An optimised careers website offering engaging, informative content, is vital for attracting the right candidates to your organisation. Find out what it takes to create a great experience to your talent audience...
When it comes to outlining an employee value proposition and an employer brand, your careers site is the shop window for your recruitment marketing.
So, you must get it right, with the right level of investment, the right functionality and everything needed for candidates to make a fully informed decision about your company and the roles within it.
You don’t need to deploy every single available widget and chatbot, but you do need a great-looking, fast, mobile first, Google-friendly, SEO optimised home for your employer brand.
Building a site that works for your organisation always excites people, but it can be a long process, because you need to get the balance right between technology and content. I say this all the time - technology is just the enabler, content is king. For the site to achieve an optimal level of impact, the technology must be able to deliver that great content in a fast, impactful manner.
We feel these are the must haves when building a career site:
- Culture page.
- Team page.
- Office locations.
- Brand pillar pages
- Persona pages
- Evergreen job role pages
Getting Your Homepage Right
The homepage is also vitally important because that's the doorway into those key areas and it’s a candidate’s first contact with your employer brand. First impressions count just as much as page impressions.
FAQs are often overlooked in importance, but they are great and can be more impactful and engaging than you might imagine. They are not just a quick way of answering obvious questions.
If you're familiar with Rich Text Snippets in Google, it's basically Google trying to answer a question someone has asked, not get you to a website, because Google wants to keep you on its website. It is almost becoming your biggest competitor. They take a snippet from your site to answer the query. And well-written FAQs will allow it to do that really well.
What it also does is answer the audience and educate the candidates, keeping them engaged, and tell them everything they need to know, while also saving the hiring managers time, because they're not having to answer those questions during the application process such as ‘what are the opportunities for me?’, ‘how does this work?’, ‘what does my first 90 days look like?’ and so on.
They should be able to get all those answers on the career site. And it's also better for SEO because the content is more in depth and the candidate will stay on the page longer.
Teams page
The Teams page provides an overview, where candidates can look at the jobs that are available within that team and explore all the roles within it.
We try to get our customers to add as much information about working in those teams as possible, to share a day in the life, the real experience, authentic employees stories, and other articles that are related to that team. It all helps to build the overall picture.
Locations is also vital in helping to build a complete picture. When companies have multiple offices and working locations candidates need to know more about what it is like to work in that location versus another office. They might want to know about the experience of working remotely or in a hybrid structure. Also, different locations might have different perks and benefits. There is a different importance attached to health benefits in the US versus the UK for instance.
Candidates will often spend hours researching a role before they apply, and you want them to do that on your career site rather than elsewhere. You want them to be really engaged and hopefully convert them.
Or if they decide it’s not for them, they won't apply, but the important thing is that your site has given them everything they need to make that informed decision.
