In the same way that other sections of a corporate website are used to market and sell the products and services supplied by the company, the careers or vacancy section of a site is important when marketing the company to the best potential new employees.
The structure and content of a careers sub-site will obviously differ from organisation to organisation. Various factors such as the size of the organisation and the budget to create the pages will determine the content. However, in general, the opening page of any vacancy site (or sub-site) is another opportunity to add positive words about your organisation, E.G. telling people how great it is to work there.
Creating a friendly feeling is important. A lot of careers sites include pictures of company social events. Links to the company’s social media pages are also common and there is often a corporate video telling potential employees about the benefits of working at the company.
Helping to attract the best potential candidate is, of course, by far the most important task for your careers website. However an interesting side effect is that vacancy pages will be indexed by search engines, just like any other web pages. As the vacancy pages are usually updated fairly regularly they can also play their own part in increasing the SEO ranking of your website.
Common functions found on Jobs pages
Easy vacancy advert management
It should be easy to update your recruitment pages as often as needed as it is important that job adverts on your vacancy pages are current and up to date. Displaying vacancies which are no longer available is often an indication to potential candidates that things are not quite as efficient as they should be.
Where a specific deadline for applications has expired, the job advert should be removed or alternatively it should clearly show that candidates should no longer apply.
Efficient vacancy searching
Good careers websites will make it easy for potential candidates to find the vacancies that match their skills. Depending on the normal number of vacancies your organization has open at any time, you may need a feature which allows visitors to search for vacancies by a variety of criteria.
Some of the common search criteria are
- Job title
- Job function
- The location for the position (E.G. City, Area, Country)
- Which department within the company
- Roletype (Permanent, Contract, Part-time, etc)
- Salarytype (Hourly rate, Per annum, etc)
- Salary range
- Required skills
- The date the vacancy was posted
Latest Jobs
In some instances where an employer or recruitment agency site has large number of listed vacancies, it can be helpful to show prospective candidates the latest jobs posted to the website. However, this feature is less prevalent on pages which only have a few listed vacancies
Track vacancy advert responses
For some positions the best way to find good candidates will be to post your job vacancy to a number of online job boards. The ability to track which job boards generate the largest number of candidate applications will help you decide which ones are most effective for any given job role.
Different job boards will ask the candidate to apply for the position in different ways, but many allow you to re-direct the candidate back to your own website to go through the application process. Ideally your careers website should allow you keep track of the referring advert and therefore allow you to produce statistics of which job sites are most effective.
Meet the team
Another common feature of a careers website is some kind of “meet the team” page. Typically the content on this type of page will range from simple written profiles to full blown video interviews, where existing employees articulate their opinions (obviously favorable!) about working at the company.
Other thing to consider
Make your site “Responsive”
Statistics show that it is more and more common to view web pages using a mobile phone or tablet. It is therefore important that you make it easy for prospective candidates to view or browse through job adverts on their mobile device.
Where a website automatically reconfigures the size and shape of the pages to allow for different device sizes it is called “Responsive”. Make sure your job pages are all properly responsive.
Make it easy for people to tell others about your vacancy
For whatever reason, for each person who actually applies for your vacancy there will be a number of others who view the advert but decide not to apply.
However, they might know someone who might be interested in applying. Therefore you should make it easy for people to send your advert to others. It somehow feels a little old fashioned these days, but a “Send to a Friend” email feature is always a good idea and, of course, the more modern way is include buttons which make it easy to share your advert on Facebook or other social media sites.