Career site refresh in six weeks or less
Since its founding in 1899, Sonoco has grown immensely to include 16 diversified packaging solutions businesses worldwide. And as the company has expanded, so has its offerings to team members. From supply chain to operations to engineering to corporate, Sonoco has enough opportunities worldwide to keep any professional engaged throughout their entire career.
The problem? They needed their career site to tell that same story to candidates.
Project Scope
The Sonoco Talent Acquisition team came to Stories Inc. in Spring 2018 looking to refresh their careers site. Their vision had people at its core: images and stories of real Sonoco team members that demonstrated the diverse opportunities Sonoco provided on a global scale. Their estimated launch was the end of the summer.
With an initial scope for one interview day, we settled on visiting the headquarters in Hartsville, SC. We would interview and capture still images of 10 team members and create three videos. As an additional deliverable, we would turnover all transcripts and raw files to the Sonoco team that they would use to populate other areas of the new careers site, too.
Because we were not visiting global sites, the goal was to capture stories that demonstrated the widespread values and experiences of working at Sonoco. With this end goal in mind, the three video topics were loosely decided in advance: Collaboration and Development, Diversity and Unity, and College Opportunities.
Now all that was left was finding the stories to prove it.
A Professional Experience Designed to Last
Collaboration and Development centered around the experiences of working at a company as large and diversified as Sonoco and what a career there truly looks like. We spoke with individuals ranging from interns early in their career to team members tenured 30+ years at Sonoco.
The common thread we found: opportunities are endless, but they’re not going to be handed to you. You need to be willing to drive your own career, too.
Take Mary E, for example. Mary began working for Sonoco in college as a process engineering intern within the paper business. She moved up the production ranks and was on track to become a plant manager when she saw a Human Resources Manager role available. She began reflecting on her own goals and career and started asking some questions; in her words, Sonoco “took a chance on a paper engineer” and enabled her to move into that role.
The rest of Mary’s story, along with others, can be found in the full length video:
Unifying the Organization through Diversity
Within the topic of Diversity and Unity, we found a culture where diverse thoughts and opinions mattered. Despite being an older organization with very tenured leadership, the voices of young professionals, junior and hourly works workers, and global backgrounds were taken seriously.
Rebecca M, for example, is a part of Sonoco’s Young Professionals group. She had a hand in planning an event that would allow young professionals to ask questions to a panel of Sonoco executives.
At the conclusion of the event, Sonoco’s CEO Rob Tiede approached Rebecca with an idea: Why don’t we reverse this? Let’s have a panel of young professionals that executives can ask questions to see what they can be doing better. And that’s what they did.
Interns and new hires find immediate impact
For the third video, College Opportunities, we interviewed both current interns as well as college graduates who had been converted from interns to full-time hires.
Mirroring the message from Diversity and Unity, we heard stories of these young professionals taking on challenging, meaningful projects that provided them a real voice within the organization.
Accounting and Finance intern Elliott C. spoke of a project given to him by the Director of Finance. Elliott was to conduct a customer analysis to determine the price point that would bring these customers to the market; after presenting his findings to leadership the Vice President of Sales simply stated, “We’ll announce the price increase next Tuesday.” To Elliott, that trust meant everything.
Alongside their tenured colleagues the possibility of a long career hit home to these young professionals, too; many expressed the sentiment that they could foresee themselves staying at the company for the majority of their careers.
A testament to this, in the time between the interview day and the launch of the new careers site, Elliott accepted a full-time position post-graduation!
Creating a people-centric career site
Six weeks post-interview day, our team delivered three finalized videos, a full library of photography, and transcripts and raw files of the interviews themselves. Right on schedule, Sonoco’s beautiful new careers site launched about four weeks later midway through September.
Stories Inc. photos were used to showcase real team members throughout the site, often accompanied with quotes from their interviews:
What’s next?
After the success of their new site launch, Sonoco is looking to continue their employer brand content creation. Future locations and business units to come!