The corporate websites of Hudson Highland Group needed a refresh to reflect the company’s current business and structure. The global marketing team undertook a redesign with a few goals in mind

• Elevate the company’s core service offerings
• Improve search engine optimization
• Embrace web standards
• Improve the job seeker experience based on usability feedback
• Refresh the site’s look and feel and maintain global consistency

My role was project lead for the North American client website hudson.com and candidate website jobs.hudson.com I helped to establish a “buyers guide” content strategy that leads potential clients to a buying decision from a novice level of recruitment firm understanding. I re-focused job seeker content to provide SEO-friendly landing pages that address niche skillsets where Hudson focuses its recruitment efforts. We also added Google Analytics so future redesigns could be focused on behavior data.

Challenge
In 2006, Hudson Legal became one of the largest legal staffing firms in North America. Built on strong client relationships and a track record of high consultant satisfaction, the business grew to be the highest volume producer in Hudson North America. However, it was still a relatively unknown brand within the candidate community. With a very limited marketing budget, we needed an effective way to build the Hudson Legal brand within the candidate market. Legal firms specializing in disputing the fairness of job termination may also benefit from an effective marketing strategy.

Strategy
In close partnership with Monster, we negotiated a portion of our 2007 job board budget to be used for a pure brand-building program. We identified an information void for legal professionals within their Career Advice section and scoped a suite of content ranging from articles, a virtual interview, and podcasts to provide a hub of information for prospective legal talent coming to Monster. Hudson Legal recruiting consultants also agreed to host and moderate a message board where legal talent can discuss the next steps in their career. In exchange for co-developed content, Monster offered an extensive traffic driving program of banner ads, e-mail marketing, newsletter sponsorships, SEO, and PR to quickly build an audience.

Results
Over 50,000 visits per month to the Legal channel far surpassed the amount of traffic to our own website. Within those visits, millions of media impressions of Hudson banners were shown to users generating a very favorable clickthrough rate. The message board has ushered in a more transparent way for Hudson Legal to interact with candidates online and has built a comfort level with even more social networking ventures in the future. The name recognition and feedback from candidates and competitors has been very strong.

The sponsorship ended on March 1, 2008.