Flagger Force

Turning a Legacy Website into a Recruiting Engine

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The Rundown

Flagger Force employs more than 2,500 people across 15 states, and keeping that workforce staffed is core to the business. Their website had three jobs: win customers, recruit a steady stream of applicants, and serve current employees. On the old site, those jobs were competing with each other.

The site ran on a 10-year-old custom WordPress theme layered with years of patches. Employee-facing and customer-facing content were tangled together, routine updates risked breaking pages, and the original developer was no longer available to maintain it.

They knew they needed a new website that integrated with their recruitment platform, effectively separated internal employee-focused content and external-facing customer content, and allowed their team to easily manage content in-house without compromising the design.

The Results

  • 33% higher engagement rate in the first six months after launch compared with the same period the prior year. Traffic held roughly steady, and more of those visitors engaged with the site.
  • Plugins cut from 82 to 22: 57 standard plugins down to 19, and 25 must-use plugins down to 3.
  • A decade-old theme replaced by a lean custom theme built from scratch with modern tooling.
  • Applicants move from the website into iCIMS without re-entering their search, and recruitment source data comes along with them.
  • Locations are entered once and stay current across the map, sidebar, and landing pages in all 15 states.
  • Employee tools moved to their own site, leaving the public site focused on customers and recruiting.
  • In-house content control, with continued support from MIND as part of a partnership that began in 2021.

Why MIND

MIND has supported Flagger Force’s website since 2021. We knew how their organization worked, had collaborative working relationships with their other vendors, and had a track record of solving problems together. When it was time to rebuild, the question was when, not who.

We worked alongside Flagger Force’s existing vendors, Armor and Grit Marketing Group. Armor designed the custom theme based on collaboration with Grit and MIND, and we built it.

What We Built

As often happens with web development projects, especially those that are large, multifaceted, and long-lived, the requirements evolved from start to finish. There were a lot of variables and considerations that needed to be accounted for, which required ongoing collaboration, flexibility, and innovative software solutions.

It was essential to be able to go with the flow, whether that was on a consulting basis to provide options for overcoming obstacles or implementing workarounds when things had to be done a certain way. The result was a clean custom theme with minimal plugins and low overhead, including several notable features:

  • A recruiting pipeline connected to iCIMS
  • A service area map that maintains itself
  • An employee portal on its own site
  • A clean foundation the marketing team owns

 

 

A Recruiting Pipeline Connected to iCIMS

iCIMS is the enterprise-grade talent acquisition platform Flagger Force uses to recruit and manage applicants. Applicants search openings by zip code on the Flagger Force site. With the new integration, the search hands off to iCIMS with results prepopulated, and recruitment-advertising tracking data travels with the applicant, so Flagger Force can see which channels bring applicants in.

iCIMS’s documentation for passing data into its application flow is thin, and much of what exists sits behind a login, with developer seats sold separately. We reverse-engineered the handoff by studying the querystrings iCIMS’s own native forms generate, then built the website search to match them.

A Service Area Map That Maintains Itself

Each location is a custom post type with an ACF repeater of Google Maps address fields. The team enters an address once, and it appears as a pin on the service area map, in a dynamic locations sidebar, and on location-specific landing pages. Under the old system, the same change took several separate, manual updates.

An Employee Portal on Its Own Site

The old site served employees and the public from a single build that was never designed to do both. We moved the employee-facing functionality to a separate site on its own subdomain. We also added 301 redirects from old main-site URLs, so employees’ bookmarks and links still land where they should. Separating the portal let the public site launch focused entirely on customers and recruiting, without waiting on the portal and without employees losing access to anything they relied on.

Phase two is now underway: rebuilding the employee portal on the same framework as the new public site.

A Clean Foundation the Marketing Team Owns

We replaced the 10-year-old theme with a custom theme written from scratch using Tailwind and Vite, with a modern deployment workflow. Combined with the plugin reduction, that means far less code to maintain, patch, and secure.

For the marketing team, we built straightforward admin panels and a library of predesigned components, including hero variants and other content blocks, to give them in-house content control. They build and update pages within the design system on their own without making design decisions or risk breaking design consistency. They don’t need a page builder, they avoid the bloated markup builders generate, and they don’t need a developer for routine changes.

“This effort removes a lot of the ‘Frankenstein’ layering and patchwork that has accumulated over the last 10 years and gives us a much cleaner foundation moving forward.”

Chris Byerly VP of Strategy, Flagger Force

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