Jim Taylor Careers websites that turn candidate experience into competitive advantage.
Managing Director & COO at Happydance. Liverpool, Merseyside, UK.
Happydance is an independent careers website platform for enterprise and mid-market organisations. It sits in front of the applicant tracking system a company already runs and hands the talent team direct control of what candidates actually see: content, structure, job search, personalisation and measurement.
A careers site is not a brochure. It is the one place where employer brand, candidate experience and hiring performance are judged against the same outcome, and most organisations still treat it as a page rather than as a product. Fix the journey and the numbers follow.
What I do
Employer branding, user experience and technology are usually three separate conversations. The work is making them one.
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Employer brand, made operational
An employer brand that only lives in a campaign has nowhere to land. I work on turning positioning, values and employee stories into site structure, page templates and content models a talent team can keep running long after launch.
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The candidate journey, end to end
The unit of work is the journey, not the page: how someone arrives from a search engine or a job board, what they read, how they decide the role is worth their time, and what the apply step asks of them. Most of the loss happens in the gaps between those steps.
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The technology underneath
A careers site sits between an applicant tracking system, a CRM, analytics and whatever else is already in place. Integration depth, page performance, accessibility and the governance model decide whether it still works in year three.
Happydance
An independent careers website platform, built for organisations whose hiring is too complex for a template and too important to leave in a development queue.
Happydance is used by enterprise and mid-market organisations that need one careers site to carry a real employer brand across several regions, audiences and hiring goals, and to keep performing once the launch project is over.
It integrates with the leading applicant tracking and CRM systems rather than replacing them, so a company keeps the hiring infrastructure it has already invested in and changes the layer candidates experience. The content management system grades what gets written as it is written, for readability, sentiment, bias and search, which makes quality a property of the tool rather than of a review meeting.
I lead the business as Managing Director & COO: the platform roadmap, the delivery and support teams who build and run customer sites, and the commercial side.
Customers
- Uber
- General Motors
- Canva
- Domino’s
- National Grid
- Nationwide
- MGM Resorts
- Xero
- Hilti
Published performance figures
Figures published by Happydance across its customer base. Results vary by organisation, market and starting point.
More from Happydance
Writing and speaking
I write about careers site performance, candidate experience and the operational side of employer brand. Most of it is published on the Happydance Insights blog.
Questions people ask
Who is Jim Taylor?
Jim Taylor is Managing Director and COO of Happydance, an independent careers website platform. He is based in Liverpool, Merseyside, in the United Kingdom. His background combines employer branding, user experience and technology, and his work is focused on how organisations attract and convert candidates through their own careers websites.
What is Happydance?
Happydance is an independent careers website platform for enterprise and mid-market organisations. It provides the careers site itself, including content management, job search, personalisation, search optimisation, accessibility and analytics, and it integrates with the applicant tracking and CRM systems an organisation already uses rather than replacing them. Customers include Uber, General Motors, Pinterest, Canva, Domino’s, National Grid, Nationwide, MGM Resorts, Xero and Hilti.
What does Jim Taylor do as Managing Director and COO of Happydance?
He runs the company day to day and owns how it operates. That covers the platform roadmap, the delivery and support teams who build and run customer careers websites, and the commercial side of the business. It also means staying close to the customer work itself, because the operational detail of a careers site is where the results come from.
What does Jim Taylor write and speak about?
He writes about careers website performance, candidate experience, employer brand and the technology decisions behind talent acquisition. His articles are published on the Happydance Insights blog, and he posts shorter commentary on LinkedIn. Two themes recur: treating a careers site as a product rather than a campaign, and measuring it on conversion rather than on visits.
How do you get in touch with Jim Taylor?
Email me@iamjimtaylor.com, or send a message through his LinkedIn profile. For questions about the Happydance platform specifically, such as integrations, pricing or a demonstration, the Happydance website is the faster route.
Get in touch
Email is best. Careers site problems, platform questions, speaking, or a second opinion on something you are about to build.
me@iamjimtaylor.com