Improve your career page to attract better candidates

There have never been more channels and tools to recruit top talent passively and actively. However, while platforms like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed offer great exposure, such channels also restrict companies to a standardized profile in a sea of other companies. The best employers go beyond third-party sites and invest heavily in their own unique career pages, driving interested candidates there to learn more. 

“When you take the time to craft a careers page that accurately reflects your unique culture and benefits, you are giving prospective candidates a taste of the care you put into the employee experience,” says Johanna Penry, People Experience Manager at The Many. “It’s the first step in building a lasting relationship.”

Even without offering FAANG compensation levels, savvy companies can still differentiate themselves and win the war for talent by following these best practices.

Tell a story that the best candidates are eagerly seeking

If your career page has the same bland corporate verbiage as everyone else, you’ll have a tough time capturing the attention of great candidates. Instead, find what makes your organization unique as an employer and tell that story to prospective candidates. Identify your competitive differentiator: something you can offer that few other organizations can. 

Many of JOON’s customers are particularly focused on workforce wellbeing. The Many highlights their wellness culture and benefits, like JOON, to attract thoughtful candidates:

There are many other examples that might apply to you. Are you solving a particularly important civic problem? Showcase that and attract mission-driven candidates. Do you offer an incredible work-life balance? Great, you’ll get parents amped. Do you allow dogs in the workplace? That’ll make it easier for pet owners to work in the office.

If you think that your story would best be told in a different multimedia format, there are new tools available like Puck that let you embed interviews with featured employees on your career page. Here are some other concepts for sections to include:

• Sample of Glassdoor reviews and awards
• Company vision, mission, and values
• Examples of how your company is facilitating community for remote workers, via offsites and virtual office space
• Pictures from a sleek office space or recent offsite
• Overview of a challenging engineering project with an overview of your techstack

“I like to reverse engineer the situation and ask myself, what are our ideal candidates passionate about?,” recommends Madelana Escudero, an experienced HR leader. “Great candidates will come from all different backgrounds and industries, but what is it about our company that will keep them engaged and motivated? Whatever it is, show it.”

Beyond the career page, your story should also be consistently weaved into job descriptions. 

“The language used in job descriptions plays a major role in attracting diverse talent,” says Gretchen Schwartz, Head of Sales at JOON. “It’s common for sales positions to use traditionally masculine and aggressive language that can reduce the interest of female candidates.”

Consider inputting your job descriptions into analysis and debiasing tools like Textio.

Create a better candidate experience than the default career page

One of the most common mistakes employers make is to use the default career page that comes with their Applicant Tracking System. Such pages are often sparse with poor user experience, particularly on mobile, and overall make it feel like recruiting isn’t a priority.

It’s worth investing in a custom career page with your jobs reformatted or embedded from your ATS. If you don’t have engineering and/or design resources, you can use a nifty tool like GrowHire to embed your jobs into a beautiful career page without any coding. Here are some great career page examples if you need inspiration.

Additionally, there are employer branding platforms that enable you to create a more unique profile that highlights specific elements of your culture. For example, you can retain BuiltIn to write custom content about your brand story or use Key Values to highlight your engineering culture.

“Using a tool like KeyValues allows for candidates to dive deeper,” explains Ashley Hofkens, HR Manager at Leapfin. “Our page showcases employee shared stories, types of projects they will be working on, and how the team connects, which is especially important given our remote work culture.”

Get feedback and iterate

While you always want to be expanding and improving your culture, existing employees are still the best source of feedback on your career page and potential improvements. 

Consider adding a question to your next Culture Amp employee engagement survey such as:

• What attracted you most to your organization? 
• Do you feel that our careers page accurately reflects our culture and benefits? 

Beyond qualitative feedback, it’s critical that career pages perform on a quantitative level as well. Here are some metrics you’ll want to track:

• Number of candidates
• Ratio of candidates that make it past initial review
• Source of candidates that make it past initial review
• Ratio of candidates that receive offer
• Ratio of candidates that accept an offer

Ultimately, your career page should be a reflection of your current culture and can impact all of these metrics.

“Your career page should be a living, breathing page,” says Escudero. “It should evolve as time goes on. Have your policies changed?  Are you team photos from an offsite from 3 years ago? Do you offer new benefits? Update your career page.”