10 tips for designing your careers site

As more and more candidates look to secure their next role online, the importance of having a well-designed and functionally rich recruitment website has never been so important. Here we discuss 10 top tips on how to get the most from your site.

1. In order to attract the best candidates you must strengthen your image in the market place. Invest as much time and money into developing your career portal as possible as this is where candidates will do most of their interacting with your organisation, e.g. to browse live jobs, apply for roles and read about your recruitment values.
2. It is important to develop an exciting website that shows candidates what it is like to work with you and promotes the benefits and culture. Candidate testimonials, blogs, galleries and video are some of the great ways to do this. However, there has been a tendency over the last few years for websites to have great content but offer little in the way of candidate services. Sites need to be balanced with actual recruiting features that you would often associate with job boards.
3. To aid that balance build your website on a strong recruitment platform. The website will operate a lot better than self-built portals and will provider a higher level of recruiting functionality to improve the overall candidate experience. A good website should be designed to maximise accessibility, usability and be optimised for the major search engines. You might also want to consider combining a content management system into the website so that authorised employees can upload and edit content themselves. These pages can often also be maintained through your recruiting system.
4. Ensure your corporate brand is protected. Make sure any career pages powered by your recruitment software perfectly match your brand guidelines and existing website. Every detail should be looked at including the URL used for the career portal. You do not want to put candidates off registering and shake their confidence by making it obvious they are registering on an external system / site.
5. Managing the overall candidate experience is key to ensuring candidates return to your site. Even candidates that may not be suitable should come away with a positive experience as any negative feedback can be damaging. Intuitive navigation (the 3 clicks rule) and easy-to-use tools will ensure an enjoyable recruitment experience for both applicants and hiring managers. Your chosen recruitment system should enable you to deliver powerful and intuitive self-service portals to candidates and hiring managers.
6. The registration process should be simple and allow for speculative applications as well as direct applications to roles. Incorporating CV Parsing into your portal makes life easier for candidates and dramatically reduces drop of rate while increasing your talent pool organically. When a suitable position then comes available, you can use the searching technology in your recruitment software to identify suitable candidates and send them a personalised message via email or SMS. Plus by having a searchable talent pool, you can reduce recruiting costs such as advertising and shorten time to hire.
7. You should introduce automated processes such as allowing job seekers to sign up for intelligent job alerts matched to their profile, or SMS alerts of upcoming interviews / events. Online scheduling for interviews and assessment centres should be available through the career portal as well as useful information and downloads.
8. If you choose to develop a mobile (touch) version of your website, make sure it will work across all smartphone platforms. When developing mobile sites or Apps, many companies choose to offer a smaller version of their main website, but this does not offer the mobile user the full experience. Being truly web based and browser independent, an Eploy powered recruitment website for example can offer your candidates full access and often negate the need to develop a cut down App version at all.
9. Feed your Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and Blog pages into your website via live RSS feeds. RSS feeds from your recruitment system can also be used in reverse to add content to your social channels. Encourage candidates to promote your jobs through their own social channels all tracked through your recruitment system. Make sure that any social networks utilised are monitored for negative feedback so that you can respond quickly and rectify any issues.
10. Finally, remember your website is not just a shop window - it is a communication tool. If it is designed well, it will work hard for you. The site will help to reduce administration procedures and allow recruiters to conduct most of the legwork involved in recruitment online in an efficient and coherent way.