Many organisations put a lot of time, thought, and energy into building a website that resonates with potential customers – prioritising attractive visuals and simplicity to help lead their target audience towards engaging and purchasing their goods or services.

Has your business put the same energy into building a career page that can attract and engage potential job seekers? If not, then now is the time to build something on your website that will provide potential candidates with the information they need – to make them want to apply for a role with your business.

Research has shown that your career page is the first destination for applicants and potential candidates to go to understand more about your business. According to LinkedIn, 59% of candidates will visit your career page first after learning of an opportunity with your company.

Your career page is where applicants will come to learn more about your company culture, the perks of working for your business, and the process of applying for a role.

With the mounting recruitment challenges showing little signs of abating in 2023, the war for talent means that businesses must do all they can to attract the best candidates.

So, let’s learn about why a career page is so important, and what a great careers page looks like in 2023.

The Importance of a Career Page

An effective career page or career site should be much more valuable than simply a place to find job listings. It should tell a story about your employer brand; it should help job seekers and potential applicants to self-select based on whether they think they’d be a good fit for your organisation and whether they align with the culture and values of your business.

A career page is often a first point of contact with potential candidates. It is a platform for you to tell your company story; to present the best possible version of your business and deliver a strong candidate experience for those who will look to apply for an open role.

A career page should serve as your central employer branding platform.

It should also improve your hiring metrics – from time-to-hire to cost-per-hire. Why? Because career pages drive traffic to your site. Applicants can find these pages through organic searches, reducing the need to pay to advertise job listings.

And because concise messaging leveraging the story of your brand helps engage candidates and allows them to screen themselves, reducing costs for candidate sourcing and screening.

Additionally, a careers page is on your own company website; you can monitor and track numerous metrics and stats based on the visitors to the page. From traffic volume, demographic data, geographic data, and engagement, building a career page will help you to better understand who is interested in working with your company, and what you need to do to target your ideal candidates.

Your messaging, targeting, and branding should work together in concert on your career page to attract applicants and convert them into new hires.

So, what does a great career page need?

What Your Career Page Needs to do in 2023

Share Your Company Values

What are the key values of your company, and do they exist in any of your external promotional material?

For many organisations, the core company values only exist internally, and are only seen and understood by people already working for the business. But these values define your organisation’s mission and culture. They help to bind people together in the workplace and show that they businesses cares about their employees as much as their customers.

Clearly stating these values on your career page will help to attract applicants who already fit the ethos of your business, and who are more likely to be able to work well with the people you already employ.

Utilise testimonials from current employees to help drive the messaging around your values, making it clear what candidates can expect from a career with your organisation.

Make Employee Value Proposition Clear

Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) defines why candidates choose to work for you, and why they choose to stay with your organisation. It includes compensation, perks, progression opportunities, and working environment.

Your career page presents a great opportunity for you to communicate all these things to potential applicants: what can you offer people, and why should they choose you?

Go beyond simply talking about salary and benefits and emphasise your culture, your investment in people, the interesting projects they’ll be involved with, and CSR initiatives your business engages in.

Sell your employer brand in a way that resonates with potential applicants. Research from Glassdoor shows that more than 50% of employees value culture more than salary, while 80% of talent acquisition managers say that employer branding is crucial to attracting and retaining the best talent. Leverage your career page to tell your brand story and provide real clarity around your EVP.

Reduce Steps & Complexity for Application

A startling statistic is that 60% of job seekers fail to complete online job applications because they are too long or too complex.

Our own research into candidate experience similarly discovered that length and complexity were the two biggest tun-offs for applicants. Application forms with only three sections saw a low drop-off rate, with just 15% of candidates leaving their application incomplete. This shot up to a 30% incompletion rate when the number of sections rose to five.

There’s a very clear correlation between length of application form and complete rates. Don’t miss out on talent because of a convoluted application process.

Don’t require candidates to login to your career site. Make sure that every element is mobile optimised, and remove as many barriers as possible that could prevent people from applying for a job.

 Showcase Creative & Clear Job Descriptions

A great careers site will also haver thoroughly written job descriptions – ones that not only make it abundantly clear what experience and skills are required for the job, but are also careful not to use gendered language that fails to present inclusive opportunities.

A good job description goes beyond simply listing roles and responsibilities and helps to provide candidates with insight into what the day-to-day aspect of doing the job looks like.

Creativity can help you stand out – that could be using words to paint a picture of what a day on the job looks like, or it could be including an interview with someone in your company where they describe what it takes to be successful.

Make Sharing Easy

Finally, one of the best ways to optimise your career page is to make it easy for visitors to share the jobs you are hiring for.

Even if an individual landing on your careers site isn’t a good fit for a position you are recruiting for, they still might know someone in their network who would be the perfect fit.

It should not take more than a single click for a visitor to be able to share a vacancy by email or on social media. Share buttons are necessary and help to widen the reach of your job vacancies by mobilising your site visitors to help spread the word across the channels and platforms that they are most active in.

If you’d like to learn more about how Hireserve ATS could help to boost your career page and develop a candidate portal that can drive your recruitment, book a demo today.

About the author

Tristan Potter

Tristan has a decade's worth of experience writing content and copy for organisations across Bristol and the Southwest of England. He has written on a diverse range of topics, including technology, philosophy, politics, and recruitment. His writing has appeared in The Drum, HR Grapevine, and The Guardian, among other publications. He joined Hireserve in March 2022.