Part one: What does your careers site say about you?

The importance of careers sites and their effectiveness at candidate engagement can often be overlooked. Ensuring your website provides an engaging candidate experience and fully reflects your brand can help improve the quality and quantity of applicants that apply for your vacancies. A careers site should help to convert your prospects to candidates and provide everything a candidate needs to find, apply, and start their ideal career with you.

In this two-part blog, we share how companies are structuring content to become peak-performing careers sites and the types of features that make a good careers site. Keep reading to see if any of the highlighted examples of best practice can be spotted on your own careers site.

Why is it important to have a good careers site?

A good careers website that reflects your brand and makes it easy for a candidate to find your vacancies will avoid any confusion when a candidate moves from your main website to your career’s pages. If the careers site looks nothing like your brand or has the URL of an ATS provider rather than a relevant URL to your company, the candidate might think they have clicked on the wrong link.

Having a careers site that incorporates peak-performing content impacts how candidates engage with you. Research shows* that you are more likely to attract a higher quality and quantity of candidates when having content such as interview hints and tips and employee videos on your careers site (source: *UK Candidate Attraction Report 2024).

Using your own careers site helps you boost your website SEO. By adding new roles to your website, you get to enjoy enhanced organic visibility while attracting candidates, who are on the lookout for the role you are advertising.

What features make a good careers site?

1. A careers site that reflects the employer’s brand and shares candidate centric content helps to build candidate engagement.
2. Intuitive navigation. By making it easy to find your careers pages you increase the chances of candidates finding your vacancies. There are many examples of careers sites hidden in the footer of a website!
3. Mobile accessibility. Ensuring your careers site is accessible via mobile helps capture the attention of a larger talent pool. According to research carried out by Glassdoor, about 58% of website users are looking for jobs on their phones.
4. Accessible user experience for candidates with disabilities and visual impairments. This can be achieved by ensuring sufficient contrast between the background and foreground colours, use of alt text, headings and more. There are also assistive technologies that make websites accessible and inclusive features including text-to-speech functionality, customisable styling features, reading aids and translations.
5. Companies who ask candidates to register before/during the online application process report significantly higher numbers of candidates and increased quality of candidates (source: UK Candidate Attraction Report 2024). There is a section in this report that shares key insights on the online candidate experience. See pages 31-35.

To learn more about how your careers site affects candidate sourcing, including what type of talent it tends to attract, read page 73 of our free UK Candidate Attraction Report 2024.

In the second part of our careers site blog, we will reveal some real-life industry examples of which careers site elements should be avoided and which ones you should consider adding to your website to improve candidate experience. We will also review if factors like the size of your organisation affect the performance of your careers site.