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If You Build It, Will They Come?

By Kathy Barton, February 15, 2007

The "it" I'm referring to in this case is a great career web site. Yes, I mean great; not mediocre, not so-so, not okay, not what your technical people put up for you, but great. Oh, there are lots of poor career web sites around - we work with clients to improve those all the time. Great isn't easy to do, but it isn't rocket science either. Okay, you ask, so what do you mean by a great career web site?

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I'm glad you asked! First and foremost, a great career web site targets top talent. It's easy to find, easy to use, attractive, and compelling. It also shows your company in the best possible light and answers a candidate's most likely questions (as well as questions you want to answer because you have really good answers). Your career web site needs to invite candidates to form a relationship with your company. It needs to get them through the application process as easily and quickly as possible. It should take into account that your company is competing with other companies for top talent. Your career web site should be better than your competitors. It should not assume that the candidate is a criminal or planning to lie. It should give them an idea of what working for your company is like. A great career web site showcases your company's employment brand and commitment to diversity. Starting to sound harder?

Let's break it down. When we audit a client's career web site, we evaluate it based on 10 key criteria. Here they are and here are some of the things to consider when looking at each one:

1. Prominence on company home page. I'm always amazed when I go to a web site and I can't find the career page. I can't stress this one point strongly enough - your company career page must link from your home page. Don't bury it under "About Us" or "Our Company" or some other menu. What are your other top level menus? Your products, partners, clients, news about your company? Surely potential candidates are equally as important. After all, if you can't hire enough good people, then everything else suffers. You want to make it as easy as possible for candidates to find it. A top level link conveys priority. It also generally means that the design of the page is more flexible; it doesn't inherit the format of the "About Us" page, for example.
2. Overall branding, look and feel. This is where your employer brand should shine. Do you have a vibrant, dynamic, fast growing company? Are you an industry leader? Do you have a strong history of community involvement? Do the company products help others in concrete ways? If you do an annual survey of your employee population, ask them what they like best about working there. Then make sure that these messages are clearly conveyed in the main career page. This is where color, pictures, and design have a big impact. Make sure that your pictures convey a positive message around diversity and that you speak directly to your commitment to diversity.
3. Accessibility of the job. More and more job seekers are using the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.) to find jobs. They enter sales jobs, healthcare and San Francisco into their browser, and see what they get back. If you enter a similar range of keywords into Google, what do you get back? Do your jobs show? Whose jobs are showing up? Is there a local job board that seems to have good placement? Maybe you should look into posting your jobs there. This simple experiment can give you a world of information about what job seekers are seeing when they look for jobs. Getting your jobs to show up isn't a simple thing. It depends on how the jobs are stored in your web site and how optimized your site is for the search engines. Companies such as HotGigs, with their Jobs2Web product, have developed sophisticated methods for making sure your jobs come up first.
   
   Once someone is at your career page, how easy is it to use your search engine? Can they just type in keywords - like they would in Google - or do they have to go through a set of drop-down menus? Do all the jobs come up when they use keywords? (Sounds like a silly question, but you would be surprised . . .) Can they easily go from a keyword search to looking at all jobs? Ask a friend, or your teenager, to apply for a job at your company and listen closely to their feedback.
4. Quality of the job postings. Please, please, please, don't title your jobs with job numbers or with arcane acronyms that no-one outside the company will understand. (ARC Engineer Grade 3, DHP446 is not a compelling title. Really.) Make the job compelling. Make clear what the person would do; then ask yourself why a top person would want this job. Is it work/life balance? Is it exposure to top management? Is it impact to the company? Is it flexibility? Make sure you know why a top person would want the job and make sure that message is clear in the posting.
5. Application process. When I worked at Peopleclick, a client asked us what the impact was of forcing candidates to register. So, we did a comparison of client sites that did and didn't require registration and discovered that the sites that did not require registration got 60% more applications. Yes, sixty percent more. So, if you are requiring candidates to register before they even apply for a job, you are losing up to 60% of your applications. The best process is the simplest - require only name, email, and phone number, let them upload a resume, parse the information and let them check it. Then give them the option to enter a password that would let them go back and check their status. And make sure you respond to their application within 24 hours.
6. Knockout questions. If you need to ask these, make them as brief, and as clear as possible. Do not disrespect a top person who has limited time or you'll lose the best people before they've even applied. Be very careful asking about relocation or travel. Many people will move or travel if it's for a great career move. The best types of questions are performance in nature, meaning they can be checked during the interview. Here's an example: "We're opening a new territory and need sales reps who can hit the ground running. Can you demonstrate that you've hit your sales quota at least 75% of the time in the past two years?"
7. Is Your Career Web Site Invisible? If you're not an employer of choice, or a well-known company, or on the Fortune Favorite Places to Work, it's unlikely people will go directly to your career web site to find a job. So, why not put the names of your biggest competitors and your most important job titles in your keyword list? Then when people look for jobs at these companies your site will show up. There are a host of other things you can do to be seen. Ask your product marketing people for some other ideas.
8. Use CRM and drip marketing to engage the passive seeker. This is where you gather simply a name, email and phone number. You let candidates create a job search agent so you can send them jobs that interest them and send them a newsletter with cool things that are going on at the company. You may not have a job for them today, but you want to keep them interested until you do. This is such a big topic that I could write the whole article just on this. (There are many people who have!)
9. How you compare to other web sites, including competitors. They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery; so, go flatter your competition a little. Check out their career sites. Steal their best ideas. Avoid the ones that make you cringe. Just make sure you've looked at them. Believe me, your candidates are looking.
10. Web Analytics. This is where we get our answer to the question, "If you build it, will they come?" Web analytics can tell you. They can tell you how many people are coming, where they are coming from, how long they stay, and where they drop off. (If candidates exit your web site half-way through the application process, you have a problem.) Web analytics will tell you if traffic is trending up or trending down. This is the big question - who owns the data in your organization? Who looks at it every month or week? How is this information being used to improve your company career web site?

It's the web analytics that tells you if your team has a successful career web site. They will also tell you how to improve the one you've got. It's not easy to build a great career web site, but if you do, based on our research, you will have one of the few great ones out there. Yes. If you build it, they will come!