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From insight to impact: how bp transformed its global careers website to improve candidate experience, engagement, and conversion.
The beginning
Our story with bp started in 2022. The bp team was looking for a solution to consolidate its employer branding advertising efforts across the globe, so the collaboration began with the Talent Attraction module. From the very first conversations, data consolidation emerged as a clear priority, highlighting just how data-driven their approach was. That was music to our ears. From the get-go, most of our calls focused on campaign performance, channel effectiveness, and conversion metrics, setting a strong foundation for a very collaborative partnership.
As we reviewed the data more closely together, the focus naturally moved beyond advertising. It became clear that the careers website played a much bigger role in shaping the candidate journey than initially expected.
While traffic volumes were strong, the on-site experience wasn’t delivering the desired results. Key metrics revealed friction across the journey, from discovery to application, highlighting the need for better usability, consistency, and conversion.
It was clear that campaign optimization alone wouldn’t be enough. To fully realize the impact of their talent attraction efforts, bp needed a more modern, candidate-centric careers website. With strong data and stakeholder alignment, the team was able to move quickly and build a compelling business case for a full website revamp.
The start of the project
Once the decision was made, the pace of the project quickly became apparent. bp assembled a large, cross-functional team covering employer branding, talent acquisition, design, and IT, a strong signal of the organization's strategic importance of the careers website.
The first task was to define the structure of the new careers website ecosystem. The main priority was to move away from a fragmented candidate experience and toward a consistent, end-to-end journey that covers employer branding pages, job listings, and the application process.
This is at the core of the SmartDreamers CMS, which works in close synergy with Workday (and many other ATSs) to ensure a seamless experience across all stages of the candidate journey, as illustrated in the image below.
The management of the project
Although multiple teams were involved, the project never felt like a handoff between teams. Instead, it operated as a single, integrated effort.
Weekly working sessions formed the backbone of the project, complemented by frequent touchpoints and fast decision-making through Microsoft Teams.
A key factor in maintaining speed was the decision to run parallel sprints rather than a traditional cascade approach. This allowed multiple workstreams to progress simultaneously, reducing bottlenecks and keeping momentum high.
The project was structured into sprints, each with well-aligned ownership and objectives:
Core elements of the project
The application wrapper
On the previous careers website, candidates were redirected from the bp careers site to application forms hosted in Workday. This break in the journey created an inconsistent experience, as the application pages looked and felt different from the rest of the site. Candidates were required to create an account before applying, a step the data showed was contributing to a high drop-off rate.
One of the main priorities of the project was therefore to bring the application process directly into the bp careers website. The goal was to keep candidates on the site, maintain a consistent design throughout the journey, and remove unnecessary friction.
Thanks to the close integration between the SmartDreamers CMS and Workday, mandatory account creation was also eliminated. Together, these changes had a clear impact on the candidate experience and were among the most visible contributors to the improvements highlighted in the ROI analysis.
The AI tools
AI was an important part of the conversation from the start, but decisions around what to implement were guided by impact and usability, not by novelty. At SmartDreamers, we use AI across our platform, which gives us a clear view of both its potential and its limitations.
Rather than adding AI for the sake of it, the focus was on whether a feature genuinely improved the candidate journey. If it didn’t, it simply didn’t make the cut.
In the end, AI was introduced in two key areas: the application process, through the AI CV Parser, and job discovery, through AI-powered job matching. Importantly, these features were not layered on top of the experience. Instead, they were designed to fit naturally within the structure and layout of the careers website, making them feel like an integral part of the journey, not add-ons.
The design
Working with bp’s design team was a genuinely inspiring experience. While many organizations are drawn to visually flashy concepts, the bp team remained focused on what truly matters for candidates: clarity, usability, and simplicity.
From the outset, the objective was to create an experience that feels closer to e-commerce than to traditional corporate storytelling. Clear entry points, intuitive navigation, and straightforward user paths were prioritized over complex, content-heavy journeys. The aim was to reduce friction and help candidates quickly understand their options and take the next step with confidence.
Design decisions were consistently guided by real user behavior and performance data, rather than assumptions or trends.
The outcome
The end result was a new global careers website that better reflects bp’s employer brand, supports a more intuitive candidate journey, and performs more effectively as a conversion channel.
By combining SmartDreamers’ CMS capabilities with deep insights from campaign and engagement data, bp created a careers experience that is not only visually modern, but measurably more effective. More importantly, the new site provides a flexible foundation for ongoing optimization, allowing teams to test, learn, and adapt as candidate expectations continue to evolve.
Rather than treating the careers website as a one-off project, bp now has a platform designed for continuous improvement, supporting both immediate hiring needs and long-term talent engagement.