How to build state-of-the-art your career pages?

Wherever they are coming from (LinkedIn, job boards, etc.), talents interested in your open positions are landing on your career pages. Therefore it is the right spot to make a killer first impression and to give more information about your company culture and values.

In the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report, candidates say that the 3 most important information they want to have before considering a company as an employer are culture and values, perks and benefits and the company’s mission and vision. Since you should keep your job descriptions short (read my blog post about job description optimization), your career pages are a good place to give them such information.

Creating cutting-edge career pages is more than just listing the open positions you have within the company. 57% of recruitment executives admit that talent competition is their biggest challenge1, therefore it is critical to make your company appealing to talents and your career pages represents an opportunity to make the difference.

To make sure you hit the target, here are a couple of things you should consider while building your career pages.

Pay attention to design and usability

Well-designed career pages will definitely help you attract more talents since you will showcase that you invest in Human Resources and that you are an people-driven company.

While building your career pages, pay attention to stay in line with your Corporate website (and your LinkedIn company/employer page). Right after hearing about a job, talents don’t always apply right away, they are 59% to first have a look at your company website2 so keep using your Corporate colors, tone of voice, imagery style, etc. Maybe you could also adapt your company headline to create an employer headline in line with the rest of your company’s communication. Creating a consistent journey for your visitors will definitely be a plus for you as an employer.

If graphic design is important, you should also provide a seamless user experience to your visitors. For instance, make it convenient to search for an open position by giving the opportunity to filter position per localization, seniority and department.

And since mobile Internet represents more than 50% of the total traffic worldwide, make sure that your career pages are fully responsive and that talents can easily navigate from any device (mobile, tablet).

Enrich it with relevant content

Even if its primary function is to clearly present the open positions available at your company, career pages must also include other information to motivate talents to join your company. As said earlier, at least two other elements must be clearly stated on your career pages: your mission and vision and your company culture and values (perks and benefits being listed in your job descriptions).

While adding information, keep in mind that it must remain easy to read so try to structure information as much as possible. A good example might be a newsletter. Most of the time you don’t see all the information in the email you get in your mailbox. Instead you see images or video thumbnails, engaging titles, short text blocks and “read more” buttons. When you are interested in one of the topics listed in the email, you click on “read more” and land on a page where you can access the full information on that topic.

You can apply the same kind of structure to your career pages. For instance start by briefly describing your company and link it to the Corporate website for more information. Then put a “job finder” to access and sort the list of open positions. Below this “job finder” you can shortly state your mission and vision and maybe add a 2 minutes video gathering all the information on that topic. Then put a text block about career development within your company with a link to download a white paper on that topic or add testimonials from employees who have moved internally. You can also add a virtual visit of your offices or anything else you may find relevant.

Humanize the whole stuff

Every day we face a lot of digital tools: web pages, online booking systems, social media, apps, self-scanning devices, e-commerce websites, etc. Well, if it is a good way to get information and make our lives easier, it doesn’t fit every situation. In their job search - and since they will spend most of their time in your offices collaborating with people - talents want to know who will be their colleagues and how does the life look like at your company. So giving them information through your digital channels is fine as long as you do not forget the human dimension.

To humanize your career pages you can leverage on your employees and management, your message will always be more powerful if it is coming from someone talents can identify themselves to. For instance you can use testimonials from happy employees, videos of your latest team buildings, trainings or events, start your page with a quote from your HR Director or CPO and use the right words to make readers feel that people matters at your company. In one word, put the Corporate speech away and orientate everything around people.

And last but not least…

Once you have designed beautiful and easy-to-use career pages, in line with your Corporate website and enriched with a lot of engaging and well-structured content and when you have made sure that these pages are not just another digital tool but also a place where you showcase how much you care about human, you may focus on two other topics.

The first one is to promote your employer social media account. Imagine a top talent visiting your career pages. He finds everything he needs to be convinced that you are a the right employer for him but there aren’t any interesting position for him at the moment. Why not seizing the opportunity to connect on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube? Beside the fact that you will most probably share your open positions there, you could also post some content that might keep this talent “hot” for a rather long period of time. So do not hesitate to promote your social accounts on your career pages, not just by adding a couple of icons but by using a reasonably big banner somewhere on the pages. “You haven’t found your dream job today? Connect with us on LinkedIn to stay aware of our job opportunities and latest news!”

Finally, you can optimize your pages structure, coding and wording to make it search-friendly. At the moment most of your traffic is probably coming from your Corporate website, social media or job boards but you could add extra traffic by optimizing your pages for Google and other search engines. You are a leading pharmaceutical company and you are looking for chemists? Try to get on the first page of Google for searches related to your recruitment objectives like “job pharma chemistry” for instance.

I hope this article will help you building state-of-the-art career pages but do not hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any question or comments.

All the best in your future recruitments!

1 LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2017

2 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2016