10 Best Practices of Employer Branding in Careers Sites

Editor's Notes

1. It’s not only for job listing. Careers site is one of the most crucial tools that empower employer brand and define the future of your team. No matter what you say in the job descriptions, what you do with your careers site speaks way louder. The candidate experience starts the moment prospects find you. Sweep them off their feet today. Don’t just list your job vacancies. Convert visitors into your brand’s believers and prospective candidates.
2. Enforce that brand identity. Why do you have that brand identity so thoroughly applied across all channels to “communicate the message” to your customers, but not to your own future employees?
3. Before showing any job vacancies, make it very clear to prospective candidates that they’re at your territory. Pay attention to colors, fonts, the use of images. Make prospects feel the value of your brand before they actually start reading.
4. Talk about career opportunities to prospective candidates. Chances are that you’re not the only one hiring for that role. There are other companies in the same sector. Your competitors.
5. What does a candidate take into account while weighing up job openings? Career growth. So stop talking about how great of a company you are. Focus on what your future employees can do if they choose your side.
6. Get creative with media. Team photos are a good start to show the real faces behind the brand. But don’t limit yourself to just that.
7. Make videos, generate GIFs, throw emoticons, and everything that fits the culture of your company. In this way, candidates get the most feel about a company’s culture. They can decide for themselves whether they’re going to fit in.
8. Add a personal touch. Strong call-to-action messages are always a good start.
9. Don’t forget that you’re talking to a person. Not just any person. Your future colleague. Make it personal and engaging.
10. Let your employees be the ambassadors. Wholeheartedly. Who doesn’t want to read about their future colleagues and how they’re doing at their company?
11. Get testimonials from current employees. Do short Q&A’s. Or, map out their entire career growth since they’re on board.
12. Make it as easy as possible for prospective candidates to access, navigate, and do research about your company. The faster prospects get the image of your company, the faster you receive their applications.
13. Make the career site clean, simple, intuitive. Put the company’s social media channels there if available. That saves prospects a trip to Google, and markets your employer brand at the same time.
14. Get some love from search engines.
15. Create a separate page for each job listed with the job title in the URL. It’s perfect for Google and search engines to index and give the job vacancy more exposure, much more than one-pager careers site with popup job vacancy.
16. Give concise, specific reasons why any talent would want to work for you. Be extremely to the point here.
17. Skip great location or free lunch. Get straight to the impact. This is the only way to capture the attention of candidates who actually care about their work. Do it well, and you can easily get people from point A – random visitors to point B – your brand’s believers and prospective candidates.
18. Recruitment video done right. It’s common to see recruitment videos with overly positive employees and fancy offices.
19. Go the extra mile, show the personalities of your company. Smiles and fanciness might waver, but personalities pull through.
20. Shorten the distance between your company and prospective candidates. It shows your initiative to establish connection, to offer a handshake.
21. There are currently two ways to do it: via human connection and via physical location. For the former: Integrating LinkedIn onsite would help prospects see how many degrees of connection they’re away. For the later: Detect a prospect location and suggest the available jobs around their neighborhood.
22. Final thought: Give the careers site as much thought as the landing page. It helps you land the people who help grow your company after all.