If finding great talent is a priority for your organization, then building an effective company career site should be at the top of your to-do list.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at some must-have features that lead to a great careers site, and discuss what job seekers are looking for on these pages.
9 must-have careers site features
Building a career site is similar to building an effective website or landing page. The same rules of user experience, appealing content, and ease-of-use apply to your career page, and will serve you well if you take the time to plan them out effectively.
With that being said, here are nine career site features that you should keep in mind when creating or editing your own.
1. An updated job list
Keeping your job list up-to-date and well organized is really a no-brainer for anybody who manages a careers site.
Candidates expect that any positions listed on your website are openly taking applications. It’s important that you don’t waste their time by leaving posts up for positions that have already been filled.
It’s good practice to always update your career site when a position is filled, or a new job pops up in your organization.
Do a weekly sweep of your careers site to ensure that you are only showing jobs that you are actively hiring for.
2. A simple search engine
This is especially important if you’re a larger organization with lots of job openings dispersed around the globe.
Candidates will want to be able to search for posts that apply to their skill sets and experience, and those which are located in their geographic area.
Your search engine, therefore, should be easy-to-use, cover all of your job postings, and be customizable should you need to change the functionality at any point.
Search variables to keep in mind include job categories, location, keywords, and seniority level.
3. Easy, intuitive application process
One sure-fire way to tank your candidate experience right off the start is to have an overly complicated and time-consuming application process. Candidates will prefer a simple application process that doesn’t take up too much of their time, or ask for redundant information.
Keep your forms and steps simple and to-the-point, and limit the overall process to no more than a few pages. Consider integrating one-step processes like automatically pulling information from a resume into the candidate profile, and enabling candidates to apply using their LinkedIn profiles.
A good Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will likely contain features that can help you build, test, and augment your application process to achieve the best user experience possible.
4. Solid employer branding and messaging
Like a normal website, it’s important that your career site contains appealing messaging and reflects your brand and values. This can range from having an appealing domain name to the website design and aesthetics. This will likely take some time to develop and will require you to work cross-functionally within your organization to synthesize your company culture into one single page.
Use a variety of mediums to present your messaging and employer brand. This can include video, text, audio, testimonials, photographs, or even GIFs.
Don’t be afraid to get creative with how you present your employer brand. Think of this step as your virtual introduction to each and every candidate.
You want to put your best foot forward, and be honest about who you are as a company.
5. Easy communication and connection
Living up to a great presentation of your employer brand means that your people need to be available to communicate with engaged candidates. An exciting employer brand doesn’t mean a whole lot if job seekers don’t know how to contact the people behind that messaging.
To ensure that this handoff between introduction and conversation goes smoothly, it’s a good idea to always include information on how candidates can contact your recruitment team. This might mean adding profile images and email addresses for your recruiters, or it could be as simple as including a chat box or contact form.
What’s important is to remember that, if your employer branding is doing its job, candidates are going to want to talk to a real person. Make sure there’s someone on the other side of the phone, email, or chat box to answer.
6. Appealing visual layout
Your career site should borrow as many pages from web design as possible to ensure your candidate’s user experience is a good one. Ensuring that your page has an appealing visual layout, a good overall user experience, and contains all relevant content is critical to success.
Here are some things you should keep in mind when creating the visual layout for your career site:
- It needs to be mobile friendly.
- Simple website navigation.
- Visually appealing fonts and colours.
- Engaging graphics and imagery.
- Show your story using video, images, and GIFs.
- Keep text short and concise.
- Let your personality shine through.
Again, this will likely take some time and planning to get right. Leverage your internal web development teams, or the built-in career site builder in your ATS to develop a design that works for your team.
7. Thorough information
Whether it’s for your job postings, employer branding, or an explanation of your application process, it’s important that you provide all of the information that a candidate will need to make an informed decision.
Don’t rush the content on your career site. Take the time to think through your recruitment process and candidate experience, and create content that reflects and explains that journey clearly.
Likewise, ensure that every job posting you add on your site contains the proper job requirements, job description, company overview, and next steps.
Learn 9 ways to get SEO for job posting right
8. Easy to edit
Your career site should be easy to edit. If you haven’t caught on yet, your team will be regularly reviewing and making edits to your career pages, and adding new job postings. It’s absolutely critical that your team can easily access and edit the backend of your career site to make these necessary changes.
Whether this involves tapping into your company content marketing system (CMS), or using a platform like Recruitee to create your career site, it’s important that the platform is user friendly and intuitive for you and your team.
9. Access to careers site analytics
Last but not least, it is essential to track data so that you can optimize your careers site. With the ability to track and report on your careers site analytics, you can learn more about your careers site visitors and see who converts to candidates.
You can track data such as the number and duration of visits and views, bounce rate, number of applications, candidate conversion and drop-off rates, and more.
Your company careers site is likely where the majority of your candidates come in from, so understanding how to improve your page to increase candidate conversion will do wonders for your employer brand!
This can be done by using Google Analytics, or by using an ATS like Recruitee which offers Careers site analytics - a simple-to-use analytics tool for data-driven hiring.
