Phantom explores Ben & Jerry's Online Recruitment Experience

The Phantom visited Ben & Jerry's career site today.  The Phantom agrees that Ben & Jerry's not only has THE best ice cream on the planet, but also practices what it preaches, supporting the Occupy movement but also implementing social capitalism to help the environment, get people jobs, and do good while doing well.

In 2000, Ben & Jerry's sold (out?) to Unilever for $326 million.  The brand continues to this day to live its mission of doing well while doing good, and have a progressive company attitude.  So you'd think they'd have a recruitment brand experience that matches their values.  Well, think again.

Here's a screenshot of their Jobs page:

Great colors, style, theme, and invitation.  When you Click here to get started, it all changes.

You're brought to the Unilever main job search page that looks exactly like this:

What happened to the brand?  How can you find jobs at Ben & Jerry's?  Searching on keywords as simple as Vermont (Ben & Jerry's headquarters is located in Vermont) brings you no results, even though when you browse all jobs you see that there are in fact jobs in Vermont.

Even worse, the jobs themselves don't indicate which Unilever business they're with.  Here's a shot of the Associate Brand Building Manager position:

There is no branding.  The fact that this job is with Ben & Jerry's is obscured by significant text.  And how easy is it to see how GREAT a job this is?  Not.  It should be.

Their application process requires agreeing to the terms and conditions before applying, which will throw some people off.  Their application process does have the ability to upload a resume that is supposed to be parsed into their forms to apply.  Phantom found this to be nearly useless.  While it did correctly parse the Phantom's name, putting Phantom in the First Name field, it didn't accurately parse the address or any of the additional information from the Phantom's chronological resume.  

In short, Unilever makes it really hard for Ben & Jerry's to connect with the talent it really wants and continue the brand identity, brand promise and values that make Ben & Jerry's a great company.  Phantom longs for the days when Ben & Jerry's maintained their own hiring site and listed their own job postings. 

Are you listening Ben?  Jerry?  We can do better.  Phantom would love to help make that happen.