1. Craft a career site candidates love
‘Craft a career site candidates love’ is the first chapter of Create, the second book of The Hiring Playbooks, 5 ebooks that will turn all your hires into wins. Created by the Homerun team.
This article will help you strengthen your employer brand, speak to the people you want to hire, boost application quality and quantity as well as improve candidate experience.
Introduction
Career sites are the number one source of job applications — so you
need to have one that’s really special. (If you’re not sure what a career
site is, you can find the definition in this handy dictionary we’ve
compiled to help you navigate the jungle of recruitment terms).
Your career site is one of the key battlefields in the war for talent — not
only is it the face of your employer brand, it’s where you share your
job posts, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s where you convert job
seekers into job applicants. Let’s make sure this is a war you can win.
How do I make a compelling career site?
1. Choose the best platform
The platform you choose will determine how your career site looks and
functions. It will also play a big role in how much you enjoy building,
updating, and using it.
When choosing your platform look for:
• Seamless connection to your company site
• Painless retrieval of applications and applicant info
• An effective, user-friendly applicant tracking system (ATS)
• Customizable design
• Optimized for mobile
• Easy to use drag-and-drop editing
• Proof that it works! Are the other career sites you like built using
the same platform?
• Features like the ability to add video, images, pictures of your
colleagues and office space and feeds of Twitter or Instagram
A platform that ticks all these boxes will give you the tools you need
to create the best possible career site for your company. And if it’s
Homerun (for example) you can build a fully customized, on-brand
career site for free, in just 30 minutes.
2. Make it easy to find
The first thing people do when they’re trying to find a new job is search
Google. But strangely enough, most career sites don’t consider how
to maximise your searchability, so if you power up your site’s Google
strength, then your jobs will appear at the top of the page.
The best way to get ahead in the Google stakes is work out the
keywords that people might use when looking for jobs like yours (or
other employers in your industry) then include these throughout your
career site. It’s especially important to use these terms in titles and
page headers as Google weights these elements more heavily.
Implement the same approach when choosing titles for the jobs that
you post on your career site. Above all, make sure you avoid quirky
job titles like ‘web ninja’. They might make you laugh, but they’ll also
make it harder for people to find your jobs in a search engine. Quirky
titles can also create confusion about what the job actually is and are
confusing for people who speak a different language or have a different
cultural background.
3. Keep it simple and informative
People have limited attention spans when it comes to the Internet, and
talented, high-demand candidates have limited patience for career
sites, so keep content on your career site clear and concise, and make
important information (requirements, perks, workplace location, how to
apply) easy to find.
Finally, it’s worth categorizing your jobs by type, department, and
location, so that people don’t need to wade through jobs that are not
relevant to them in order to find the ones that are.
4. Turn on the charm
The best way to attract the right people to your company is to highlight
your company culture in all its glorious detail. Simply telling people
you’re great doesn’t cut it anymore — you need to show people what
makes your workplace THE place to be.
At Homerun we’ve built ‘job blocks’ that allow you to customise and
personalise each job post by sharing videos, playlists, and image
galleries of your workspace and team members.
We’ll cover how to do this in more detail later in ‘Write Better Job Posts’
- but at this stage in the process it’s enough to make sure that your
career site has the potential to post content that gives better insights
into your company culture.
5. Don’t miss the opportunity to grow your talent pool
Sometimes you can meet the right candidate at the wrong time. That’s
why you should always include an easy way (like an open job post) for
people to connect with your company on your career site, even if you
don’t have any jobs immediately available for them.
Here’s Thomas from Homerun to explain why:
“We get a lot of inspiration from sports. It empowers our brand and the way our team works together, it’s a driving force in how we hire. One thing we picked
up is the importance of not just hiring when you need someone, but
scouting future talent when you don’t.”
Grabbing contact info, and even resumes, from people who are
attracted to your employer brand is a smart way to be proactive
with your recruitment. An easy way to assemble this database is the
Homerun Talent Clipper. It’s a Google Chrome Plugin that allows you to
‘save’ someone without leaving the page you’re on. All you have to do to
add someone to your talent pool is click the icon and add a note so that
the team knows what you like about the person. That’s it.
What do I do next?
Create job posts that are worthy of your new career site! And then… Read the other chapters of Hiring Playbook #2 Create.
All Images by Studio Spass.
