- Details (more than just bullet points)
- Authenticity (Featuring real employees)
- Specific functional content (target your toughest areas to recruit with the best content)
- Social widgets (what channels are promoting your jobs? Are they linked?)
- Apply now (easy, direct apply options)
Career site must-haves! We are here to cover the basics. The 5 most important things are: a Company, a Domain, Access to the Internet, Access to Electricity, and a Keen Ability to Recognize a Sarcastic Introduction. After you check those boxes, you should read this article for 5 more things you can do to make sure your career site catches the eye of candidates, encourages them to return, and gets even the more stubborn ones to click that apply button.
DETAILS: MORE THAN JUST BULLET POINTS
Quality candidates are smart, discerning, and hungry for more information about your company to help them make a decision. Websites like Glassdoor wouldn’t exist if candidates didn’t want transparency, so providing as many details as you can about your company, culture, and positions will instill a sense of trust. On the homepage of the career site, you can keep the bullet points, but provide links to more details (such as job family specific pages, a company culture page, a benefits page, or even a FAQ page); providing high-level information on the surface with clear paths to specific information will make sure your site serves both candidates who know what they want and those who still need to be convinced.
AUTHENTICITY: FEATURE REAL EMPLOYEES
Stock photos are so passé! Seriously, you don’t need Annie Leibovitz on your team to make a big impact with home-grown pictures of real employees. Just grab a camera and show candidates what real employees look like while doing real work at your company. Real photos, however, are just the first step to demonstrating authenticity. Employee stories are authentic ways that candidates can see themselves at your company. There is no easy way around this, so you need to hit the streets, listen to your employees, and record their stories for blogs and video – video being the big one. This can be quite an undertaking, so you may want to hire outside help with experience in creating content like this. Someone like *ahem* Kinetix.
SPECIFIC FUNCTIONAL CONTENT: TARGET YOUR TOUGHEST-TO-RECRUIT
Presenting any ol’ employee story is great, but having a direction for what kind of content will provide the highest ROI for your recruitment team is the best way to leverage your work. Whatever positions you know to be difficult to recruit for should have their own job-family pages and content featuring current employees in those roles. This will give your recruiters a simple link to send to passive candidates that continues to sell your company after they end the conversation. Not only does provide all the details and transparency as we discussed before, but a candidate who sees how much time you have dedicated to finding someone in their field will be much more likely to join the team. This will really help distinguish you from the competition.
SOCIAL WIDGETS: COMPLETE THE CIRCLE
Ideally, you should be sharing the content you produced on social media to drive traffic to your career site. This social media management can be a lot to take on ( unless you have a dedicated partner like *ahem* Kinetix) so make sure these channels get as much exposure as possible and this work won’t be in vain. Integrating your social media recruitment strategy and your career site is a no-brainer and pretty easy to accomplish. First thing’s first: put those links on your site! Let people follow the channels that will keep them connected to your recruiting team with social widgets in the header and/or footer of your site. You may even want a banner on the homepage calling on people to follow your channels to hear about new openings and to see newly produced career-centric content. Next, make your jobs shareable! Get a widget on your job posts that lets your candidates do your work for you by sharing the posts to social media. You advertise your positions on social media, which drives traffic to your career site, which shares your positions on social media; the circle is complete!
APPLY NOOOWWWWW: MAKE A HAPPY PATH
In UX design, a happy path is the optimal path for a user to take that leads to increased satisfaction with each step. In that context, you want to make sure there is ALWAYS a happy path for a candidate on your site, and that path should end with them applying for a job. The best way to think this through is to think like a candidate. Do I already know I want to apply? There should be a clearly visible way for me to apply above the fold on the home page so I can get right to it. Do I need to know where you are before I make my decision? There should be a link to a “Locations” page which offers information about your locations and a call to action to apply for each one. Do I want to know more about my position at your company, maybe even a first-hand account? I should be able to go to my job family’s specific page, read a story, and click a link after reading that takes me to apply. For a true happily ever after, any user story should end in application.
These five steps may seem like a lot, but they are really important in making sure you maximize your candidate pool. Your career site should be the hub of your recruiting activities and, though it may take some work, you should make sure that hub is working as hard for your company as your people are. Details, authenticity, targeted content, social integration, and easy access to application will turn your career site into a career destination.