When Ongig held our first kick-off meeting with ADP on the morning of August 15th about their huge Dealer Services spin-off, we were impressed by their ambitious goal: launching a complete new employer brand along with careers site and overhaul of job descriptions within 45 days (by October 1st) — the new business would immediately go public on NASDAQ.
But back in August, they didn’t even have a company name or logo yet.
Note: ADP selected their new brand name in September and said it derived from three of the businesses’ core operations: Cobalt Digital Marketing, the core Dealer Services and global technology business Kerridge Computer Co., a U.K. company acquired in 2005.
This soon-to-be-named CDK Global brand was looking to launch all this with practically nothing except the ADP Virtual Edge applicant tracking system that they used when they were known under their previous brand: ADP Dealer Services.
This was super-exciting: it’s not every day that a business with $2 billion in annual sales and 9,000 associates gets to build an employer brand from scratch. Heck, we know many companies who just hold meetings about about new careers pages for 6 weeks — and with little to show for it!
A few things that stood out about the CDK Global launch:
Speed
To go for speed, CDK used a relatively lean group of just 5 main online recruiting tools:
- LinkedIn (for distribution)
- CareerBuilder (for distribution)
- Glassdoor (for distribution)
- Indeed (for distribution)
- Ongig (as the hub to help make everything happen)
It helped to be lean as these weren’t just simple landing pages and job descriptions. CDK launched 120 jobs segmented by 13 departments across 8 countries (see a landing page example above and job description example below).
Every one of their job descriptions originated from their Virtual Edge ATS and was prepared for pictures, media and commenting (candidates get to ask questions of CDK) using Ongig.
Note: read The Top 50 Applicant Tracking Systems to see which types of ATS’s Ongig works with.
Media
To prep for the launch, CDK collected more than 270 pieces of media (pictures and video) to be used on just about every career and job page they launched. They used Ongig’s recruiting media library for this.
CDK used media to differentiate their employer brand at the department level (like Technology and Sales) as well as at the location-level such as for their headquarters (Hoffman Estates/Chicago-area) versus Seattle (a key office for their Cobalt business).
Full Recruiting Team Involved
CDK enlisted dozens of their team to help recruit for jobs, including multiple recruiters in sales and tech as well as their:
- Corporate Storyteller
- Director, Employer Brand & Recruitment Marketing
- Talent Acquisition Coordinator
- Director of Technical Talent Acquisition
At least 10 members of the CDK talent acquisition team logged into the Ongig SaaS to help this launch.
Distribution & Integration
CDK made sure that its job feed was fed to top job aggregators like Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn and CareerBuilder.
That way they had candidates visiting them from high-traffic job boards (in addition to from their own careers page) right out of the gates; and every one of those candidates sees the media-rich job descriptions such as the one above.
The CDK team stamped all their job job descriptions coming out of ADP Virtual Edge with the appropriate codes for each distribution point (LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor and Indeed) so all can be tracked.Virtual Ed
Note: The Virtual Edge applicant tracking system has since been sunsetted by ATS — check out The Top 70 ATS’s Report for a full list of the top applicant tracking software programs.
The October 1st launch of the new CDK employer brand went off without a hitch. CDK is now a publicly traded company worth more than $4 billion.
A new employer brand was born.
Not bad for 45 days — congrats, CDK! Ongig was proud to assist.
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Rob is the co-founder & CEO of Ongig which amplifies employer brand through its cloud-based interactive job description platform. American Express, Autodesk, Intel and Yelp are among the early users of the Ongig SaaS.
