On average, 95% of visitors to your career site leave without submitting an application. It could be because they failed to find the information they needed to get a clear idea of your company and employer proposition. Or maybe it’s because the user experience you offer on your career site isn’t up to par? You might never find out, but one thing that is certain is that there are a few points you can focus on in order to optimise your career site to make candidates want to apply, and therefore increase your conversion rate.
Place your employer brand centre stage on your career site
As soon as they land on your homepage, visitors need to understand straight away what makes you so unique. Your brand needs to be attractive immediately.
Explain your Employer Value Proposition
Visitors to your site need to know who you are and what your commitments are as an employer.
You could ask your employees what they like about your company to help you build your Employer Value Proposition (EVP).
You’ll also need to make sure the pages of your career site are coherent with the rest of your ecosystem (customer-, investor or partner-focused). This way, your promise as an employer will be visible everywhere, and the way you communicate with interested parties will be consistent.
Showcase employee testimonies on your career site
Who could possibly be in a better position than your own employees to talk about what it’s like to work for your company? Your employees are your best ambassadors, and visitors to your career site will undoubtedly grant more credibility to employee statements than company communication alone.
Interviews, testimonies, verbatim will boost confidence and inspire candidates to apply. Although images illustrating text content should be enough, you can also leverage video content to provide even more information.
Use appealing imagery that represents your employer brand
Graphic elements are a must on any career site. But avoid image banks as much as possible: you need to showcase your brand and employee experience in a true light.
Arrange a photo shoot, or make the most of corporate events to capture moments that reflect your corporate identity. You can also share images of your offices, both indoors and outdoors, and slices of employee and business life (customers, partners, production processes, etc.).
Images should ideally be high quality and draw attention to the viewer, but you can also use editing software on your images to provide the most loyal representation of your brand.
Provide links to your company’s social media profiles
Make it easy for visitors to follow you on social media (especially LinkedIn – but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and even TikTok can also be strategic choices) by providing access buttons. Demanding very little effort, social media platforms help maintain communication with candidates, who’ll have access to the latest news and job opportunities.
A functioning career site for a seamless visitor journey
Smart vacancy sorting
An efficient career site needs to have a vacancy section that provides dynamic listing options. Visitors must be able to sort vacancies according to:
- Location
- Corporate department
- Level of seniority required
- Status/contract type (permanent contract, placement, internship, consultancy)
- Etc.
That way, candidates will spend less time finding a job offer that suits them.
You can also include matching technology on your career site to save potential candidates from having to perform searches entirely on their own. They can submit their resume and automatically receive vacancies that match their profile.
Your career site must be accessible on mobile devices
At least one third of visitors navigate career sites using their mobile phone. To avoid losing visitors, your career site must be perfectly optimised for smartphone use. You need to make sure your user experience meets visitor expectations.
This goes for all the actions required of visitors in order to become candidates: submit a resume, complete forms, synchronise their LinkedIn profile, etc.
Invest in producing content that entices people to apply
Relevant up-to-date job vacancies
The job vacancies you publish must be written carefully – and that stands even if you don’t have a career site. Some career sites have the advantage of using formatting that increases vacancy legibility, and include photos and videos.
Above all, make sure any online vacancies are up to date. In other words, filled vacancies shouldn’t still be published on your career sites. This can foster disappointment in potential candidates who may be put off applying for any other position within your company.
Assisted resume submission process
If candidates are required to fill several pages of forms, you increase the risk of them dropping out of the process early. An effective career site is one that must allow candidates to submit an online application in the most straightforward way possible. Career sites must provide seamless navigation, and pages must load quickly.
Smoother speculative application processes
Potential candidates interested in working for your company might not find a vacancy that fits their background when they visit your career site. They’ll just leave your site without leaving any information behind. Providing a section on your career site dedicated to speculative applications can be a way of collecting resumes which will feed into a talent pool.
Must-have action buttons
Make it easier for candidates to apply by providing action buttons in strategic locations on your pages – candidates mustn’t have to look for them.
The best thing to do is to always include a call-to-action button on your page to avoid reducing the likeliness the visitor will take action. All the content you publish must carry potential for action. Your most advanced call to action will likely be “Apply”.
