Challenge
OTTO Work Force attracted around two million visitors per year to its recruitment platform. An impressive number, but the traffic was not converting into results. Fewer than 7% of visitors reached the application form. Of those who started, more than 60% dropped off before completing it. On top of that, roughly 30% of traffic came from non-EU regions, none of whom could legally be placed in the Netherlands.
The business ambitions were growing fast, but the platform’s technical foundations had not kept pace. OTTO recognized it was time for a ground-up rebuild.
Solution
In a one-month discovery phase with OTTO’s marketing, IT teams, CTO and design partners, we identified five concrete pain points, each mapped to a clear business goal. Together, we defined what the new platform needed to do, how content and data should flow, and what the migration path from the legacy system would look like.
Then we made a decision that shaped the entire project: Pimcore DXP as the central platform to showcase the updated brand look and mobile-first design concept. For a company with a defined budget and ambitious timelines, it offered the right balance of capability and cost, without heavyweight enterprise licensing. It meant vacancies, content, digital assets, and multi-language publishing could all live under one roof, managed by OTTO’s own teams after handover.
From there, delivery picked up the pace. Working in two-week sprints, the team shaped a mobile-first platform where candidates can search, filter, and apply with minimal friction. Vacancy data refreshes automatically, so listings stay accurate without manual upkeep. Translation across markets, previously a coordination headache, now runs through an automated pipeline. Compliance, analytics, SSO, and a ground-up SEO rebuild were baked in from sprint one.
Benefits
Delivered on time and on budget, the new platform gives OTTO Work Force a mobile-first, multi-market recruitment experience built to reduce friction at every step of the candidate journey. A unified content repository replaces the previous patchwork, eliminating duplication and lowering coordination costs.
For the first twelve months, the targets are clear:
- raise visit-to-application conversion from 11.4% to 20%
- cut drop-off to below 25%
- lift the share of visitors reaching the apply form from under 7% to 10%.
Supporting targets include 20% more organic traffic and 99.9% uptime. Longer-term, OTTO aims to double applicant-to-placement conversion to 10% and grow website-sourced applications to 80% of total candidates.
