Building one careers solution for over 50 countries.

ZEISS makes optical systems and optoelectronics, turns over more than 10.8 billion euros a year and employs over 43,000 people in fifty countries. It asked for a relaunch. What it had was fifty markets that had each solved the same problem their own way, on numerous microsites that made the whole thing hard to scale.

A researcher wants to know if she can publish. A production specialist wants to know about shifts and the commute. A graduate has never heard of the company at all. All of them landed on the same page, which treated every visitor identically once they arrived.

Country or language. Organise by language and there is less to maintain, but a candidate in Belgium gets an experience built for Paris. Organise by country and it fits, but every market becomes something to look after. We modelled both against how ZEISS actually hires and where the content is actually owned, then made the call before anyone drew a screen.

Four audiences, not one. Students, professionals, researchers and production staff got their own route in. Small change on a wireframe, large one for the person reading it.

Existing modules only. Every custom component is a promise that someone maintains it forever. Across fifty markets that is how good launches turn into local workarounds two years later.

The relaunch left ZEISS with a modern, functional interface, navigation that guides rather than lists, a structure that gets candidates to the relevant information quickly, and content that is localised and accessible for every market.

Three things carried it: a detailed market and competitor analysis to identify the trends and best practices worth following, an iterative design and development process that kept adapting to what users needed, and a user-centred approach grounded in targeted UX analyses and testing.