How to Build the Perfect Careers Page for Your Website

• Your careers page is the best way to showcase your work culture to potential talent
• Creating a functional careers page is more important than making it look pretty
• An Applicant Tracking System helps you optimize your careers page to streamline recruitment

The careers page is one of the most frequently visited pages of a company’s website. It’s a place that allows you to showcase your opportunities to candidates and attract qualified applicants.

According to Career Builder, 74% of employers say they’ve hired the wrong person for the job and if the recruitment and selection process isn’t streamlined, a lot of time and money will be wasted on hiring unqualified candidates. Optimizing your careers page is the best way to streamline this process and acquire some great talent.

Function over Form

If the careers section doesn’t allow the candidate to find out more information about the position quickly and streamline the application process, then candidates are likely to lose interest in the job role. You could employ as many marketing tactics as you want to attract talent, but it all leads back to your company’s careers page. Which is why it needs to be engaging and functional to attract the best talent.

8 tips to make your careers page more functional

Here are some common problems that you could face when setting up your careers page along with some tips to tackle them.

• Outdated job posts

Outdated content can quickly become your worst enemy, which is why you should strive to update your job posts regularly. Sometimes, companies advertise job openings on their social media, but when candidates check the job postings on the company site, they are either outdated or missing. This can really damper the applicant’s interest in your company and can make a bad impression on them. An applicant tracking system is a good way to allow HR teams to directly update the careers page.

• Job descriptions that don’t say much

When a candidate checks a company’s job postings, they’re looking for as many details about the job as possible. The recruitment process is a two-way street and as the employer, it’s up to you to make sure the job descriptions are as interesting and accurate as possible. Include the location, employer, department, date posted, the responsibilities, experience required to apply for the position and the salary range if possible.

• Forgetting to optimize your careers page for SEO

Make sure your site’s SEO strategy extends to your careers page as well as this will make your job listings more visible to potential applicants. Use the most popular keywords to describe alternative job titles in your job descriptions. Blogs are a great way to increase the visibility of your company by creating SEO optimized content that will reach a wider pool of talent. It’s also a good way to keep your community up to date about what’s happening at the company.

• Asking candidates to register

People are more mobile nowadays and want the convenience and ease of access to all their resources and information. Asking your candidates to register with your company before applying might make them rethink applying for that position. Candidates prefer a ‘one-stop’ shop where they can finish the job application process faster.

• No mention of your company’s culture & values

Highlighting your company’s culture in your careers page allows potential talent to grasp an idea of how well they’ll fit in with the team. This will increase the chances of you receiving applicants that have the same interests, motivation and passion that your existing employees do, and make them a great addition to the team.

• Bland page design

Creating a mobile-responsive site is probably a standard nowadays, combine that with a visually pleasing careers page that is on brand? You’re bound to engage some great applicants.

• Not acknowledging career paths an applicant could take with the company

Displaying the future career path of a job role isn’t a feature that a lot of companies have, but it certainly is a great one. Applicants would be given the chance to see what their career options are and what future opportunities your company has to offer. Being transparent about your career path will help attract candidates that will be loyal employees in the future.

• Forgetting to update candidates on their application status

This is probably the most common problem that takes place during the recruitment process. If your applicant is unaware of what stage they are in, they might be approached by other companies and accept positions there. Generally, it’s a good idea to incorporate a notification system that allows candidates to identify whether they’ve been rejected or hired during each recruitment stage. Including an FAQ section about how long it would take to receive a callback from the team would help ease the tension off of your team as well as the candidate.

Here are some examples of the best career pages to get you started!

1. Surge Global

The simplified user interface on Surge’s careers page, along with its detailed job descriptions encourage only qualified candidates to apply and helps them understand what’s expected of the role, allowing the company to select the best of the best. The use of an applicant tracking system allows them to receive applications straight from the site in a structured manner, making it much easier to manage CVs later on.

2. Thiken

Thiken’s careers page focuses more on the company’s work culture and environment, helping the candidate identify whether they’d be a good cultural fit with the company. Improving the selection ratio and quality of hire every time.

3. Google Careers

Google’s FAQs provide quick information on any questions the candidate might have, letting the HR team take up more important tasks like interviewing and selecting more candidates, instead of answering the same questions again and again. 

4. Medallia

Medallia not only lets you discover jobs based on countries, but it also promotes equal employment opportunities and workforce diversity. They also provide extremely detailed job descriptions, even listing out day-to-day responsibilities letting potential candidates see what a normal day would be like for them.

5. Facebook

Facebook’s use of a careers blog allows them to access a larger talent pool and also takes candidates behind the scenes of job roles that they may be interested in and helps share your employee’s experiences.

Why you need to integrate your careers page with an ATS

A few issues that recruiters face daily are:

• Sending out tons of emails daily to candidates based on their application status.
• Not being able to sort candidates based on active jobs, skills, locations and other factors.
• Updating job posts manually to the job boards.
• Having to wait for your developers to be free to update the careers page
• Constantly updating hiring managers on the status of the applications.

All of these factors can lower your team’s efficiency and productivity. Causing your company to spend more time and money dealing with unqualified candidates, which can lead to lower quality hires. This is where an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Rooster comes in and pretty much does all this work for you.

How can Rooster help?

Rooster is a free applicant tracking system that helps businesses find the right candidates as smoothly as possible. If you’re looking to start using an applicant tracking system for your company but don’t want to commit to the higher price point that usually comes with an ATS, Rooster could be a great option for you as it has some great features:

• All of Rooster’s Premium features will be free until April 2021, as we want to give businesses a chance to recover from COVID-19 and the effects on the economy that have risen due to it.
• If you want to, you can integrate Rooster directly into your existing careers page in a few easy steps, or we can do it for you. We’ve made sure that you can quickly and efficiently style the page based on your brand.
• Your HR team can easily update your careers page from our backend with our straightforward user interface.
• All the jobs that are posted on your careers page are immediately updated onto the Rooster Job Board, allowing more potential talent to access and view your company’s job listings.
• Being organized is a vital part of any business, which is why Rooster arranges all your CV’s for you, allowing you to parse through them based on active jobs, skills, tags and a whole lot more to help your team stay on top of things.
• Update your candidates with customized automated messages on shortlists, hires and rejections; helping them build better resumes and sending them in the right direction to another company or job title.
• Rooster’s great customer support team will help you set up or fix any issues that you may come across while using our platform.

We’ve got loads of interesting new features coming soon and you can take a look at them on our pricing site. Rooster will change the way companies hire talent. There are no hidden costs, no unnecessary features and it’s simple and easy to use. We thrive on transparency and we want to set a new, higher standard for recruitment with all the companies that sign up with us while providing the best experience for your team as well as the applicants.

Recruit ahead of the curve

The job market continues to grow day by day, with new standards being set in the way we recruit talent. Optimizing your careers section is just step one in reaching more candidates and streamlining the recruitment and selection process. 

The more thought you put into this page, the easier it’ll be to find the best fit for your company. It can help alleviate some of the work from your employees and allow them to focus more on the important parts of the selection process, like creating a better interview process for both the candidate and interviewer.

Employing the use of an applicant tracking system that is customized to the size and needs of your organization will allow your team to stay organized and efficient and could be just what you were looking for to achieve a flawless recruitment process.