Can't keep up? 3 ways to make a great career website on a shoestring

In previous blogs we have discussed how to find and capture top talents’ attention and drive traffic to your site. But what happens after that?

You've managed to stand out from the crowd and attract the right people. You've even managed to get your job advert to go viral (thanks to your superstar recruitment employees!). The hard work is done right? I'm sorry to say, you’re wrong…

Once you have attracted talent to your website, you need to keep them there and more importantly, you need them to apply for your jobs not only with excitement but also with a burning desire to join your business.

Looking at many career websites, it seems the big spenders have got it right but does that mean those with a smaller budget have to miss out? Not on my watch!

Here are the three things you need to get right in order to attract the best candidates to your business:

Usability:

First of all, your candidates are not looking for a game of ‘Where’s Wally’.

Make your careers site easy to find from your main corporate website. Don’t hide it in the footnote or the ‘about us’, make it easy for them, have a separate tab that is instantly viewable.

Not only will you keep your candidates on track for applying for a role, you may also entice others who weren’t necessarily job hunting to take a sneak peak.

In respect to usability, you should think on the same lines of your corporate website. Instead of selling your key product you are selling your careers and employer branding.

With this in mind you need to ensure that your key components (which we will cover!) are accessible, easy to understand and to the point. 

Google is a prime example of this – when entering their career website, the first thing you are greeted with is a simple search bar to allow candidates to find their perfect job in an easy and timely manner. 

Think of it this way – if a customer has to click on your website several times to find the item they want and then after that they have to fill in several fields to buy the product, they are likely to ‘abandon the cart’ and shop elsewhere.

Your potential candidates have the exact same mind-set, they don’t want to be spending their whole afternoon finding one role and completing an application – they have stuff to do, let them get on with it!

One final tip on the careers website user experience… make it mobile! 86% of job seekers use a mobile device to complete their job search, don’t lose out!

Employer Branding:

It is no longer acceptable to just post job adverts on careers website.

Employer branding is your organization's effort to communicate what makes it a desirable place to work in and the active management of your image to prospective employees.

Make sure you showcase the following:

Define and display culture: Share photographs on events, post blogs introducing new and existing team members, display what the business does for social responsibility and promote internal training programmes.

Mission statements, values and principles: These statements should set the bar for what candidates should expect from the company and what you expect of your employees.

Job adverts: Make them fun, make them interesting. Video adverts can be embedded on your company career page. Video adverts are more engaging and allow potential candidates to see if there is a personality and cultural fit.

Incentives: Candidates want you to highlight benefits that make you unique

Social media links: Perhaps your candidate isn’t ready to move job yet or you don’t have a live role for them at this current moment in time. Make it easy for them to join your talent community and stay updated with the businesses progress.

Application Management and Recruitment Process:

It is a careers website after all. So I better mention the recruitment side to it!

Be sure to explain in detail what process your business follows when it comes to recruiting. This will allow the candidate to assess whether they have the availability and level of commitment before applying – the major benefit of this is that you should have less ‘drop outs’ in the process.

If someone has to register before they can apply, you may lose out candidates who are maybe just browsing and not actively looking. My best advice is to try and always work to the 3 minute rule. If it takes more than three minutes to apply, the application process is too long!

Here are a couple of other things to consider:

1.  Job alert trigger system: where a member selects the type of jobs they would be interested in and thus alerted when one arrives. This is a great way of passive resourcing, building an in-house database and access to A1 candidates.

2. Speculative CVs: Offer your candidates the option to send in unsolicited applications on your career site. If you do not tell them it’s ok to send their CV, then they may well not send it and you may lose out on the industry superstar!

Candidate Experience:

When hiring, your business is competing with some of the best in the industry. Delivering a great candidate experience will differentiate your business and help you stand out.

Show your personal side and have some fun with potential employees. Have an online game and put the scores up in a box score showing how your employees have done and then challenge your audience: “Can you get into the top 10?” Jobseekers will give it a try to see where they rank amongst your employees. 

As well as having fun, candidates should be able to easily interact with your brand ambassadors. Post links to your team with their names, title, position and links to their e-mail and social media profiles

Finally, think back to when you booked your last holiday, did you jump straight in and book it? Or did you do research on the location, hotel and food? I bet you did. And I bet you went on TripAdvisor (or something similar!) to read all the reviews before going.

What has this got to do with candidate experience?

GlassDoor is the TripAdvisor to the working world! Build a strong profile on there and link it to your career website so candidates can see straight away that you are an employer of choice. Social proof will give trust and make your candidates feel at ease.

These suggestions should not require a large budget or an advanced IT team to implement and if you can piece all the puzzles together you should find that rather putting your candidates off with a messy and complicated website, you will have to be turning away candidates because you’ve received too many applications!

Check out this gallery of great career websites to give you inspiration for yours.

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