1 - On-brand careers website and content
2 - Engaging job adverts
3 - Mobile-friendly candidate experience
4 - Easy-to-complete applications
5 - Next level candidate experience, brand builder, and careers website
6 - Research & analysis
Candidates want to be able to search for a job, know what the job they’re applying to involves, complete an application online and along the way be engaged with insightful content.
There’s plenty of bad examples where a candidate experience doesn’t happen this way, but we’re here to cover all the big (and some small) things that you can do so candidates will always have a fantastic experience with you when they apply for jobs.
Your careers website should have the same look and feel as your corporate one. Transitioning between the two, candidates should experience a seamless continuation of the brand.
Make sure you have content on your careers website that will drive excitement for prospective employees – add stories from current employees of what it means to work there, ‘day in the life’ video interviews, show off your culture and what you do to help your local community (CSR). These are the things that will really stand you out from competitors and make you memorable and ultimately help to reinforce your EVP.
Secondly, ask yourself how easy it is to find your careers content from your corporate website. It’s crucial to make this step easy for candidates – if they can’t easily find your vacancies then they’ll head off to your competitors in no time. Try it yourself – are your vacancies or careers website clearly signposted?
A careers website doesn’t have to be a huge expense. Most good applicant tracking systems, like ours, give you the tools to create and manage the look and feel of where jobs are advertised, and candidates apply.
Candidates want to read job adverts that are engaging, eye-catching, have lots of useful information and be irresistible. With the human attention span falling to just eight seconds (study from Microsoft), then this is crucial! Bring your job advert to life by including images and videos of your people, your office, your canteen - whatever you feel that helps to colour in what it’s like to work for you and what the job involves.
We also have a fantastic example of a job advert and description from a How Talent Webinar with Andrea Garvey from Talent.com – get it here: how to hire more candidates with powerful job adverts.
We can’t stress enough the importance of a mobile-friendly careers website and candidate experience. People are constantly on the go and prospective candidates are no different with more and more searching and applying for jobs using a mobile device. In fact, over 90% of candidates use their mobile devices to look for their dream job according to Undercover Recruiter.
Make sure your careers site and job adverts are made for mobile – doing so will ensure they will automatically resize to fit perfectly on any device they’re being viewed on, so no more pinching and zooming.
A recruiter’s aim is always to attract a high number of good-quality candidates who actually complete and submit their applications. You might have worked really hard to create a branded careers website and attractive and engaging job adverts, so you don’t want to fall at the application form hurdle.
That’s why we recommend making sure application forms are easy to understand and complete – and importantly can be completed using a mobile phone. 47% of candidates completed an application using a mobile, according to our data from JobBrain™. Try it yourself and apply to one of your jobs using your mobile and see how you fair.
If you’re looking to improve how candidates interact with your careers content and engage with the application and recruitment process, then look no further than our Candidate Experience, Brand Builder and Careers Website.
In a matter of minutes our Brand Builder can transform your careers website’s look and feel so that it mirrors your own corporate brand.
We didn’t just think this was the best design – we know it is. We commissioned research that recorded candidates applying for a job, what actions they took, where on the page they expect content to be and how they navigate the page. After analysing all of this data and candidates’ behaviours – we took these learnings and implemented them into what we have today.