How to create an engaging careers website that speaks to top talent
By Hannah Jameson & Evelyn Jackson (CEO)
Imagine having the number of applicants you need for every role in your organisation. And imagine they all come directly to you from your website.
How do you design a careers website that truly captures your audience? Although we can start to understand how a careers website is key to external talent recruitment marketing, creating one that speaks to top talent and achieves your goal is critical. Whether this is a page on your website or a separate careers website, it’s how you show off what you offer to top talent and is filled with important information about your organisation. Information that you know your audience wants to know. Information that your audience needs, to decide if they want to work for you. How you put one together can seem daunting at first, but here at Corporate Crayon, we’ve worked with a range of clients on their careers websites and, along the way, have used our unique approach for greater impact.
Below you will find some additional information on our process and how you can create a careers website or page that best represents your organisation's employer brand including your values and your unique employee value proposition (EVP). Both critical elements to developing the right content for your audience.
Step One: Discovery
To create an effective careers website, you need to understand your audience. This is both the internal and the external talent that you’re targeting. Understanding what is important to the people that work for you and what makes you different and understanding who you are targeting and their needs. Perhaps you have multiple personas you need to create an individualised experience for. Whether you need to target graduates or service professionals. Understanding and knowing your audience is crucial to understanding what user experience and content is needed. To achieve this, conduct external talent questionnaires and focus groups. Alternatively, put yourself in their shoes by using an empathy map.
Once you clearly understand who your audience is, you need to review your current website. Dive deep into discovering what’s missing and what you can add to improve the overall experience—utilising data such as click rate and time spent on the page. Take a look at what your other competitors are doing. Test other websites for user experience and identify success factors for your organisation. Take inspiration from great examples and think about what content works and why.
STEP TWO: CONNECTION
When you have a clear vision of who you are targeting, you need to align on branding, tone of voice and experience. This is key to remaining in alignment with your organisation. We recommend engaging with the marketing and communications team early and working collaboratively across all stakeholders to understand the organisation’s talent objectives to ensure success.
Ask questions. What’s the overall goal? Do you want to educate your audience? Or do you want them to take action? How do these goals marry up to your marketing team’s goals? This level of understanding will inform not only the framework for your careers website but also key considerations such as technical limitations.
A seamless integration between branding, user experience, business goals and communications.
STEP THREE: HUMAN
You can develop the structure by understanding your objectives and knowing your limitations. This is also commonly known as the wireframe. Your wireframe shapes the user journey on each page(s) and helps to map out where content should be placed. Thinking about how to literally make the user journey the core of your careers website. Understanding users’ key motivators, actions and testing experience as you develop. What functionality is required, what is a minimal viable product to design and test? It is with this knowledge you then create the content for your careers website or page. Think about content in the same way as functionality with the user at the forefront. And it is at this stage that we review and develop any new content required for the page or website.
STEP FOUR: CONSIDERED DESIGN
Once you have clarity on structure and content, you can create high fidelity designs with a considered approach utilising your employee value proposition (EVP) and developing a visual representation of your employer brand and the elements you have completed in Steps 1-3. Alongside your brand guidelines, develop design elements that are fit for purpose. Test with users and tweak as you develop and create your website or page. Consider elements such as font, colour hierarchy and tone of voice, brand personality and the theme of your website. Consider SEO recommendations and adapt your content to match. To accompany, use a combination of mixed media for an engaging and impactful website. This helps to engage your audience and increase talent traffic. Always ensure that all of the content is useful and relevant. Upon receiving feedback, revise and finalise the structure, design and content. An impactful careers website or page is one that is considered and adaptable to the audience it is trying to attract. Our most recent website and the careers page is a great example of this.
STEP FIVE: launch
Step five is the launch of your site. But this if not before you have developed, tested and planned the internal and external communications for your site launch. Recruitment marketing requires consistency on message, consistency on branding and consistency on timing to target your external talent. At Corporate Crayon, we support clients beyond launch when you need it. With social media templates, recruitment content for linkedin, job templates and ongoing testing and updates to your website. By following these steps, you will have all of the relevant information to create a careers website that truly impacts your audience. Clarify who will be responsible for reviewing and managing your careers website. Keep your careers website updated to keep top talent and relevant communities aware of your organisation. Importantly too, editing your website should be easy and we can train you and your team so you can have control to edit as you need.
Final Thoughts.
Your careers website or page is key to your external recruitment marketing strategy. More and more a careers website is your avenue to attracting the right talent to enable your organisation to achieve its objectives.
Consider the impact your website has on recruitment and the costs associated with recruitment that could be saved if only you had more traffic to your website as opposed to seek or other job posting boards. Imagine if you could attract the relevant traffic to your website and even better, influence them to apply to work for you. An impactful careers website can achieve this and more.
How Corporate Crayon Can Help
At Corporate Crayon, we work to increase performance with meaningful connection and considered design. If your organisation is looking for external support, get in touch with us.