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Therefore, we asked ourselves some questions: Is the Career Site just a logo paired with a short description of the company, or is it much more? And what makes a great Career Site?
Keep reading the blog and find out everything you need to know about making your Career Site the best advertisement for your company!
What’s the problem?
It’s no news to the recruitment industry that by promoting a company's brand you’ll attract more candidates to apply for open positions. Not only does the quality and interactivity of the website reflect on the candidate experience, but it has a direct impact on your entire employer brand. But, if it’s really that well known that having a customized Career Site makes your company stand out and motivates your candidates to quickly press that ‘Apply’ button, why do we still see so few of them looking good?
It could be that just the thought of creating a nice looking, interactive, and customized Career Site that is truly representative of your brand, makes you think of big budgets and hiring IT professionals. For this reason Career Sites often still come in the shape of a short description of what the company does, followed by a logo of the organization. But this can't be the best we can do nowadays!
A number of highly competitive ATS providers are no help when it comes to solving the issues with the Career Site. When purchasing their product, you are convinced that it is their exact product that will enable you to independently create a customized branded Career Site tailored to your company's needs. Yet, when trying to implement their solution, your Career Site ends up looking kind of dull, unattractive and definitely doesn’t represent a simple solution for creating everything that you need. All of the separate landing pages decorated with great pictures and videos portraying life at your company therefore maintain just an aspiration and costly solution.
What makes a good career site?
A big problem when it comes to creating Career Sites is knowing what is possible, what is considered to be good and how can that be achieved. Consequently, if we don’t know what is good and what should be a standard and not a luxury in the world of Career Sites, we can’t really look for that. Therefore we present you with a checklist of what your Career Site should look like and all the elements that it should have.
1. Make it a showstopper!
In this case, looks matter! Whether it’s nice pictures showcasing the atmosphere from the office, a good looking font of an attractive text about the company/position, or a well put together video with the team, it will all benefit your company. When a candidate sees that there has been a substantial effort put into making the Career Site, it shows them that this is a company that cares for its employees and is accepting of the new ones. It also explicitly and implicitly displays a certain culture and what is it that the company cares for and what isn’t.
2. Customize it
In addition to taking care of the layout and all the visuals displayed at the page, it is equally important to make sure that the branded content is represented correctly. From the logo to the company’s colors, typography and the illustrations. Complete customization is something that makes a company stand out from the rest. For candidates, when looking into a completely branded career site, this becomes a universal appearance of the company which will be engraved in their minds for a long time. Therefore, having the ability to independently customize your content without a constant collaboration with designers and the IT department would represent a huge advantage.
3. Regularly refresh the content
Updating your Career Site with the newest and the most relevant changes is probably one of the most important aspects of this list. There is nothing more frustrating to candidates than to waste their time on filling in the applications that expired or are irrelevant. On the other hand, it goes without saying that being able to post a new job opening as soon and as simple as possible speeds up the process, making it more efficient.
Additionally, by regularly adding relevant content in a form of a blog or testimonials from the team, your website benefits by further shaping the employer brand. This way you are no longer engaging with the candidates solely by spreading information about the open position but also about everything company related that might be interesting to them.
4. Create separate career pages for different locations
When hiring worldwide, creating a truthful Career Site representative for each location can become a nightmare for a recruiter who is trying to figure out web design. However, having a single career page for several office locations presents candidates with the lack of information about the practices and specialties of each location. By being able to create separate career sites for separate locations, not only can you showcase the specifics of life in one location, but you can also distinguish a particular micro-culture and the atmosphere from each office. 
Furthermore, imagine your company mostly employs Data Science Engineers in an office in Warsaw and everyone working in corporate affairs and communications departments in the HQ in London. Not only that the lifestyle outside of the office will be entirely different in these two locations, but your future employees will be drawn by entirely different company environments depending on the geographical location and jobs that they are applying for.
5. Create separate career pages for different departments/teams
In addition to the previous bullet point about the location pages, separate pages for different departments can be equally valuable when attracting the right candidates. If you are working for a small startup company where official departments aren’t even a thing, this might be redundant.
However, just imagine the struggle that banks and other corporate structures are going through when trying to attract candidates to their IT departments. It’s no secret that developers and bankers look for different things when searching for a job. While developers might think that working in a bank is a professional setback in comparison to working in exciting tech companies, bakers find the corporate structure of a bank to be a perfect environment. This calls for differently designed career pages for both departments where each could highlight its important aspects in different ways.
6. Create separate pages for all your needs!
Having the possibility to independently add content and pages, represents a huge advantage. In order for candidates to have the ultimate candidate experience while browsing your website, you can create separate pages for everything that you wish to showcase to your candidates! Here are some examples:
If you are organizing an annual Job Fair event or performing on Campus recruitment create separate pages and show students and young job seekers all career opportunities at your company by inviting them to the next event!
Are you hosting a webinar where your future employees could learn more about the work that goes on at your company? Or about the industry they would be working in if hired at your company? By creating a separate page dedicated to all your webinars, candidates can easily find a space dedicated to education about your company!
If you have a Talent Network to which you would love to invite everyone interested in working at your company, create a special place on your website and let all your visitors know what are the benefits of entering your Talent Network!
Finally, you can create a personalized landing page dedicated to each diverse group of candidates you want to target. For instance, you want to focus on recruiting Veterans, disabled workers or anyone who might be interested in your diversity policies? In that case, creating a separate landing page explaining all opportunities is a way to go!
Having separate pages have multiple advantages, but one that stands out significantly is Group Advertising. This feature gives you the possibility to advertise your entire page with all your job openings in it, instead of promoting each job separately. Not only that this becomes more convenient but it saves a lot of money since you are now advertising only one page with all your openings on it.
7. Make it mobile friendly
Therefore, optimizing for mobile is no longer an option, but a necessity! However, oftentimes that is easier said than done. Most of the ATS systems designed to make your life easier when creating a career site on your own, don’t offer an embedded solution for adjusting your career site for mobile. That is why being able to do this without employing extra workforce would really make your life easier!
8. It’s not just the looks - take advantage of SEO Optimization
Last but not least is optimizing your Career Site for Google. Without being able to optimize your career site and become a relevant competitor in a Google Search Engine, all your efforts can be overlooked. Just like retailers are competing for their online space, trying to beat the competition with their upgraded products and better marketing abilities, you are doing the same by marketing the culture of your company through your career site. Standing out and becoming a part of the search battle is definitely something to have on the list of priorities!
9. Track your Career Site
Finally, since your Career Site is not merely a notice board displaying all job opportunities, but an interactive page whose performance can be tracked and measured, it is essential to take advantage of that feature. Make sure your career page is integrated with all marketing pixel tools for the benefit of promoting it and connect it to your candidate database to track which candidates were looking into your site recently. Finally, having the entire built-in analytics will show all visitors and their characteristics so that you can tailor your content and turn your visitors into candidates.
Convert with the best Career Site
Having the best career site means having the best candidate conversion and having the best candidate conversion means being able to put a check mark on all of these bullet points.
So, if you are looking for a tool that would enable you to create a relevant career site without employing additional staff and coordinating efforts with other departments, start our free trial and learn how to tailor your career pages exactly to your needs!
Every company nowadays needs a Career Site that besides displaying job opportunities in their organization truthfully represents the culture to convert visitors into future job candidates!
