Customer Stories 
Summary
Fonterra’s first truly global careers site marked a shift in how the Co-operative approached talent attraction. Rather than treating the site as a destination for job applications alone, the team set out to build a more agile experience to express Fonterra’s employer brand globally, while still leaving room for local relevance. For a business with thousands of roles, multiple markets and deeply local realities, a traditional job-led site was not enough. Fonterra needed a model that could support global consistency while continuing to evolve as business priorities changed.
With the help of Avature Careers Marketplace and Portal Apps Builder, Fonterra built a more flexible global career experience around reusable structures, richer candidate content and a setup that helps talent teams evolve content more independently over time.
About Fonterra
Fonterra is a New Zealand dairy co-operative owned by thousands of New Zealand farmer families. The Co-operative has a significant presence in New Zealand, employing more than 10,500 people across its network of 24 manufacturing sites, Farm Source retail stores and offices. Globally, Fonterra has a presence in the Americas, China, North Asia, Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia with more than 1,000 employees connecting the Co-op with customers.
The Challenge: Building a Career Experience That Could Adapt at Scale
For Fonterra, the challenge was not simply to launch a new site. It was to bring its “Imagine Tomorrow” employer brand to life in a way candidates could genuinely experience. The team recognized that a careers site was more than a place to view vacancies. It is often the first real interaction a candidate has with an employer brand and a moment when people are asking broader questions about belonging, purpose and what kind of future they could imagine there.
That mattered because while Fonterra is widely recognized as a dairy business, the full breadth of careers across the Co-operative, from engineering, science and sustainability to marketing and operations are lesser known. The issue was not how to post jobs more effectively. It was how to create an experience that could help candidates see the wider business and understand where they might fit within it.
A traditional careers site was never going to solve that on its own. Fonterra needed something less static and more centred on candidate journeys, story-led content and the decisions people were trying to make. At the same time, the team was not looking for a one-size-fits-all site. They needed an approach that could balance global consistency with local flexibility and continue evolving as business priorities changed.
The Solution: Designing a Career Experience That Could Evolve With the Business
Defining the Global Core
The team began by mapping out the structure of Fonterra’s careers site before any pages were built. They identified which elements needed to remain consistent across the experience, including brand, values, experience principles and technical foundations, and where content needed more room to adapt across different audiences, campaigns, job families and market contexts. That decision established the operating model from the outset: a shared global core, with enough room for local storytelling and variation where it mattered most.
Making Autonomy Operational With Portal Apps Builder
That model had to work in practice, not just in principle. Fonterra needed teams to be able to create, update and extend content over time without turning every change into a heavy development cycle. To support that, the team mapped candidate journeys and created a detailed sitemap before a single page was built. The team also worked closely with Avature’s development team, its agency partner and internal brand stakeholders to connect design and technology early so the site could be built on a structure that supported both governance and change.
Autonomy wasn’t a byproduct. It was the design goal.”
Katharine Holgate
Talent Marketing Manager, Fonterra
The Avature Portal Apps Builder gave the team a governed, practical way to put that planning into action. Using a visual, template-based builder with drag-and-drop page creation and reusable page structures, the team could work from consistent layouts and navigation rather than rebuilding entire pages from scratch. That made the site easier to build and refresh job family pages, campaign pages and content for different business units and projects, while keeping the overall experience aligned.
[The Portal Apps Builder] allowed us to build new pages quickly for campaigns, locations, business units and projects, using reusable structures instead of starting from scratch every time.”
Katharine Holgate
Talent Marketing Manager, Fonterra
Extending the Experience Beyond Jobs
That same foundation also made it easier to extend the experience beyond those core career-site pages and support candidates in more meaningful ways across the journey. The Fonterra team wanted the site to do more than surface opportunities. They wanted candidates to better understand the Co-operative, its culture and possible pathways and decide, before applying, whether they could see themselves there.
To support that, Fonterra created a Careers Resources section with content for early-career candidates, recruitment-process guidance, career development information and support for candidates who may need reasonable adjustments during the hiring process. The wider experience also made room for downloadable resources, career pathways and values-based content designed to help people explore the Co-operative in greater depth before applying.
Using the flexibility of Page Builder, we created a Careers Resources section, featuring content to support candidates throughout each stage of their career journey.”
Katharine Holgate
Talent Marketing Manager, Fonterra
Fonterra also used Avature capabilities to make discovery and guidance more intuitive across the candidate journey. AI-powered job recommendations helped candidates find roles aligned with their work experience and skills, broadening exploration beyond simple keyword searches. The site also featured Milkie, a chatbot experience built with Avature’s chatbot capabilities, giving candidates another way to navigate questions, job search and parts of the application journey. Together, these elements made the experience more guided, informative and easier to move through.
The Result: Greater Flexibility Without Losing Consistency
The new global careers site gave Fonterra a stronger platform for expressing its employer brand and presenting a more complete view of the business to candidates. The experience created more space to showcase careers across engineering, science, sustainability, marketing, operations and opportunities for leadership.
The Portal Apps Builder also gave the team more autonomy to keep the site responsive as business priorities changed. Rather than locking the experience into a fixed structure, Fonterra had a more practical way to introduce new pages and content while maintaining consistency across the global site. This mattered not only for day-to-day updates but also when the business needed more tailored hiring spaces, allowing the team to respond to change without losing governance behind the scenes.
For candidates, the result was a career experience that supported more informed exploration before applying. It gave them access to richer content, clearer guidance and more contextual ways to understand the Co-operative, its culture and the kinds of pathways available across the business. And because the site was designed to evolve, Fonterra is continuing to extend the experience over time, including localization to reflect community needs across the global site.
