Adidas Careers

www.adidas.com/careers

The new Adidas careers website got a lot of hype pre-launch with a few teaser campaigns being released in the months leading to launch.

There is no doubt that the “Back stage at Accenture” campaign of a few years back set the precedent for sites of this nature and this site seems to have used a lot of ideas/concepts that Accenture used a while back.

The site is heavily flash based – with a lot of interactive content focused on interviews/interactions with employees & some of the Adidas sponsored athletes.

“The adidas recruiting department got the company’s marketing department to let it borrow, so to speak, some of the star athletes who are adidas sponsors. “Our employment brand,” adidas recruiters told adidas marketers, “is as important as our consumer brand. You give us an athlete and we’re going to shape what they do. We’re going to script what they do.” In other words, canned, generic messages from athletes that didn’t relate to employment wouldn’t be pigeonholed into a recruiting site.

Adidas doesn’t want candidates to think of athletes as the demigods they’re often portrayed as in the media. At this company, a superstar is someone you might actually meet through your job. Says Fogarty: “We take athletes off their pedestal so they become more like you and I.”

A trio of these adidas sponsors will be featured prominently for candidates who land on the new site. There’s Candace Parker, of the Los Angeles Sparks’ WNBA team, Ben Watson, from the New England Patriots, who is associated with Reebok, and golfer Natalie Gulbis, pitching the TaylorMade brand. Current employees, talking about their jobs, are also featured prominently.”  Source

“The one thing we do hope you take away from the site is that working at adidas is much more than a job. We did our best to convey this on the site, and hopefully, someday, you can experience this first hand. Until then we hope you continue to visit our site, check for updates, and apply to the many career opportunities offered by adidas and our sister brands.

• Future Talent Section: Here you will find our internship and graduate programs. Read program descriptions, view videos of current employees in these programs, and apply.
• Locations: We have created robust location pages so you can get a sense of what it’s like to work at adidas locations around the world
• Sustainability: This link will direct you to our main corporate site and give you information about what adidas Group is doing globally in the area of Social Environmental Affairs.
• adidas Group Career Sites: Check out our adidas Group career site and our sister brand career sites–TaylorMade, Reebok and Rockport.
• Retail Stores/News & Hotjobs: Learn what it’s like to work in retail, check out our hottest jobs, and read about what’s new.

We believe the greatest value is interacting with the athletes and learning about the departments you are interested in. Of course if you want to skip all of this and jump right into the job search you can do that too.” Source

We re-iterate – There is no doubt that job-seekers would rather watch video content than read loads and loads of text, further to this – with Adidas bringing in their well known athletes, as well as including various employee interviews the interactive nature of this website is bound to appeal and convince job seekers that Adidas is a great place to work.

That said, if you are on a slow internet connection the site is VERY sluggish, which to me is a major concern and has impacted my experience with this website.  Beware to those who are looking at including flash/video content in their local careers website – don’t overdo it.

Connectivity as you know is a problem in South Africa, and if candidate cant access & view content quickly and easily on your site, they will leave as quickly as they arrived.

To me there is an overuse of flash & parts of the site are not simple to use an navigate.  The job search, and relevant job display could be improved upon and is not intuitive.

Besides this – there is no doubt that a lot of hard work has gone into this site, large amounts of interactivity take a lot of time to complete and implement. There are going to be more and more career websites of this nature launching in times to come.

As technologies evolve, the ability to immerse candidates in the organisation via the careers website is going to become the norm and the Adidas careers website is no doubt setting the bar in these early stages.