our new capabilities enable us to monitor performance and make data-driven optimisationsoptimizations to win top talent more quickly, and stay ahead of the competition in an incredibly competitive sector.”
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