It’s widely acknowledged that your organization’s career portal is one of the most crucial components of your recruitment strategy. In fact, it’s an integration of numerous efforts: candidate experience, employer branding, recruitment marketing, diversity and inclusion. So, continue exploring this career portal guide.
The essential message: Enhancing your organization’s career portal is vital if you wish to draw in, engage, and convert more applicants. Moreover, it becomes simpler to refresh it with a career portal guide to assist you.
In this career portal guide, I’m going to share everything you need to create an impressive career portal.
After all, wouldn’t you like your career portal to be featured on lists such as The 15 Best Career Pages in 2019 or 14 Examples of the Best Company Career Portals (2018)?
7 Essential Steps to Establishing a New Company Career Portal: Career Portal Guide
Within this career portal guide, I’ve outlined 7 essential steps to assist you in creating a new career portal. However, you might omit one or two based on your company’s scale.
My commitment: If you adhere to this career portal guide you will expedite the development of your new career portal. Thus, here are the 7 essential steps to assist you:
- Step #1: Why Do You Require a New Company Career Portal?
- Step #2: Is Your Career Portal for a Small or Large Organization?
- Step #3: Is Your Career Portal Global?
- Step #4: Compile Your Core Career Portal Features
- Step #5: What You’ll Require “Under the Hood” for Your Career Portal
- Step #6: What Internal Assets do You Possess? (CMS?)
- Step #7: Evaluate Your Internal Assets Against a “Recruitment CMS”
1) Career Portal Guide: Why Do You Require a New Company Career Portal?
A new career portal requires a goal to attract potential candidates with the ideal cultural alignment. Most Career Portal/CMS requests for proposals (RFPs) I encounter mention one or more of the following objectives:
- Enhance Employer Brand — Elevate Employer Value Proposition and synchronize it with the corporate identity.
- Refine Candidate Experience –Treat candidates more as clients with a user-friendly user interface (UI/UX).
- Expand presence in new geographical regions
- Free up time for recruiters!
- “Transformation” — Many employers approach me currently due to a “transformation initiative” that propels the creation of a new employment portal. They are sometimes also migrating to a new applicant tracking system (ATS) simultaneously.
- Reduce Turnover
2) Is Your New Career Portal for a Small or Large Organization?
As your organization expands, your career portal needs to evolve in complexity.
Thus, larger employers should contemplate these “large company” considerations:
- Internal Career Website — Deloitte, for instance, is so vast that they now employ someone whose responsibility is to manage candidate experience for INTERNAL applicants (i.e. current employees). Some refer to this as “internal mobility,” which can fulfill significant objectives like minimizing hiring costs and turnover. The most effective employers ensure their new career portal accommodates both internal and external applicants.
- Multiple Brands — If you operate several brands, you must decide whether to maintain one central career portal enabling candidates to search jobs across all brands, or allow each brand to have its own career portals. Some organizations adopt a blended approach.
- Mergers/Acquisitions & Spin-offs — Some large organizations are acquiring, or merging with, other businesses. Alternatively, they are divesting business units. They seek continuity in the employer brand and candidate experience amid such transitions. This scenario may also involve multiple ATS’s.
3) Is Your Career Portal Global?
Organizations recruiting across multiple global regions frequently require extra features compared to a single-country employer. These include:
- Country Pages — These are sometimes decentralized, with each regional unit determining its own recruitment budgets and strategies. They may require the capability to establish subordinate sites for new regions (e.g., a distinct country page to empower business leaders in those areas).
- Translation — Facilitate translation into various languages such as Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese; Polish, Portuguese, etc.
- Integration with Multiple ATS’s — Some global organizations utilize different ATS’s in various regions. For example, one global bank reached out to me needing to connect “12 to 14” ATS’s
- within a cohesive candidate experience.
- Regions with No ATS — Some global organizations have regions that need to list a job without the assistance of an ATS.
- GDPR compliance
Caption: United States country page.
4) Career Portal Guide: Compile Your Core Career Portal Features
You’ll want to develop a checklist of the essential, must-have features for your new career portal.
Here are the fundamental ones to consider:
Job Search Box
Some applicants favor utilizing a search box. After all, they’ve been trained on the Internet (by Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) to search for content.
Ongig’s data indicates that as much as 50% of applicants on career portals use a search box (instead of clicking through functions or locations) to find their job.
The candidate must also have the ability to search by keywords and phrases.
Most applicant tracking systems have limited job search capabilities. They necessitate an exact search (e.g., a candidate must input “Account Executive” (typically a sales role) to find the position titled “Account Executive”).
The best job search technology enables “intuitive searching.” For example, if the candidate searches for “sales,” they should see the Account Executive position in the results if it is indeed a sales role.
The finest career portal job search also permits:
- Typos (we all make them!)
- Concepts (“sales in the UK”)
- Title Detection — It comprehends that if a candidate searching a hospital’s jobs types “medical assistant,” the results should prioritize the “Medical Assistant jobs before/instead of “Assistant” jobs with “medical” perks.
Furthermore, an effective company job search will NOT generate false positives. This is quite challenging to achieve.
For instance, as of the creation of this article (July 18, 2024), if you visit Salesforce.com’s global career portal and enter “sales,” you will discover 722 results since every job at Salesforce includes the term “sales.”
Google presents the most advanced job search technology I’ve encountered. They provide the technology through partners (like Ongig).
Exploring Job Opportunities
Some applicants favor to explore (click links) rather than to seek through a search bar.
When prospective applicants explore, the primary 2 choices should be:
- Location— City, State, Nation
- Function— Category, team, division
If your organization encompasses various brands, you might also wish to incorporate those as search filters.
In light of the trends in post-pandemic job searches, your organization could also add filters for job formats. This could encompass on-site, remote, and hybrid categories.
Several companies also desire profile matching. For example, if the applicant logs in with their social media profile (e.g. LinkedIn or Facebook), then the career portal will automatically align them with jobs based on their CV/resume on these platforms.
Tailored Landing Pages
Most employers seek a distinct page for at least one of the following:
- Diversity– These pages encompass DEIB statements that reflect your company values. You could substantiate these essential values to attract premier talent with workforce diversity statistics and policies.
- Interns
- Veterans
Job Listings
The job listings on your new career site are crucial. This is also where the applicant makes their final choice…to apply or not apply!
Thus, you’ll want your job postings to encompass:
- Color palette
- Typeface
- Logo
- Header/footer
- Applicable and inclusive job titles
- Space for media— Image or video
- Space for recruiting tools — Google Maps, LinkedIn Connect, Glassdoor ratings and feedback, etc.
Job Application Status Tracking Page
These automated page updates offer potential employees greater transparency. Hence, enhancing their perception of your company. This feature on the career site is particularly beneficial for active job seekers who submit multiple applications, where replies can get lost in the fray. Thus, you could connect the page updates to a candidate’s email or mobile number to keep them promptly informed to facilitate follow-up interviews.
Additional Career Site Features to Consider
There are also numerous further features for consideration on your career site. Explore these 3 useful links:
5) What You’ll Require “Under the Hood” for Your Career Site Guide
To enhance the candidate experience on your new career site, you’ll need to ensure it’s:
Adaptive Design
Adaptive design implies that every page of your career portal is legible on mobile devices of various sizes.
Feedback and Community-Supported Content
The design of your career site should mirror a positive company culture, thus it should include employee feedback. Your content strategy may incorporate employee testimonials (video is particularly effective in engaging the audience) that illustrate what prospective candidates can anticipate with open positions.
Search Engine Optimized
A system to guarantee that search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) can readily index your career site pages. Effective search engine optimization strategies also attract free traffic from Google and similar platforms. Additionally, you should schema tag your jobs so they will be recognized by Google For Jobs.
6) What Internal Resources Do You Possess? (CMS?)
The most effective company career sites have numerous dynamic elements.
Consequently, to manage the dynamic components of any website necessitates some form of content management system (CMS).
If You’re Creating a New Company Career Site Internally
If you require CMS software for your internal team to construct a career website, the most prevalent CMS systems (off-the-shelf) are tools such as:
- WordPress
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Squarespace
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- Force.com (by Salesforce)
These CMS tools empower you to enhance user experiences by constructing quality and dependable career sites.
Some employers utilize a simpler blogging tool like Tumblr to create job pages. Check out the Washington Post’s jobs page powered by Tumblr.
Career Site Guide: Constructing Your Own Internal Recruitment Content Management System
For those more technically inclined, open-source code is readily available. You might search “PHP content management systems” to find a few examples.
The principal drawback of employing a general CMS to develop your career site is that it will lack essential career site-specific functionalities. Depending on who constructed it (internally or via an external agency), it might also be sluggish for you to implement changes.
For example, recently, a $500 million organization solicited us for their Recruitment CMS Request for Proposal (RFP). The reason: they had their corporate website built on WordPress but couldn’t determine how to use it to include video in their Workday-based job pages.
7) A “Recruitment CMS” is Optimal if You Can Afford One
At this stage, you’ll have clarity on your internal resources.
Now the question arises: “Build or purchase?”
The “buy” option refers to what is termed a recruitment content management system (CMS) or career site builder.
Consider a recruitment CMS as a drag-and-drop career site creator. These user-friendly solutions enable you to design effective career pages while reducing errors and intricate technicalities.
Here are 2 checklists you can utilize to ensure any recruitment CMS platform provides you and the candidate:
Career Site Guide: A Recruitment CMS Checklist for You the Employer!
Your recruitment process should encompass the following to enhance candidate experiences:
- Self-Service
- You should be capable of managing essential functionalities from within the CMS
- Capability to incorporate video, images, and media on any job page
- ATS Integration
- A central recruitment media repository
- Job pages that align with the color scheme/style guide of your organization
- A customizable template for job announcements
- SEO
- Socially-shareable positions (for instance, when a candidate clicks “share” on your job announcements, the media should be automatically integrated into the social job feed)
- Gathering candidate details such as through email job alerts or atop talent community. You can utilize this information to add a personal touch to candidate interactions, including personalizing offer letters.
- Career Site Analytics (source traffic and conversion to applications by Job Search, Job Browse, and individual job )
- Job Board Distribution (to at least the top 3 job boards) to ensure that your job postings reach a broader audience of talented hires and potentially draw in passive job seekers.
- Google for Jobs-optimized
- Text analysis to assess any biases
- Onboarding tools that assist new hires through the talent pipeline and encourage career development could enhance job satisfaction and retention.
- Text analysis to make job descriptions more comprehensible
- The recruitment CMS should seamlessly extract the job posting content from your ATS
- Integrated communication tools that allow team members to collaborate effortlessly with candidate data management within the system.
- Service Level Agreement — you should request a commitment to 99.9% uptime
Career Site Guide: A Recruitment CMS Checklist on What the Candidate Should Receive!
- A.I.-driven Job Search
- Browsing jobs by location and function/department
- Job postings featuring images and videos
- Recruiting widgets such as maps, reviews and ratings, and salaries (e.g. Glassdoor), LinkedIn integration, etc.
- Recommended Jobs (A.I.-driven).Suggested jobs across the company’s careers connect job seekers with other similar open roles if they miss their first preference.
- Social sign-in
- Translation of job descriptions into any major language
- Mobile-optimized job pages
- Robust career site tools, featuring intuitive widgets that enhance site navigation (these can increase application rates).
- Email job alertsto streamline your search for the top candidates
- Jobs that are easily discoverable on Google, Bing, and other search engines
Future Trends for Career Site Guides
AI and Chatbots in Recruitment
One of the most thrilling trends in career sites is the application of AI and chatbots. These powerful tools can simplify and accelerate the application process. Chatbots can address common inquiries from potential employees, offer relevant information about available roles, and assist job applicants in completing the application form.
For example, if you explore some of the leading company career pages, you might notice chatbots assisting in listing job openings or providing details about employee benefits. This not only enhances user experience but also aids in attracting top talent. Consequently, it’s an excellent way to ensure that your company’s career page is always prepared to support today’s job seekers.
Virtual Reality for Job Previews
Another trend gaining traction is the utilization of virtual reality (VR) for job previews. Imagine being able to explore a prospective work environment from the comfort of your home. VR can deliver a genuine glimpse into various departments, making it easier for job candidates to assess if they would fit into the company’s culture.
Moreover, this technology can create a positive first impression tool, showcasing the company’s culture and work environment in a more immersive manner. It’s also an innovative enhancement for career websites aiming to distinguish themselves and attract suitable candidates.
Gamification in Hiring Processes
Gamification is another trend making significant strides in talent acquisition. By integrating game-like elements into the hiring process, organizations can render job applications more engaging and enjoyable. This may also include challenges or quizzes that creatively assess a candidate’s skills.
Leveraging gamification can assist in identifying the right talent while maintaining an enjoyable process. It’s a fantastic career page design strategy that could increase the conversion rate of qualified candidates. Several of the top career pages already employ this technique to connect with prospective hires.
If you opt for a recruitment CMS, I’d be delighted to discuss Ongig. Ongig’s Career Site Building Software encompasses all of the above to enhance the hiring process.
Best wishes in whatever path you choose!