Career Websites: Satisfying Recruitment Demands

A careers website is a flagship tool in recruitment marketing, a dedicated page on your company website where potential employees can find out about career opportunities in your organisation. What a career website provides is an effective way to engage with potential employees, as well as creating a manageable area through which to channel recruitment activity.

Like most websites, career websites come in all forms. Some go all out with recruitment videos, CV uploads, online applications, newsletters, behavioural tests etc; while others are much more basic and just list vacancies. The kind of career website you have will depend fundamentally on your ongoing recruitment needs and your available resources.

It is worth noting that the careers area is often the second most visited page on a company website after the Home page. Therefore, not only can your careers website play a central role in your recruitment strategy, it can also play a significant part in your wider marketing strategy.

Career websites will be the place where people who want to work with your organisation will come to find jobs. For example, in 2010 Flight Centre Ltd had a massive 40% of their applications come through their career website! Wall Street Journal Online also found that career websites rank second only to referrals in being most successful at finding new employees.

A fundamental factor in working for a particular company is a like for its people, culture, working environment or benefits. Within the careers website you will have lots of space to talk about your company, your people and your culture, so use it to attract the right people and to sell your company as an employer of choice. It has been found that adding a personal feel to this section (such as stories, blogs or live chats) is extremely effective at producing a good fit and connecting with potential candidates, especially graduates.

Your careers website can also provide a single place from which to manage all your recruitment activity, in conjunction with a candidate management system. This will help avoid wasting resources on duplicated duties and will make the whole recruitment process much more manageable, productive and effective as you can post opportunities instantaneously.

A well produced and thought out careers site coupled with an effective online recruitment strategy can help to drastically reduce the time and effort spent in recruiting, and improve the quality of your hires.

Top 5 Tips when designing your organisation's career website:

1. PLAN IT IN ADVANCE: Spend some time planning it out and think about the kind of website you want as an end result. Do you require just one extra page on your website so that you can advertise a few positions each year, or do you require something more extensive with an e-recruitment system behind the scenes?
2. ENSURE CONSISTENCY OF YOUR BRAND: Make your career website reflects your company’s overall brand, as well as its employer brand.
3. THINK ABOUT WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE CANDIDATE: Detail your company culture, working environment and benefits. Being clear about such information will help you find the right people to work with and help the right people find you.
4. TEST IT! Make sure the career website works correctly. You are trying to attract the right candidates, and it will not look good if content doesn't make sense or there is incorrect grammar or links don't work. Make it easy to use and easy to navigate.
5. SEEK AND WELCOME FEEDBACK: Obtain feedback about your career website. Monitor results and respond to criticisms.

How EO can help:

At Employment Office,we can help tailor your career website to suit your business needs.
Employment Office is a recruitment organisation that is expert in hiring processes and marketing. Our key strength lies in the development of unique and effective attraction strategies, deployed via cross-media marketing campaigns, to assist organisations in finding the best possible candidates at the lowest possible cost.

At Employment Office we can strategise with you to determine your career website needs and requirements, create, test and implement the career website and manage it through our CMS system! Our system also has the enhanced capabilities of features such as auto-rating, auto-filtering, the ability for candidates to book themselves into interview timeslots nominated by HR managers and recruiters, and comprehensive reporting.