Did you know that at least 80 percent of job seekers use a company’s career site to learn more about and “investigate” potential employers? We live in the age of over-information, so if you’re an employer that isn’t utilizing every possible online channel available to communicate with applicants (including an optimized career site), then you’re missing vital opportunities to connect with people who “connect” with someone or something online every six minutes!
Fortunately, most HR professionals are convinced that having a career site is essential to their success. Compared to five or so years ago when only about 40 percent of our clients had a career site, that’s significant improvement. Unfortunately, slapping up a haphazard and last minute career site simply for the sake of throwing one together will cause you more grief in the long run because it has the potential to impart a negative perception of your company in your applicant’s mind.
If you have a career site, but it’s buried below ten unknown links on your company website, then you might as well not have a career site at all.
These simple steps should help ease some of your career site pain:
-
Make your career site visible.
One of the biggest frustrations for millennials is hopping onto a website that is not user friendly or intuitive. If you have a career site, but it’s buried below ten unknown links on your company website, then you might as well not have a career site at all. After all, the first rule of the Internet is that you have to be found. If no one can find you, you don’t exist.
Additionally, having your career site somewhere conspicuous on your homepage helps you to establish a talent pool because there are a lot of people who want to work for a specific company because they are a happy customer, know someone who works there and is happy, or has heard through the grapevine how amazing it is to work for that company. If your career site is difficult to find, it can be frustrating to applicants and it might sway their opinion of you into negative territory.
-
Create an individual link for each job opening on your career site.
Another well-known rule of the web is to create as many individual links on your site as you can without overwhelming your website traffic. Creating individual links (pages) for each of your job openings on your career site can make things easier for potential applicants because they simply click a link to view a particular job in which they’re interested. It’s also much easier to optimize your career site for mobile if each of your job openings have their own page. You won’t have to deal with the formatting and scrolling issues that develop when you have a “long” page on a mobile device. Lastly, it will help your website’s traffic (SEO) overall for each job opening to populate because it beefs up the content on your company website.
-
Add a job alerts to your career site.
I mentioned above how important it is to building a thriving candidate pool to make your job postings user friendly. Adding job alerts to your career site is a simple way to do this because it allows job seekers to sign up to be notified when you post a new job. All this requires on your end is a simple line of code (similar to signing up for an RSS feed) that your programmer can add to your site, or simply ask your ATS provider to add it if you don’t have one already. Remember that your goal is to snag as many future employees interested in working for your company as easily as possible, and job alerts on your career site is one more simple way to engage them.
Want to see how your career site measures up against the competition? Contact us for a free career site assessment!
