Boels launches a modern new careers website with Contentstack

At Boels, hiring is always a priority. At any given time, there are between 150-400 local open roles, as well as international opportunities in seven countries and eight locales outside of the Netherlands. Before deploying Contentstack, Boels was looking to improve communication of its employer branding on their careers site, to support building the brand’s reputation as a global player in the rental equipment market.

“Everyone knows us from the local depots, but we didn’t feel like people realized how big we were,” Kimberley Frenken, Product Owner Careers Website, said. “We wanted to be able to fill vacancies faster, but also to help with this global brand initiative, which wasn’t facilitated by our previous CMS.”

Boel’s previous CMS didn’t have the flexibility to create pages that offered an excellent user experience to candidates. “Our previous careers site was old-fashioned to look at, and we wanted to show users that we are a modern company,” Frenken said. “We were only speaking to depot jobs, and focusing too much on the machines themselves — when actually we wanted to start focusing on the people.”

With the support of a development team from Capgemini, the Boels careers website was migrated to Contentstack. Architect Lead Developer, Gabriël Moawad, has a lot of experience with MACH architecture, and says Contentstack has helped the team to move faster, and integrate necessary data at the different stages of migration. 

“From a technical perspective, Contentstack has allowed us to take control,” Moawad said. “We can create our own content types, model everything ourselves — we’re really autonomous. We’re just a bunch of front-enders turned full-stack developers, and now we can model the content, build requests to the API, and build based on what we get in return. This means we can move so much faster, and be more effective with what the organization needs.” At the front end, this has led to a huge improvement in user experience.

Boels has also gained a lot of value out of the Contentstack Marketplace, leveraging turnkey integrations such as Bynder, which enable agility and time-to-value, alongside built-in Contentstack capabilities such as tagging and search. “[With search], we can create our own search queries, save them, and then quickly find the right content when we need to,” Moawad said.

Boels is looking forward to a deeper partnership with Contentstack moving forward. From a technical perspective, 50% of the Capgemini developers on the team are already Contentstack certified, and migrating all the Boels websites is next on the roadmap. 

Boels’ key wins with Contentstack include:

• A real proof of concept: Boels has been able to solve an internal problem with Contentstack, modernizing their careers site and adding flexibility where it’s needed most. After showing value with this use case, the business is now prepared to repeat this process across other sites and products.  
• Global hiring at scale: 15,000 users visit the new Boels careers site each month, and applications receive a 9.5% conversion rate. Contentstack has given the team the flexibility to tell a better story about working at Boels across eight locales. 
• A single source of content: Boels now has one content repository — a single data source that can be used for cross-site content as products and pages are migrated across the business. Everything is reusable, saving time on initiatives such as SEO for the next step in the migration.