Award winning Recruitment website

A company’s career website isn’t just for facilitating the application process – it’s one of the most important tools businesses can use to lure talent and educate them about the workplace culture and open opportunities. So how effective is your current career website?

From the most minimalist, bare-bones career pages that embrace a utilitarian approach to elaborate multi-tiered portals that offer would-be employees valuable insights, we’ve seen it all. It’s best to focus on quality versus quantity; more content isn’t always better if it is poorly organized, causes confusion or is disruptive to the application process.

For an example of a stellar career portal, check out UnitedHealth Group, which was last year’s winner of our Top Ranked Fortune 500 Career Portals. Even if your company is much smaller or has fewer resources, you can still take cues from some notable features on the site, such as a search button on the career homepage, links to the company career blog and the option to meet with recruiters.

If you think your company’s career website could use a refresh, consider these simple things you can do to start the process of revitalizing the portal and empowering prospective employees:

1. Take the journey yourself
Put yourself in the shoes of a potential applicant and go through the entire education and application process yourself. By going through the steps and looking at it through a different lens, you can discover opportunities for improvement. If you think you might be too biased as a company employee, ask a friend who works externally to go through the process and provide critiques.

2. Add a careers link to the homepage
How do prospective employees find your career website? Is it easily visible from the main homepage or do they have to click multiple times in order to find it? Making it easy to navigate to this section of your site is key to engaging applicants and streamlining the educational process.

3. Convey the company culture
Every hiring manager knows that it’s not just an employee’s credentials that count; the right person will be a good fit for the company culture as well. Use the website to give valuable insight into what the culture is like and what type of person will be a successful employee. Great additions include employee profiles, event photos, day-in-the-life videos and links to social media.

4. Improve job descriptions
Even if you have all the career portal bells and whistles, if your job titles and descriptions are lacking, you’re failing yourself and losing opportunities to attract talent. Good job descriptions should be clear and concise. Skip block paragraphs and use bullets instead. The details should focus on the job itself rather than lengthy company information (which should be located on a separate section of the career site).

For more tips about effective ways to improve your career website to streamline the talent-acquisition process, check out our white paper about Top Rated Career Websites.

Do you already work for a company with an awesome career site? We are now accepting nominations for the 2015 Top Career Site award! Nominate your company today!