Your company career site should be the center of your recruitment marketing and digital recruiting activities. When evaluating your digital recruiting efforts, it’s important to think about the information and resources you can anticipate a candidate will need or want before they apply for your job opening.
Candidate Resources That Drive Value on Your Career Site
By offering resources on your career site or career pages, you are not only attracting the right talent to your organization, but you are arming your candidates with information they can use in their research process prior to their application. This will in turn will increase your candidate quality, as job seekers can opt out of expressing their interest just as those who better fit your company culture and understand the job can apply and opt in.
Here are five primary resources to include on your company career site to optimize applicant quality and your employer brand.
1) FAQ
This is a list of commonly asked questions that you should be supplying all job seekers. Include the link to this page in your automated email response email to job seekers and use it to build and create content that supports those questions.
While you should demonstrate authority through the depth of your answers, be sure you’re not losing your audience by giving them more than they need. Write your questions from your customer’s perspective (e.g. “How do I…”) and answer from your business’s perspective (e.g. “You should…” or “We provide…”).
Another benefit of FAQ pages: Ranking for answer boxes on Google and improving your organic search results. By phrasing questions and answers on a page, Google will crawl your site along with other sources and could potentially rank your FAQ page higher when candidates search for terms like “how do I get a job at _____?” Also, if you want information about your company to come from your company page and not other sources (like Glassdoor, with potentially negative reviews), make sure to provide that information on your career website in a clear format.
2) Video
A simple “about us” video can go a long way towards appealing to your ideal candidate. If you’re on a budget, it doesn’t have to be done professionally, but having an expert produce this for you means that you’ll hit the high points visually, have captioning for accessibility, and appeal to the type of candidates you want to interview. What makes people want to work for your company? What’s the emotional appeal? This is great as text (see the next item), but when you have a video that can be shared on social, you’re going to reach a broader audience and it gives you the opportunity to have your employees tell candidates what they like about working for you.
3) Details about your company
What type of company are you? What’s your story? Why should the job seeker want to work there? Your employee value proposition (EVP) is the highlight of this section, including things like perks, benefits, and what makes your company stand out from your competitors. You don’t have to do a deep dive into the founding and history, but if you have an interesting story that showcases the passion of what your company does, then consider a visual timeline or infographic that demonstrates milestones and growth.
4) Three words
Ask your employees to describe the company in three words or less. Place these words into a word cloud and it is here that you have the three most powerful descriptive words that employees feel represents the organization and keeps them coming back to your organization. These words should be front and center on your career page. Your EVP or employee value proposition is a great place to find these, but don’t just drop a statement in because it sounds good. You have a valuable resource in your current employees, specifically top talent, and they can sum up your value better than you can. Consider the stories you tell in onboarding training, feedback from happy employees, and even sending an internal survey to ask what adjectives your employees would use to describe working for your company. A few quick employee perspective videos could be added to the page to help support this message.
5) Contact information
The biggest frustration for job seekers is lack of follow up. Provide them an email address, phone number, social media information or a chat bot to follow up with your recruiting team. This gives them a channel to communicate with you first instead of venting their frustrations with negative comments on review sites. Additionally, having a direct contact with a short bio (your point of contact in HR, for example) humanizes your company, no matter how large.
Finally, don’t forget to consider how job seekers will find your careers page from your company’s primary website. If job seekers can find your company site, but not your careers page, you’re missing an opportunity to engage candidates. Most candidates will visit a company page to do research. If your careers page isn’t prominently linked – in a sidebar, a top nav menu, a pop-up – they’ll head for the nearest job search engine instead.
