PERSOL Australia (the rebranded entity formerly known as PERSOLKELLY Australia and New Zealand) asked The Animals to lift the user experience and conversion performance of their corporate website. We were invited onto the project by Leigh at Decode Agency, who led project management and web development, with The Animals leading UX research, UI design and creative.
The brief behind the PERSOLKELLY UX UI optimisation
PERSOLKELLY’s existing site was working hard but not converting hard. Pages were attracting strong traffic, yet bounce rates were high on key commercial pages, and the journey from “looking for staff” or “looking for work” through to a meaningful action wasn’t doing the recruitment business justice. Our remit was clear: improve the user experience and lift conversion across the site, anchored in evidence rather than opinion, and rolled out under PERSOLKELLY’s global brand playbook.
The challenge
Recruitment websites carry a dual audience burden — candidates and clients — each with very different intents, content needs and conversion goals. Add a global brand system that needed to be honoured across every page, and an Australian and New Zealand market with its own behavioural quirks, and the optimisation challenge becomes more nuanced than a simple visual refresh. The work had to be earned through data, not assumed. Every change needed a reason behind it, and every reason needed to point back to a real user need or a real commercial outcome.
Our approach to the PERSOLKELLY UX UI optimisation
We started where every good UX project should start — by listening to the data. Working alongside Leigh and the Decode Agency team, we ran a deep analytics and behavioural audit across the site: heatmaps, scroll depth, click maps, movement tracking, Google Analytics deep-dives, page-by-page bounce rate analysis, average time on page, page views and yearly traffic patterns. We mapped the journeys candidates and clients were actually taking — not the ones the site assumed they were.
The research surfaced clear, useful patterns. Traffic peaked in April and dipped in January. Mid-week visits did the heavy lifting. The home page’s “I’m looking for work” and “I’m looking for staff” split was working for candidates but quietly under-serving clients. Insights and article pages were generating real engagement, but lacked the calls to action to convert that attention into a lead. Some pages with high time on page had no popup, no contact module, no next step at all.
From that research we surfaced a clear set of UX recommendations covering navigation hierarchy, the home page audience split, lead capture, content depth, CTA placement on article pages, and where to introduce new modules to recover drop-off. Those recommendations fed straight into wireframes, then into a full UI redesign that brought PERSOLKELLY’s global brand playbook to life in a way that felt local, considered and easy to use. You can see more of our UX and digital design work here.
The result
The redesigned site delivered exactly what it set out to: a measurably better user experience and a meaningful lift in conversion rates across both candidate and client journeys. Bounce rates dropped on the pages that mattered, time on page increased on the content that converts, and the site finally reflected the calibre of the business behind it. For us, it’s a textbook example of what happens when analytics, UX thinking and brand craft pull in the same direction — and a reminder that the best digital outcomes are almost always built on the back of honest, properly interrogated data.
Why this PERSOLKELLY UX UI optimisation matters to us
This project sat right in The Animals’ sweet spot — the intersection of strategy, research, brand and design — and it gave us the chance to work hand-in-hand with a digital partner we genuinely respect. Big brand systems can sometimes feel like a constraint; in this case, the global PERSOLKELLY playbook became a creative springboard, and a useful guardrail that kept the work consistent while still feeling considered for the local market. The end result is a site that works harder for both candidates and clients, and a case study we’re proud to put our name to.
Credits
A genuine thank you to Leigh and the team at Decode Agency for inviting us onto the project and running the project management and web development end of things, and to PERSOLKELLY (now PERSOL Australia) for trusting the process from research through to redesign. Curious about how a similar approach could work for your business? Get in touch with The Animals.
