NAS Talent Talk

5 Hot Career Site Tips

July 31, 2012 at 7:16 pm kendrapearson Leave a comment

that will turn casual job seekers into candidates.

by Kendra Pearson

I love the weather in North Carolina, but sadly, my hair does not. The heat and humidity here cause me to wage an annual battle against frizz. Unfortunately, the weather wins out most of the time. This summer, which has seen temperatures exceed 104 degrees, has increased this battle to epic proportions.

Although summer heat on my mind (and my head) can be bothersome, there’s one thing I’m sure you’d like to keep hot—job seeker interest in your organization. When job seekers visit your website to explore career opportunities, does the experience leave them hot…or cold? While you’re trying to beat the heat this summer, follow these five tips and make sure that great talent will warm to your organization:

1)    Make your careers easy to find. In this age of instant results, don’t expect candidates to spend time guessing where your employment opportunities are hiding. Make sure the Careers tab on your website’s home page is above the fold and highly visible. Don’t lose great talent to bad navigation.

2)    Provide content that speaks directly to each potential candidate. Make sure each job seeker can easily find information that relates directly to him or her. Talk about specific job families and feature employee testimonials. And tell each visitor just what a career with your organization offers, including learning and growth opportunities, career paths, work environment, culture and more.

3)    Offer job seekers ways to stay connected. What if your ideal candidate visits your site, but you don’t have the right job available at the moment? Don’t let that job seeker give up and abandon you. Stay connected through social media and set up a talent community you can use to learn about potential candidates and provide them with targeted job alerts.

4)    Make the application process easy. You are probably familiar with the back end of your job application process, but do you know how candidates experience it? Have you tried to complete your company’s online application? Is the process cumbersome? Do you explain to candidates why you need their social security number or other personal information? Do candidates know what to expect after they apply? Your application process should be efficient—detailed, yet respectful of the candidate’s time—and leave the candidate with a clear understanding of your hiring process.

5)    Create a positive mobile experience. More and more, candidates are using smartphones to explore career opportunities, so be sure to provide job seekers with a version of your career site that’s optimized for mobile.

I may have little control over how my hair reacts to this heat and humidity, but if you follow these five tips, you can definitely impact each candidate’s degree of engagement with your organization. I welcome your feedback in the comments below regarding how you are engaging your ideal candidates on your site.

Kendra Pearson – Director, Business Development

I am passionate about helping companies attract and retain top talent. I help organizations perfect their employment messaging, choose the right channels to deploy that message and then measure their ROI. I have been with NAS Recruitment Communications for six years, and I currently serve as director of our Raleigh, North Carolina, office.

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Entry filed under: Career Site Development, Career Site Planning, Contributor, Kendra Pearson. Tags: application process, best practices, candidate experience, career site, job families, mobile site.