Careers sites are no longer static webpages that showcase your diversity and corporate values from 2019 or the afterthought when building a new website.

They are an extremely valuable part of your recruitment marketing strategy if you want to hire the best talent in todays market. Why? Numbers don’t lie, with 71% of candidates doing their own research before applying to a company LinkedIn.

Their first port of call is usually your website followed by your careers site. This means you have an opportunity to engage and excite the candidates from the get go!

So, what are your career site must haves for 2023

1. Mobile First

With the world moving mobile you need to Make sure your careers site is not mobile responsive but built for mobile. This means taking a mobile first approach. Why? With 64% of job ad views on mobile (Seek) the future of recruitment is mobile.

Your careers site will often be the first or second place candidates go to do more research about your organisation. If that experience isn’t up to scratch you will be turning away potential candidates before you even start.

Things to keep in mind

• Prioritise important content – With limited space you need to make sure that the important stuff gets seen. Positioning important elements in the right spots that are easy to access will make the users journey more seamless.

• Intuitive Navigation – Don’t try and reinvent the wheel with menus or navigation. Using the traditional hamburger menus is what users expect but also bring the next logical steps or actions to the user in a logical way with prominent buttons.

• Avoid annoying pop-ups – Popups on mobile are an experience killer. Especially when you cant easily figure out how to close them.

2. Employee Generated Content - Real Stories from Real People

Candidates are looking for real insights from real people who they can relate to. The traditional hyper scripted careers videos, quotes and stories are lost on candidates when they are searching for the real day to day in your organisation.

Using your employees to tell their stories about life at your organisation is the easiest way to build trust with candidates. Candidates trust information from employees 3 times more than from the company (linkedIn)

Employee generated content can also be some of the easiest content to create if done right. You can use surveys, quotes or videos to get and tell the employee stories to your candidates.

We love unscripted employee videos because they are more genuine and often tell the story that candidates want to hear. Information from someone in the same role is much more relatable then hearing the CEO talk about the company’s vision.

3. Focus on your teams

Candidates are looking for specifics when the land on your careers site. The best way of giving them this is by giving them an overview of the team they would be looking to join. The closer you can show what the everyday life is really like at your company, the better.

What to include

• What your team does - How you make an impact on the business and for your customers.

• The people - people like to know who their boss is, who they sit next to and who they have to support them. A short bio on each of the team members give a quick insight into the makeup of the team.

• The team culture – What it's like to be a part of the team with real life stories and examples from the team members (employee generated content)

4. A simple application processes

According to Appcast, one of the industry's most respected recruitment data providers, the candidate drop-off rate for people who click 'Apply' but never complete an application is a whopping 92 percent.

So that means we are possibly only capturing 8% of the people who are even tempted to apply!

So how can you minimise the impact of this drop off?

• Don’t make candidates jump through hoops just to signal interest in your company or jobs.

• Most passive candidates who are casually open to opportunities don’t have an up to date CV and the thought of creating one to apply to a job they are “kind of” interested in isn’t worth the effort.

• If you require a CV with every application you are effectively losing out on a huge % of the candidate pool who would be interested but aren’t going to spend an hour or two to see if the opportunity is worthwhile.

• Consider adding a “lets talk” button where they can setup a time for a confidential chat with much less effort than completing an application.

Final thoughts..

Your company's careers site needs to be fit for purpose. Providing a modern web experience that delivers personalised content and a way that’s easy to navigate and find what your candidates want. Considering these 4 elements will go a long way to you creating a careers site that will no longer be a static webpage that doesn’t deliver results but one that is a critical part of your recruitment marketing ecosystem.