3 Careers Page Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
Picture this. You’re sitting in the drive-thru craving a Big Mac with extra mac sauce and extra pickles, fresh fries and a pop with little ice. You make your order and pull up to the pay window. You drive up to the second window and get your bag of delicious crave-busting cholesterol and drive off. You open up the bag and take the Big Mac and take a bite… There’s no extra mac sauce. There are no extra pickles. Your fries are stale. And your pop is watery, and flat. There are very few things more annoying or disappointing than ending up with something you didn’t order. And you’re left with a sour taste (sometimes literally). But I get it, it’s usually an honest mistake. The orders are rushed. There’s pressure to get things done quickly. There’s other people in line. Mistakes are bound to be made.
You might not be serving your candidates Big Macs. But this situation happens to job seekers in some form every day. They get to a company’s careers page looking for some interesting opportunities. And they get there expecting to learn about the company mission, the company culture, what jobs are available, what challenges they’ll be solving, and how they’ll be able to achieve their career goals… However, none of those key things are on the menu and what the company serves up — is not what they ordered. It’s a huge missed opportunity.
If you want to avoid and minimize the chance that you serve your job seekers an experience that they didn’t order, I’ve put together three tactics you can implement right now to ensure you give them exactly what they are looking for.
- Don’t Try To Be Everything To Everyone
Something I see and hear a lot of the time when it comes to employer branding is that companies tend to strive to attract everyone. Of course, it makes sense! If EVERYONE wants to work at your company, that means your branding is working. However, when it comes to your employer branding and attracting candidates — you actually want to target a specific group of job seekers whose career goals align with what your organization has to offer. I think there is a lot of pressure right now to ensure that your organization is a diverse and inclusive place to work. However, being diverse and inclusive and having an employer brand that targets specific candidates aren’t mutually exclusive.
Many employers get so caught up in trying to not single people out. But this actually becomes counterproductive because it creates a gap in the hiring process. Employers end up attracting a large pool of candidates — many of which may not actually be qualified or aligned with the need of the organization.
The solution? Be very specific about who you’re looking for, what you’re looking for, and how candidates will be successful in your organization. The goal is to have your candidates self-select based on the employer-branding content you provide. By doing this, you are ultimately lowering the number of unqualified candidates while increasing the number of quality of candidates that apply.
2. Don’t Add Fluff, But Add More Stuff
Everybody loves perks. And they are definitely necessary to have and very important to have. But, perks shouldn’t be the main reason why candidates should or want to work for your company. I always see careers sites prioritize perks and extras over critically important information such as the company mission, providing purpose-driven content, the team, the challenges provided, and the process of applying.
When a candidate visits your careers page they are looking for some specific information, which mainly revolves around understanding why they would want to work at your company over a different one. What’ll set you apart is giving them information that keeps them interested. It’s great that you might have a ping-pong table, and an endless beer fridge. But giving the opportunity to candidates to see who they will work with, what they will be working on, what tools they’ll use to accomplish their goals will go a much longer way on selling the job.
What you should do is talk about the kind of meaningful work and impact candidates will get to make at your company and on the world. And positively ensure that your candidates know exactly the process of what happens after they apply! If you’re able to represent that on your career site, including the unique offerings, experiences and opportunities your company offers, you’ll start to win and attract the right people to your brand.
3. Don’t just tell. Show.
If you’ve ever read any other of my employer branding blogs, you’d know that I’m a major advocate of video content. People love video. Our brains are literally wired to retain visual information. Here’s a crazy fact about just how much people love video. We watch 1 billion hours of video on YouTube alone per day (not including Netflix or Facebook). It’s so hard to even put into perspective. 1 billion hours is equivalent to 114,155 years. That’s actually an unfathomable amount of time.
Not including some video or interactive content is an unbelievably huge missed opportunity with career sites and job postings. In today’s world of content overload, it’s almost essential that you include video on your careers page because it’s the easiest way to inspire action. You can’t just tell job seekers that your company is a great place to work, you need to show it. Studies show that the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched, whereas only 10% when read. What does that mean for you? It means that your candidates will remember 95% of your employer brand messaging if you’ve got a video for them to engage with.
Always remember. Your candidates are hungry and you’ve got the recipe to curb their hunger. If you implement these three tips into your careers page and job postings you’ll ensure that you’re providing your candidates with a consistently great experience by giving them exactly what they order.
