Maintaining a global multilingual careers website

Part 4: Maintaining a global multilingual careers website

The war for talent isn’t local, or even regional. It’s global. The best candidates are in demand all around the world, and they can pick and choose wherever they want their career journey to take them next.

I’m lucky enough to work with some very large businesses, helping them source talent globally to fill positions at all levels via their careers website, and I want to share some advice to help you attract the best to join your business, wherever you may operate.

In a nutshell, it’s important to think global but act local. And here’s how…

Speak the same language

Whilst the huge economic growth experienced by the USA and the UK over the last couple of hundred years made English become ‘the language of business’, it’s important to speak to your candidates in their native tongue.

In real terms that means making sure that your global careers website is set up to allow candidates to see the locations where you operate and to see available opportunities in that location in the local language. So if you are a UK business with offices or a factory in France, make sure the French opportunities on your careers page can be seen in the French language - either by default or via a straightforward click or tap. Apple does this really well. The experience across all the countries where they operate is consistent and localised.

Share the inside track

It’s obviously a great idea to have bags of content on your careers website regarding your culture and values. But if you are operating in multiple locations then take the next step and provide plenty of localised content too.

Each location in which you operate will share a lot of common culture by the very nature of being part of your organisation and the values that you communicate via your employer brand. But there will also be some local differences, and it’s good practice to highlight them. Give each location a dedicated page and deep dive into what it’s like to live and work there. Share the inside track and include some background detail about the city or country - the places where your team like to hang out for great pizza or a beer, the best beaches for swimming or surfing, the best hills for walking, or the farmers’ market.

Presenting a fully-rounded view of the place you do business will get people excited and fill in some gaps in their knowledge. You’ll be reassuring them that uprooting and relocating would be a good move, and making it more likely that they will hit the apply button. On their careers website, Candy Crush legends King has location guides that are packed with great information to tell a candidate all they need to know about where they could be working. Use tools like Altru to get some video content from your team in each location talking about what they love about the location and their job and you’ll really make an impact. Our global careers website for Entain is a great example of this.

SEO in the relevant country

I’ve mentioned before in this series the absolute vital importance of SEO for the success of any careers website. If you’re operating in different locations around the globe, you need to make sure your job listings are ranking highly in each country.

The best way to help this happen is to give each location it’s dedicated URL as well as packing it with local content and being in the local language, as I outlined above.
So for example, if your global careers site is careers.example.com, then if your candidate chooses to look at your job opportunities in France, by clicking to see those jobs they get taken to careers.example.fr And with the best practice in place that I’ve shared in other blogs, you’ll be all set for great Google rankings for your jobs all around the world.

If all of this seems daunting, then help is at hand. At Ph.Creative we’ve developed a careers website service that allows for quick and straightforward localisation of a global careers website, with a specific URL for whatever your location may be. Our creative, in-depth and strategic approach means your careers website will proudly share your employer brand story with the world, attracting the right candidates and ensuring they feel valued and happy - long before their first day on the job. We call it Contentment, with our bespoke Content Management System at its heart, it’s built with love, expertise, and candidate-experience in mind. Plus there’s the option to make it multilingual so there’s no excuse to not be speaking to candidates in their own language.

Learn more about Ph.Creative’s award-winning approach to careers websites by downloading our free brochure or get in touch and say hello.