Ancestry®

The challenge

Ancestry® is the global leader in family history and consumer genomics. With over 40 billion online records and the world’s largest consumer DNA network, its mission is to empower journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. 

As a prominent and recognizable company, Ancestry can leverage its high-profile external brand to boost awareness of its career opportunities. Over the past year, the team worked hard to create a new EVP to help them attract and retain a talented and diverse workforce. Talent Acquisition Marketing Manager, Kristen Jacobs, then faced a new challenge: activating that EVP, and creating a consistent, outstanding candidate experience across every candidate touchpoint.  

“Candidate experience is number one. At Ancestry, we’re always looking for ways to improve the hiring process so it’s not frustrating for candidates. A poor experience can negatively impact a candidate’s impression of our brand — so it’s important we provide a great experience.”

—Kristen Jacobs, Talent Acquisition Marketing Manager
Ancestry 

With innovation and cutting-edge technology core to the growth of the business, the team needed a powerful solution to help them bring their employer brand and EVP to life. 

The solution

Ancestry partnered with Clinch for a complete and easy-to-use Recruitment Marketing solution. Using the Clinch career site builder, Ancestry built internal and external career sites quickly and easily. 

“I am pretty technical but have never built a complete website before so working with Clinch on building the new career site has been fantastic —and very, very easy. Bringing our EVP to life on our career site has allowed us to reach more candidates and drive more qualified candidates to our roles.” 

—Kristen Jacobs, TA Marketing Manager
Ancestry 

The ease of use and flexibility of the platform brought Ancestry’s EVP to life, attracting and engaging more candidates and driving qualified job seekers to hit ‘apply’. Dynamic, targeted and engaging content showcased employees and expanded on the information available on the website. The team was able to whip up custom landing pages to speak to target talent segments with ease — pushing pages live in just half a day.

“The team was thinking: ‘How long will it take her to build this page? Probably weeks!’ And it took me half a day. That’s just one example of how easily I can use the platform to support the team. It’s been great to see how we are able to take what the candidates are looking for and build it out so quickly.”

With seamless integration with their Workday ATS, Ancestry can further enhance the candidate experience, allowing jobseekers to apply for a role quickly and easily. Being able to see the visitor-to-hire journey across the recruitment funnel gives the Ancestry team complete visibility into the recruitment process through in-depth end-to-end analytics —so they can see clearly what’s working, and where to adjust their sourcing and talent attraction approach. 

With access to the powerful Clinch CRM, Kristen and the team are now exploring how they can harness this functionality to build and segment talent communities. Working with the broader recruitment team to introduce this workflow, the Ancestry team is excited to see the impact this sourcing channel will have on their ROI. This CRM functionality extends the power of Clinch beyond employer branding into proactive talent acquisition. 

“’We can make a big impact on the business by utilizing our talent community. These are active candidates, who’ve expressed interest — and we have almost 100,000 individuals enrolled. We’re helping recruiters realize the value of engaging candidates through the CRM.”

—Kristen Jacobs, TA Marketing Manager
Ancestry 

Kristen also highlighted the impact of the Clinch team’s outstanding customer support. With a hands-on partnership approach, the team was always available to help every step of the way: through implementation, optimization and beyond. 

“Working with Clinch has definitely made my job easier, and it’s helped me support the whole team beyond building the initial site —Clinch support is fantastic.” 

The results 

Using Clinch, Ancestry has been able to activate its EVP on their career site and create a seamless experience for its candidates. By pairing Clinch with the Workday ATS to increase candidate conversion at speed, the team has seen an incredible 250% increase in started applications, and 188% in completed applications, year on year.  

The new career site has emerged as an impactful, high-ROI sourcing channel, now driving 25% of application volume. With Clinch’s user-friendly platform and self-service CMS, the team now has an easy-to-manage solution, empowering them to take control of the employer brand, showcase the EVP and optimize content on the fly.