How to Build a More Compelling Career Website

Building a Compelling Career Website: What We’ve Learned from Our Free Scoring Tool- Job Page Grader

Awareness is often seen as the first step in attracting and engaging qualified applicants. It isn’t until talented applicants become aware of an opportunity that they officially begin their journey to a particular position.

How that journey starts will vary. Talent may initially learn of an opening at your company through social channels, job boards, networking, referrals, cold calling, and so on. But awareness will inevitably lead candidates to your career website — or, at the very least, to the job description page.

In fact, many job boards direct potential applicants to the job page of interest. Even larger career sites will scrape yours for information on open positions and then send people directly to your job posting or page.

All that is to say one key thing: Job seekers will be pushed toward your career site, meaning it should be a central focus of your employer branding strategy. It’s this site where you control the conversation surrounding your company, culture, and career opportunities. So, why do so many employers fail to give it the attention it deserves?

Building the Best Job Site

Each time a company runs its career website through our Job Page Grader, it becomes more and more evident that job description pages — and the career site in general — are left as more of an afterthought. Little attention is paid to the actual content beyond the basics of the job. Having an employer branding strategy is essential, and collateral based on it should compel talent to apply.

To ensure that potential applicants not only arrive at your career site but actually apply for a job, a few elements need to be in place. While a lot will go into building one of the best job sites around, a few basics can get you started. Here’s what you should be focusing on:

Search engine optimization

SEO is one of the career-site features no company can do without. Following SEO best practices improves visibility and increases the chances of a high-ranking position on search results. But the goal should go beyond “more traffic” — that’s just a vanity metric. Relevant keywords can help improve the quality of traffic, too.

Candidate experience

Once applicants arrive at their destination, the next hurdle will be providing a memorable candidate experience. Much of the experience will be shaped by employer branding strategies, as it must reflect the actual employment experience to come. Develop content around what it’s like to work for your company. Produce film around those

topics, capture images of the workplace, and use an attractive, clean website design with intuitive navigation. Make the candidate experience frictionless from end-to-end.

Mobile-first design

These days, the best job sites take a mobile-first approach to design. As of 2020, more than 68% of website visits came from mobile devices. With a mobile-first design philosophy, development begins with mobile devices to ensure that content can be displayed on smaller screens, no panning or zooming necessary. PCs and laptops still deliver the same candidate experience. It’s often easier to “expand” on the design than “contract.”

FAQs

Another career site feature that’ll never steer you wrong is a FAQ page. For one, it can serve as a candidate resource. Even the best job descriptions leave a few unanswered questions, so a devoted space for those commonly heard questions makes good sense. It also saves hiring managers time by keeping them from fielding inquiries easily answered by a simple additional page on your career site.

The goal of building a world-class career site is ultimately to build a solid foundation and then add layers from there. Your employer brand should always serve as the architecture for that site and your talent acquisition efforts as a whole. Get the SEO in place, develop content about your company (as well as open positions), and create candidate resources that speak to your target audience and answer their questions. It’s all about making job opportunities attractive to the right people and equipping them with whatever they need to apply. Do that, and you’ll find that talent shortages don’t feel so scary anymore.

To learn more about building a top-quality career site, get in touch today. We’ll talk soon!