Practical tips for optimizing your career site to attract top talent

UX and Employer Brand

UX (User Experience) is all about the experience of visitors on websites. If the candidate has an unpleasant or poor experience, they will quickly leave your career site without applying. This can be especially problematic if you are targeting a younger audience that primarily uses mobile applications. Therefore, a mobile-friendly career site is essential.

Responsive design is not a fleeting trend; it adapts the digital interface to the size and resolution of the screen on which it is viewed. The goal is to simplify and speed up the use of this interface on all devices. With 67.8% of internet users using their smartphones to browse the web, a mobile-friendly career site is indispensable.

In addition to these fundamental technical considerations, UX also has an emotional dimension. Imagine: a potential candidate visits your career site and doesn’t feel comfortable or cannot navigate intuitively. What happens then? They will likely not only leave the site but also be left with a negative impression of your company. How many career sites offer a standardized and impersonal user interface that hardly differs from their competitors? And even worse, how many of these websites awkwardly redirect users to an external platform with a completely different design after they click on “Apply”? This is particularly embarrassing for companies that claim to be “digital experts.” Why do they have a career site that does not live up to this promise at all?

What you can learn from e-commerce marketers

Do you need to make your website more accessible? Let’s look at the journey of a candidate on a career site and compare it to that of a consumer on an e-commerce website. What do good e-commerce providers do to grab attention and encourage action? They make the purchase process as simple and quick as possible. Their websites allow users to view the most important information at a glance and make a purchase with just a few clicks. It’s all about avoiding abandoned shopping carts—the biggest enemy of e-commerce providers.

How can you improve the UX of your career sites? Let’s draw some inspiration from the best e-commerce websites when designing your web pages and career site. We want to create a smooth, enjoyable, and intuitive navigation experience so that candidates can easily access relevant information. It’s important that they can apply with just a few clicks, especially for challenging vacancies that many companies advertise. To help you improve the UX of your career sites, we have summarized several key points.

Header

Pay special attention to your header. This consists of the menu for your website and the breadcrumb navigation. The latter allows internet users to recognize their position on your site and quickly find the pages that interest them.

Mobile-friendly

Ensure that your career sites are also mobile-friendly. You can check the mobile version of your website from most browsers by accessing the relevant “responsive” menu in your browser’s web inspector. There, you can easily look for possible display issues: is the page displayed correctly? Is there a good balance between text areas and images? Are the buttons clickable and have enough space between them?

Call-to-action

Place your call-to-action buttons in the right place. “Call-to-action” (CTA) refers to all the buttons that encourage the user to take action. Examples include “Click for more information,” “Click to play the testimonial video,” “Click to apply,” and so on. The “Apply” button contains the most important CTA for your career site. Make sure it is highly visible and emphasized within your content.

Candidate Journey

Personalize the candidate journey on your career site. If a visitor is watching interviews with quality engineers from your company, don’t suggest applying for positions in the HR department on the same page. Instead, the next step should direct them to open positions in the quality area.

How can you boost your Employer Brand with digital tools?

It makes sense to take steps to upgrade your Employer Brand, but how do you know if you’re on the right track? After all, you want to know if you are being successful, right? You can measure the success of your Employer Brand, and digital tools can help you with that.

But beware, analyzing your Employer Brand does not mean just collecting some numbers. It’s about focusing on the key elements that make your company attractive. When choosing your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you should keep two principles in mind: keep it simple and make it relevant. Your analysis should clearly show the performance or lack thereof. Get rid of those complex statistics, they are often useless.

Conversion Rate

Check if your applications have a high conversion rate and how many candidates are invited for interviews. How many candidates make it to the final selection after the process? How many drop out along the way? These data reveal the quality of your Employer Brand, which should attract motivated candidates.

If you are already using recruitment software, you can measure your effectiveness—and indirectly your Employer Brand—using accurate statistics. Some software solutions, such as Cegid’s recruitment tool, allow you to design your career sites and track your recruitment statistics.

A thorough analysis of your recruitment processes is a great starting point. But let’s take it a step further and examine the external perception of your Employer Brand by analyzing the traffic to your career site. This is the way to see if your company is attracting attention. We don’t just look at your current applicants (those who have applied or have been involved in your recruitment processes), but we also examine all visitors to your career sites. These people are potential candidates as well as visitors who could have been candidates. With this comprehensive overview, you can fully understand the impact of your Employer Brand.

KPIs

Let’s specifically look at the following KPIs:

• The bounce rate on your career sites the bounce rate indicates the relevance of the content offered—both thematically and formally. It shows the percentage of visitors who land on a career site and leave without viewing another page. The lower the bounce rate, the better. For reference: A good bounce rate for a website is between 41% and 55%, while a rate between 56% and 70% is considered acceptable. If your bounce rate is above 70%, you need to address this issue.
• The average session duration the average session duration, or dwell time, is the time visitors spend on your career site. An internet user looking for a job and interested in your company should stay on your vacancy page for at least 30 seconds. If the average session duration is shorter, make sure to produce longer and more impactful content. You can read more about that in this ebook.

The number of pages per visit

This KPI shows how many pages (including view pages) a visitor views. It indicates the quality of your website. The more vacancies a visitor views during their session, the more motivated they are to work for you. If the number of page views is below three, it’s time to add more links to other pages and advertisements to increase interest.

The conversion rate of your pages

This KPI is especially important for your vacancies. Analyzing the conversion rate of your contact forms can also be useful, for example, to see who has requested information or an e-book. For a vacancy, you should aim for a conversion rate of 35%. If you fall below this threshold, it may indicate that your advertisements (or form pages) are not effective enough or that the forms have defects. In that case, you need to review your advertisements and forms. These different statistics are accessible with just a few clicks via Google Analytics on your company’s career site.

Essential elements of a good career site

To stand out, you need to show that your company is unique. Stay authentic and true to your brand values. What do you specifically offer to the candidates you have identified as your Candidate Persona? To effectively promote your Employer Brand, it is important to make the most of digital tools. Mobile-optimized career sites, an intuitive and user-friendly interface, relevant content, videos, and so on, are essential elements. If you expand your Employer Branding content (blog posts, videos with employee testimonials), evaluate the impact after a few months. Has traffic increased? Have candidates applied as a result? How do candidates experience the content? These results should be positive for an Employer Brand that wants to recruit better and longer. Your website should be unique and maintained both online and offline.

Integrated career site with ATS

As we have seen, your Employer Brand is closely linked to your career site. Depending on the context, considerations can go beyond the usual framework of a career site developed by a web agency or integrated into the company website. An applicant tracking system (ATS) can replace a career site. This way, you don’t need to hire an expensive web agency to create a career site and and ensure a seamless user experience. HR professionals agree: over time, careersites will be 100% integrated into the ATS.

For more information on crafting an excellent candidate journey, check out the replay of our Linkedin Live session on ‘How to Craft a 5-Star Candidate Journey’, where Recruitment Expert Dirkje Zoetbrood will guide you through practical tips and actionable strategies to create memorable moments for candidates.