You’re thinking about building your first careers website or developing the one you already have. You’re doing a bit of research to put the business case and get the go-ahead. You know it makes sense, but maybe others need a little bit more convincing. It just so happens we’ve written this for you. There are so many powerful reasons why you’d want to invest in a careers site, so where do we start?
How about we tell you why we can help with this. We’re That Little Agency and building great careers sites is a big part of what we do. Oh, and we’re winners of the best careers website awards for Hastings Direct (EBMAs, 2018), Pinsent Masons (All About Law Awards, 2019), Derbyshire Constabulary (NORA, 2020) and NFU Mutual (S1 Jobs and RMAs, 2021).
Everyone loves a few statistics
81% of job seekers expect a company to have a dedicated careers website (TotalJobs, 2020)
92% of the ‘Top 100 UK Companies to Work For’ have a dedicated careers website (TLA, 2021)
86% of the ‘Fortune 500’ have a dedicated careers website (TLA, 2021)
89% of job seekers agree that an employer’s career website is important for finding key information (CareerBuilder, 2020)
27% of all hires come from applications made through the careers website with no job boards, social media or search involved (Jobvite, 2020)
60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity (CareerBuilder, 2020)
What a careers page isn’t
OK, let’s start with what a careers website isn’t. Others might tell you it’s good enough to have a ‘careers page’ somewhere on your main website with a list of vacancies and a picture of the office. Will it inspire candidates to apply at a time of record vacancies? No, of course not. Just because there’s something on your website about vacancies doesn’t mean it’s your careers website. But you know this of course, so let’s help you convince others.
What a careers page is
It’s a home for your employer brand, the place where you talk about your culture, values, development opportunities and list your open roles. It’s where your existing employees talk about what they love about working for you. It can offer career and interview tips and carry real career stories written by your people via a blog. There will probably be a video (like the ones we made for Deichmann) and it’ll integrate nicely with your ATS offering a seamless candidate experience all the way to the application and beyond.
Bottom line – it’s where engagement is built. It will convince candidates why they would want to work for you ahead of any other organisation. And, in an increasingly remote world, a careers website provides the focal point for your organisation instead of a visit to your office.
And that’s not all. So, why else would you want a careers website?
Because you may not be as well known as you’d like (yet)
It’s easy for Apple and Facebook, everyone knows who they are. But if you are a smaller company or an ambitious start-up, you can’t expect jobseekers to have heard about you. A careers website helps you punch a little above your weight when they see your job ads or arrive at your main website and want to find out more before they apply. A strong careers site will help you to capture candidates’ attention and make a stellar first impression – something you only get one chance to do.
It helps you build a talent pool
A careers website builds a relationship with candidates who might want to work for you in the future. If they can’t find the role they want right now but are right for your organisation, you don’t want to lose their interest. Searching your talent pool is a great starting point before you launch a recruitment campaign or for filling roles due to an unexpected departure. You do this by inviting interested candidates to register their interest for future roles and, in the meantime, giving them the right content to keep them interested for when they’re ready. You can also segment those in the pool and send them very specific information, relevant to their interests.
You can deliver a great candidate experience
Being a part of a talent pool is just one opportunity to offer a great candidate experience, and that’s something that should run through every aspect of your recruitment process which makes the careers website an ideal platform to deliver this. And why does this matter so much? Research from IBM found that a positive candidate experience makes candidates 38 percent more likely to accept a job offer. What’s more, Workopolis found that 51% of candidates will share their positive experience online through social media, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn. And that’s likely to spark more interest.
You can integrate your careers site with your ATS
If you have an ATS – an Applicant Tracking System, you can take the job data on the ATS and pull it through onto the pages of your careers website. This offers a seamless experience for candidates who, having found out all they want about working for you are then highly engaged at the point where they find your roles. An ATS that isn’t integrated with a careers website, where a candidate may typically have to login and create an account to apply for a role, often experiences high abandon rates. We almost always help clients link to their ATS and customise the look and feel when we build a careers website. It offers a far better candidate experience and allows the capture of data.
Here’s how we helped The Telegraph embed their ATS, Workable, into the new career site we built for them.
A careers website gives you valuable candidate data
Thanks to Google Analytics, you can identify and track how candidates arrived at your careers site even before they’ve applied for a job. You can find out where they came from – was it a job ad, social media or LinkedIn and, the content they read on the site when they got there. You can also measure your conversion rate – the percentage of visitors actually applying to a job on your page and see the impact of any changes made. All of which contributes to a better understanding of your candidate’s job search habits which in turn informs where you might want to invest more (or less) of your recruitment budget.
You’ll receive an increase in completed applications
We compare the performance of our new careers websites with their previous incarnations, with all the data coming from Google Analytics. They always increase the rate of completed applications. For example, our new site for NFU Mutual saw a 36% increase in completed applications, as well as a 148% increase in visitors.
In summary
Jobseekers are no longer interested in simply finding a job, they’re looking for an insight into what it’s actually like to work for you and they’d love to hear it from your own people. A careers website offers the platform to inspire them with your employer brand, give a window into the company culture and provide them with helpful information on the recruiting process.
It’s all about positioning your organisation as an employer of choice and giving them all the possible reasons they could have for wanting to work for you – and not somewhere else.
For further information
If you feel that you’d like some help, support or even a little chat around your next careers website, just drop me a line. After all, much of our best work has started with a cup of tea, a biscuit and a Zoom call.
Is your current careers site meeting jobseekers needs?
We have developed a website audit specifically for careers websites. The audit will benchmark your current careers website against best practice in site design, structure, functionality, content and candidate experience. You’ll receive useful and actionable feedback to improve both your site’s search engine friendliness and SEO. We think the insight will help with your case for developing your next careers site.
It’s free of charge and you can find out more here.
