Guide to Creating a Killer Career Page
A good career page and effective job postings play a huge role in the process of attracting job candidates. It’s often the very first interaction with the company and at the same time, a make-it-or-break-it moment. The impression that candidates get from browsing the career page and job adverts can be the decisive factor that determines whether they will continue or drop out of the process.
Therefore, you should pay special attention to creating your career page. How to make a good impression and convert job seekers? Follow our advice!
Why it’s important to have a career page?
Many companies rely on external recruitment websites, job boards and social media platforms to advertise open vacancies. That’s a great source of qualified candidates, however, it shouldn’t be the only resource you use in recruitment. Having your own career page.
- Independency. With your own career page on the company website, you’re not dependent on third-party platforms such as job boards or social media. Therefore, you won’t be unpleasantly surprised by any changes there that might affect your business, such as pricing or content showcasing modifications.
- Employer branding. It’s way easier to build your brand as an employer on your own website. You’re free to design the page and adverts the way you like and include everything you think it’s worth mentioning: company values, culture, history, employee testimonials, team photos, videos…
- Search engine optimization. Candidates increasingly prefer to Google available job openings rather than hit the job boards. With this in mind, you can optimize your career page for search, including the most popular keywords and drive this organic traffic to your site. Remember also that website performance is another important factor in SEO.
Below you can find tips that can help you create a killer career page that will convert valuable candidates:
Write for humans
Writing copy that sells is something that’s not applicable only to marketing or sales. Given that nearly 80% of millennials look for people and culture fit in their job search, focusing on these traits should be a must. Describe your company and the team with passion.
A dull posting that lists the responsibilities, requirements and perks in an uptight, formal style is already passé, even for corporate jobs. This kind of language too often lacks clarity to the point that candidates don’t really understand what the position is about. Straightforward, relaxed communication is a way better idea, as it helps to show the human side of your company, a place that’s friendly, welcoming, and… worth applying to!
Optimize the application form
Forcing your candidates to fill multiple fields with exactly the same information that they already included in the attached CV is one of the biggest sins of candidate experience. Save them the frustration by limiting the number of fields in the application form to the minimum.
Do you need this data to be automatically added to candidate profiles in your ATS? There are better ways to do so. For instance, an ATS with the feature of parsing CV data can help you save a great deal of time on screening and copying information, and has a positive impact on candidate experience.
Make it mobile-friendly
With mobile internet usage on the rise for years, it’s not surprising that already 43% of job seekers use mobile devices when looking for a job. If your career page is not optimized for mobile browsing, you can lose a huge percentage of traffic almost instantly.
Website performance is another crucial matter that can affect the conversion rates on your career page. Research by Google has found that 53% of mobile visitors leave the website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Therefore, make sure your page is optimized in terms of mobile performance to avoid a high bounce rate.
Polish the UX
This means not only the design (that should be clean and seamless) but also the flow. The application process on your career page should be as simple as possible, without unnecessary friction. Account registration required to send a CV? That’s a no-go. Too many steps to complete? A huge percentage of candidates will drop out of the process. Never-ending blocks of solid text? You’re risking that no one will read to the end.
Instead, try to divide the content into separate sections for better readability, limit the number of clicks needed to complete the application, and last but not least, visualize the application progress and write clear call to actions.
Harness the power of your ATS
Having your career page integrated with the Applicant Tracking System brings multiple benefits: effortlessly publishing your new open positions as soon as they’re created, inserting custom screening questions, immediately adding candidates to chosen talent pools…
A career page integrated with ATS also helps you stay compliant with data protection standards such as GDPR by allowing you to add policies and consents that have to be accepted by candidates. For instance, the tomHRM ATS is fully compliant with European privacy and data protection laws with two types of data processing consents, templates, changelog, consent expiry warnings, and more features.
Bring visitors back
According to this Linkedin research, only 25% of candidates are actively looking for a job. The rest of your career page visitors might be just browsing through listings without the intention of applying right now. However, this doesn’t mean they won’t be a match in the future. It’s a smart move to make them part of your talent pipeline to stay in touch and reach out at the right moment. How? If you don’t have their contact details, you could make use of the retargeting ads available in most advertising networks and social media platforms, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Linkedin Ads. You can leverage this option by posting ads with new job openings, targeting visitors that viewed similar postings on your career page. Maybe this time you’ll be lucky?
Is it easy to create an excellent career page and describe job openings in a compelling way? The numbers prove that it’s not: the bounce rates for the career page can reach a staggering 98%! However, the above tips can help you do a better job and effectively convince visitors to apply.