12 Strategies for your Corporate Career Website

There are many companies who emphasise that their staff is their most valuable asset but out of all those: How many make an effort to present on their corporate website valuable information for jobseekers? The benefits of having your own career site are manifold. It will first of all, give any potential employee the impression that you really care and value your staff. Secondly, your company will be perceived as a professional, attractive, innovative and well-organised enterprise. Thirdly, it will also save you time because you will deal only with candidates who (hopefully!) read all the details and think they are the perfect match.

If you want to stand out from the crowd you might also want to get a corporate recruitment brochure printed which could be distributed at Job/Career Fairs and several other events. It would give you the opportunity to brand your company as a great place to work for.

These are 12 strategies which will help you to create an impressive career website:

• Make the CAREER section on your website instantly visible to job seeking people. Many companies call this section ‘WORK FOR US’. The mistake that they often make is that people need to dig for this information because it is hidden somewhere and just mentioned as a subcategory. How to make it more effective? Put it on the front page of the website on the main menu bar. This way it will be instantly visible and noticeable.
• Publish your current open vacancies. Be aware that the more specific you are in the job description and the person specification the more suitable candidates you will be able to attract. You might want to consider of providing a job ad also in video format, this would be surely something that will make you stand out from the crowd. It would also give the applicant an impression about an employee who is already working at that company.
• Providing a step-by-step description of the recruitment process is something that every job applicant would highly appreciate.How many interviews can a candidate expect? What type of interviews (face to face, panel interview, phone interview, video interview, lunch interview) is a job seeker going to face? How many people are involved in each type of interview? How long will the interview last? Are there any tests/assessments/presentations that need to be done? What is the timeframe in which a decision will be made?
• A video about your corporate culture. A picture can tell you more than 1000 words but what do you think can a video tell you? No job ad in the world would be able to give you the same impression of a company’s culture like a video. It will obviously require some more time and money but it will be well invested. It will help jobseekers to decide quickly whether they would fit into a particular culture or not. Every applicant would appreciate of getting a glimpse (even though maybe just a short one) into what it looks and feels like working for a particular company. How do the offices look like, what kind of people are working there, does it look like a fun or more serious environment?
• Testimonials from employees can be very revealing. Listening and watching someone talk about their job (what they like about it, why they love to work for that company) would surely help to increase the company’s public image and motivate people to apply. Adding to each job vacancy a story, such as “A Day in the Life of a (job xyz) at (company xyz)” would be something that would not be overlooked!
• Make a list of the Top 5 or 10 Reasons why it is great to work for your company. Focus on what current employees really appreciate and what makes them think that your company is special. These points might have already been mentioned in the videos, however, reading about them one more time makes it more memorable.
• Avoid asking your candidates to register, sign up or fill in lengthy forms in order to apply for a job at your company. For most of the job applicants it will just lead to one thing: to look for a job somewhere else.Make the whole process instead easy, quick and smooth so that the number of candidates stopping halfway through the process will be minimised as much as possible.
• Include social media buttons (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.) at the top of your job vacancy. This will allow people to spread the word about certain jobs quickly and easily.
• If candidates can’t find a suitable job, give them the opportunity to submit their speculative application in an easy way. It would be great if your company could create a system in which speculative CVs would automatically be transferred to the corporate talent database.
• You might also want to consider to set up a job alert tool which will notify jobseekers about suitable jobs in the future.
• Offer a Live Chat Option in which interested people can ask specific questions before they decide to apply.
• Create an interactive quiz. If your company is keen on having people aboard who are very knowledgeable about the company, their products and services it would be great to make them participate in a fun and interactive quiz. Here you would have two options: a) Make it a part in your screening process ‘How much does the candidate know about us?’ or b) Offer it just as an entertaining tool which will help jobseekers to be better prepared about what the company is all about before heading to the interview. But you could also offer it for everyone who would like to learn more about your enterprise.

Companies need to realise that in today’s competitive world it’s not just about marketing their products or services. Additional efforts and investments need to be made in order to attract great talent. It’s a two-way selling process between a company and a candidate. Companies are getting more demanding in their requirements but so do also jobseekers. They want to spend half of their life (which they do at their job!) doing something that they love and they consider as meaningful at a company that appreciates their contribution.