When you’re a recruiter, your company’s careers page is your homepage, your domain, and the tip of your employer branding spear. Your candidates will research your organization on Glassdoor, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but they will spend the most time looking at your careers page.
The architects of careers pages rarely miss an opportunity to show off their company’s benefits, perks, employee testimonials, day-in-the-life videos, and of course job openings. These are the bread and butter of a careers page, and are almost always included because they provide so much insight to prospective candidates on what it’s truly like to work at an organization.
But in today’s competitive job market, recruiters are expanding the breadth of content they feature in order to win the war for talent. The key is to be creative, showcase your employer value proposition, and get the candidate’s attention. To that end, here are a few often overlooked content gems for you to consider for your next careers page overhaul…
Location, Location, Location
For a lot of employees, the office is a home away from home. From couches to curly slides, huddle rooms to rooftop hangouts, a tricked-out workplace can often be a deciding factor when it comes to a candidate calling your company home. So when your prospects land on your careers page, make sure they get a great view of where they’ll be working.
Snagajob uses photos and video to subtly showcase their workspace by featuring their team – the office is simply the stage! Hubspot has multiple offices around the world, and whether it’s Berlin, Tokyo, or their Massachusetts HQ, their careers site is excellent at featuring the culture, teams, offices, clients, and job openings from each location. Some companies keep it simple and just list them out, like WP Engine.
Show Them the Glassdoor
More than half of all candidates will visit your Glassdoor page, so lean into the open nature of the platform and show them the way! Whether you like it or not, Glassdoor is your company’s de facto Amazon rating, and promoting it can not only position you as an authentic and transparent organization, but bring in more applicants.
The easiest way to do this is by simply linking to your Glassdoor page like Gusto, Greenhouse, or Hubspot do with a “Read Our Reviews” call to action. Red Ventures cranks the transparency up a notch by keeping their overall rating and total review count visible on the careers page (scroll to the bottom). Glassdoor also hands out Best Places to Work awards each year, and winning companies like DocuSign and BenefitFocus use their careers page as a venue to show off this achievement.
It’s All About the Work
At the end of the day, most candidates join a company to do amazing work, and I bet your marketing team already has some great content around clients, projects, success stories, and the industries you serve. Like Rackspace, you can leverage these stories on your careers page by pointing out what you do and who you do it for.
You can also take it a step further by developing content that gives candidates insight into what it’s like being a part of your organization. Charles Schwab features their “Through Client Eyes” approach to doing business, which gives prospective candidates a glimpse into how employees engage with their work.
How About a (Not So) Humble Brag?
When your company is doing something right, people notice, awards happen, attention is garnered… and it’s OK to let candidates know! I mentioned Glassdoor awards already, but other companies like VMWare and Atlassian display all kinds of honors on their careers page. While these awards are often positioned elsewhere on the website to earn the respect of clients, they go a long way on a careers page for a candidate looking for a great organization to call home.
Skip the Job Openings
Yes, that’s crazy talk, I know, but what I really mean is: Don’t ONLY list your job openings. If your careers page is simply a list of open positions, it’s not a careers page, it’s a jobs page. And what can a list of jobs tell candidates about life at your company? Almost nothing.
Use your careers page to talk about, well, careers, and then use calls to action like “See Open Positions” and “Explore Our Jobs” as ways to get candidates to that list. By the time someone is looking at a list of positions, the rest of the content should have already sold them on wanting to join the company. In fact, Ersi has one of my favorite careers pages of all time, and their open positions are nowhere to be found.
And Now For the Lightning Round…
The more careers pages you look at, the more creative ideas you see. For instance, Paypal tells candidates about what their recruiting process is going to be like – a smart move. Good recruiters know that it’s never too early to develop a pipeline, so if you’ve got an intern or graduate program like AirBnB and Twitter, be sure to feature it.
And finally, give a little love to the candidate who just wants to work for you: Let THEM pitch a job! Eventbrite or Boomtown both do this, and I think it demonstrates a understanding that great talent can not always be contained by a job description and is still welcome at their companies.
Just remember that your careers page is your homepage, your billboard, your multimedia-enhanced elevator pitch, so leverage creativity, your team, your office, your clients, and any other shiny objects you think will bring the talent in the door.
What creative tactics are you using on your company’s careers page to attract talent? Let me know in the comments below!
