The challenge
PagerDuty supports IT departments in more than 19,000 companies worldwide through its incident response platform and 1,000+ strong team.
As an early-stage, publicly-traded company, PagerDuty needed to support its growth in new and existing regions by engaging key talent.
Operating as a ‘team of one’, Senior Program Manager for Talent Marketing, Karen Neov, had limited time and resources. As PagerDuty prepared to branch into Portugal and Chile, she was tasked with developing warm talent communities in these new locations to win successful hires.
“It’s always a challenge starting from zero. In these regions, nobody ‘knew’ us. So, we wanted to design a custom experience to speak to these new candidates by tailoring our value proposition, branding, and messaging.”
–Karen Neov, Senior Program Manager for Talent Marketing, PagerDuty
To stay agile in a fast-growing tech environment, success hinged on overcoming three key challenges.
First, the company’s career site was owned by its development team, who had competing priorities in consumer marketing. Karen needed ownership of a self-service career site solution that could integrate with their existing ATS, Greenhouse. Being able to use and customize branded templates would boost PagerDuty’s employer brand recognition and ability to tap into talent networks in new and existing regions.
Second, Karen needed automation capabilities to optimize her efficiency. Implementing well-designed, set-and-forget workflows would enable her to deliver important, personalized information to candidates, while freeing up more time for high-value tasks. Last but not least, a solution with analytics would enable Karen to measure the results of objective-based talent marketing campaigns, gain more direction around content strategy, and demonstrate ROI.
The solution
PagerDuty chose Clinch as its recruitment marketing partner, kicking off with a new career site, brand guidelines, and templates. Working with TA team members, Karen applied authentic, engaging content to support candidates in their decision making, various calls to action, and automations, including:
- job alerts – enabling prospective applicants to register their interest for jobs, with configurable notification options
- abandoned application workflow – encouraging candidates with incomplete submissions to return and submit their applications
- talent community workflow – an opt-in newsletter to educate candidates about PagerDuty culture, initiatives, and opportunities.
“When you have a beautiful career site, it doesn’t matter if no-one sees it, or you lose returning visitors. We established a fantastic career site with great employer branding, and combined it with automated recruitment marketing campaigns to re-engage candidates. It’s fully automated, customizable, and scalable. It helps us do more with less, keeping us a step ahead.”
This important foundation laid the groundwork for Karen to marshall targeted virtual, face-to-face, and in-person campaigns.
For PagerDuty’s launch in Portugal, Karen led a wide-reaching virtual campaign, targeting warm candidates in their talent community, with additional sourcing efforts. The campaign drove traffic to a dedicated landing page with tailored content, including employee videos, testimonials, and a featured local partnership. With this playbook in hand, she replicated the process in Chile.
Next, Karen used Clinch to support PagerDuty’s diversity focus, growing its talent community through partnership DEI organizations and face-to-face events. She designed custom messaging to engage attendees before, during, and after key events.
Most recently, PagerDuty has launched an internal career site for employees, with tailored messaging, job alerts, resources, and tools to empower team members in their career development.
The results
PagerDuty has achieved incredible success engaging talent through virtual, face-to-face, and internal campaigns.
“For our virtual campaigns, we achieved 50% open rates in Portugal and 62% open rates in Chile – converting 23% and 33% [respectively] to direct hires. Additionally, we made two new hires in North America from our Portugal campaign! Overall, it drastically reduced our sourcing spend. Being able to report on and share this return on investment was incredible.”
Face-to-face event campaigns have been similarly successful. For one event callout, attendee numbers tripled overnight! For another, its campaign achieved 1,800 brand impressions and 150 sign ups.
So far, PagerDuty’s internal career site has received positive feedback and shown promising markers for internal employee engagement and retention.
Karen is using real-time analytics to make informed, data-driven decisions around content strategy and campaigns, support strong conversion rates through their career site and automated workflows, and validate ROI.
“We’ve achieved so much in such a short amount of time! I’m excited to share our progress and success. Like many of my peers, I am a team of ‘one’. So having Clinch feels like having my own ‘team’ in a way, because I have an amazing CSM. We bounce ideas off of one another, she’s always available and willing to assist.
“What took months, we can now achieve in seconds. Our partnership with Clinch has been a gamechanger. The time and resource savings have been incredible. In the TA space, things change all the time, so having these critical capabilities enables us to better serve candidates.”
