The lessons in building high quality career pages

One of the primary avenues for HR teams to attract the very best candidates and strengthen their employer brand is a career page. Your career page showcases the key elements of your company culture, from work socials to office pets, it’s important to give candidates a flavour of what it’s like working at your company.

With this in mind, we asked Talent Brand & Marketing Manager, Jack Ludlam at culture custodians, Canda, to share with us the very best career pages he’s helped to craft, along with his top tips for taking full advantage of your career page.

What are the key elements that candidates look for in a career page?

In a nutshell, candidates want to understand your company culture. They want to know what it feels like to work with you and envisage themselves in the role before they consider applying for it - the content on your career page is what helps them do that. We suggest starting with three key elements:

• Company mission statement: What are you here for? Describe to the candidate the journey they are joining.
• Company values: What do you stand for? Let candidates see how closely their values align with yours.
• Perks and benefits: Before you ask a candidate to commit, remind them of what’s in it for them whilst they’re working with you.

Consider Ecologi’s career page, for example. The headline, right through to the company mission, values and benefits all reinforce Ecologi’s proposition to employees; come and make an impact on the world. In isolation, the fact Ecologi fund more than 1 million trees every few weeks or that they offer an ethical investment option for candidate pension plans is still impressive. But the real strength of the page comes from the consistent theme woven into the key elements; candidates leaving Ecologi’s career page will likely feel engaged and energised by a clear and compelling proposition.

Source: Ecologi

What attracts the most candidates to read a full job listing?

Candidates can sniff out a copy and paste job a mile off. To truly engage top talent and to get them excited by your job advert, take the time to make it personal. Everything from the title through to the description of your company culture, should be written as if it were written only for the ideal candidate.

The right language and tone for the audience works wonders, and that goes both ways; a lengthy list of bullet points might be readable to anyone, but it’s unlikely to excite anyone. Hook candidates in with an advert title and keep them reading by talking in their language - consider the difference in how you’d promote an opportunity to a creative marketer versus a senior software engineer versus a finance professional.

Source: Elsewhen

Take Elsewhen’s presentation of their company values, for example. As a design consultancy, it’s in Elsewhen’s DNA to be clear, concise and compelling with their communication. Through their career page copy, Elsewhen present themselves in a way which would resonate with, and appeal to, their ideal candidate by using simple, punchy sentences and removing any ambiguity from what they’re saying.

How do you ensure companies are equipped with the tools to showcase their employer brand?

Ultimately, we’re looking to get the right content in front of the right candidates wherever they are, digitally.

So at the outset of every project, we work with customers to establish exactly what they’ve got in terms of their toolkit and where they’re already showcasing their employer brand. From there, we can quickly identify any gaps and start working with them. For example, the career page is often the hub of any employer branding toolkit, so we’ll always start there and look to add activities such as helping to build out their social media presence or creating digital content such as blogs and articles.

Source: Joseph Joseph

As part of Joseph Joseph’s career page, for example, we created skill-specific content in support of a particular hiring campaign. As we knew Joseph Joseph were looking to hire a number of design roles, we worked together to build a design-focused landing page on their career page where candidates applying for said roles could be directed and immediately see content created specifically for them. Whilst the rest of the career page still functions as Joseph Joseph’s ‘shop window’ for candidates, the need to attract and engage a specific skill set en masse meant we needed to create additional space for them to highlight their employer brand to a particular audience without diluting or broadening their messaging.

What steps should you take to not only build a great career page, but maintain it too?

As we work with a number of customers in the start-up and scale-up space, we’re often building their first career page. As their digital ‘shopfront’ for candidates to check them out, it’s so important to not only create something attractive and engaging, but also accurate.

Candidates should see consistency between what they read on the career page and their first conversation with a recruiter, right through to their onboarding experience. This always starts with discovery; it's crucial to get on the same page as the customer and ensure we’re quite literally telling the right story with their employer branding content.

In terms of maintenance, it’s really important to avoid the trap of thinking once a career page exists, it’s job done. As your company grows and develops over time (headcount, ways of working, geographies, product innovations), the EVP (Employer Value Proposition) will change too. This means your offering to employees as a place to work might be bigger, better and more attractive than it was when you first built your career page, but if you don’t tell candidates that, how are they to know?

Great career page maintenance is all about keeping the ‘shop window’ as up-to-date as possible, and maintaining that accuracy between what your company looks like from the outside, and the inside.

For example, Tenzo recently went through an incredible rebrand and so we knew the career page needed to follow suit. This was not simply a case of changing the colours and logos, however, but more so the need to ensure Tenzo’s entire proposition to candidates (what they say, how they say it and who they’re saying it to) were accurately portrayed on the career page. Since the original career page was built, Tenzo was a bigger and better place to work, so it was crucial to make that clear through the content of the new pages. We worked closely with Tenzo’s own Marketing team to ensure the new career page felt like a true extension of their main website and, of course, new brand identity.

Source: Tenzo

What role can career site data play in a successful recruitment process?

Career site data is a surefire way to make more informed decisions about your recruitment process. Whether you’re using the data to understand how effective your site is at encouraging visitors to apply for your vacancies, or to simply get a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from, career sites offer a wealth of information you can leverage to make decisions and spot opportunities for improvement. 

With all of our Teamtailor customers, we use the Analytics dashboard to drive conversations around opportunities for improving content, trying new things, or increasing investment in the best performing traffic sources.

Who are Canda?

Canda is a community of highly skilled talent partners who partner with startups and scale-ups to make great hires, grow their team and tell their story. One way in which Canda do this is through storytelling, advising companies on nailing their employer brand.

Want to see how a Teamtailor career site can help you attract talent and showcase your employer brand?