I Set Up My Company’s Career Page . . . Now What?

Let’s say that a couple of months ago, you decided to really start drinking the authentic recruiting Kool-Aid, and you took the plunge. You set up your company’s career page that showcases your corporate culture, benefit perks, and organization.  You started producing great employment videos and content from real employees, getting good adoption from hiring managers (and their responses to potential candidates is almost not creepy). You put in the time to get it going, published a few posts, and waited for the candidates to start rolling in.

So why haven’t you noticed a difference? What happened to the results? WHERE ARE ALL THE CANDIDATES?!  

So many new career pages adopt the simple “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But let’s be honest — there’s a lot more work involved. So if you’re suffering from a failing career page or just a general recruiting fail, take a good, hard look at what you’ve been doing, and consider these 8 reasons why you are not seeing the quality candidates, the volume, or both.

Are You Experiencing a Company Careers Page & Recruiting Fail?

• It’s All About You: If you’re writing all about your company’s “great” products and services, regurgitating recent award wins, and lauding just how plain fabulous your company is, you’re doing it wrong. Feel free to create a completely separate company news and product blog and talk about yourself all you want. But if you want to generate top candidates keep all that me-centric product talk away.

• Your Content Isn’t Actionable: One of the main reasons your potential candidates will want to consider reading your careers page is to learn something from you. They want to be educated. They want to obtain information. If your career page is all theory with no actionable, how-to type content, its performance will suffer.  Ask yourself this, can a candidate easily communicate to us via our career page WITHOUT applying first?

• It’s Also Not Valuable: Not only should your content be actionable, but it should also be valuable to your potential candidates. Make sure you’re content is about the topics your candidates truly cares about. Create candidate personas for your hiring managers and their open roles, identify the wants and needs of those personas, and create content that addresses those wants and needs.

• It Has No (or Few) Calls-to-Action: Here’s the thing: in and of itself, your career page isn’t a direct source of leads. The way to generate candidates to your career page is by convincing your site visitors to complete a lead-capture form or submit a resume, and the best places to put these forms are on dedicated landing pages that promote a specific job. I am not talking about the ones auto generated by your Applicant Tracking System.  Although some cloud based solutions like Jobvite or TheResumator have emerged to be able to facilitate these kinds of landing pages. These call-to-actions do not necessarily need to just be an apply button.  It can be — webinars, ebooks, White Papers, request a coffee meeting, etc. So in order to use your career page to generate candidates, you need to be adding relevant calls-to-action (CTAs) for each job offer and link to appropriate cross content.  Example, if its a web video of an interview with one of your hiring manager’s about a new initiative, this should link to a job offer on his or her team.

• You’re Not Promoting It: Do your target candidates even know your career page exists? Are you promoting and sharing your jobs via social media? Get the word out about your job posts!  But DO NOT just stack it high and let it fly with paid job posts and ‘pushed’ social media posts.  You will NOT get top candidates that way.

• You’re Never Controversial: Want a quick way to pump up traffic? Take a stand on a hot button industry issue. Controversial marketing campaigns are a great way to drive content and conversation virally.  Has another competitor in your industry written about a topic with which you disagree? Talk about it. Or take a look at a commonly held belief from a different perspective. That said, don’t be controversial for the sake of being controversial. Just don’t be afraid to have an opinion either.

• Your Titles Aren’t Compelling, Clear, and Concise: A company career page’s title is often the first thing a potential candidate will see. If it isn’t compelling enough to grab their attention and entice them to read the requirements, it’s not doing its job. Furthermore, it needs to clearly and concisely convey what the job is about. If you’re overlooking the value of the title, you’re missing out on an important opportunity to attract more and better candidates.

• It’s Not Social Media-Friendly: Make it as easy as pie for candidates, current employees, or  industry mavens  to share your content with their networks by adding social media sharing buttons/links (i.e. “Share on Facebook,” “Tweet This!” etc.) to every job post you publish on your career page. Most people are lazy, even if they love your job offer. So give them an easy opportunity to share it, and you’ll expand your content’s reach beyond your direct network of subscribers and followers.

Your Company Career Page Takes Effort, Planning, and Strategy