What Do the Top 3 Career Websites Have in Common?
Were the top three career websites in the United States. These employers were thought to have the best online application processes from the job seeker’s perspective.
Who wouldn’t want to be on that list?! The careers page can be a recruiter’s best friend when crafted thoughtfully and with the candidate in mind. Attracting great talent starts with the career page, so what makes these guys the best?
The careers page should be front and center.
All three websites’ career pages can be found at the top of the homepage. The current standard is for candidates to be able to find the career page within one click of the homepage. On these sites, the visitor doesn’t even have to scroll; once the page loads, “Careers” becomes visible. Recruiting.com suggests:
“Don’t hide the link as a subheading, instead make it visible and easily accessible. If prospective candidates have a hard time finding your career site, they may never actually make it there to apply for a job!”
Mobile Optimization is Mandatory
Again, all three career pages are mobile friendly. Mobile optimization of career sites is the standard these days, and candidates have come to expect this feature of employers. A 2011 Beyond.com survey found that 77 percent of job seekers use mobile search apps. Although this stat is a few years old, mobile usage overall has only gone up. Among the several reasons that job seekers chose mobile, the top two were:
- 36.3 percent said they can quickly react to new job postings. A study conducted by TheLadders defines why that is so important. They found that job seekers need to apply to a job within 72 hours after it has been posted online. After that amount of time, the chances of their application even being opened lowers by 50 percent.
- 23.8 percent said they like being able to search anytime, anywhere. It’s obvious that candidates prefer to apply online, but many organizations are simply behind the curve. Potentialpark’s latest research of more than 23,000 job seekers across more than 100 countries found that complicated Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) result in a dropout rate of 48 percent of applicants.
Visual appeal is vital.
Each of these three career sites are packed full of images, sliders, video and icons. Not only does this draw the eye, each visual is informative and serves a purpose. Digital motion media company, Three Motion, tell us that visuals improve the impact of messages and facilitate brand recognition and recall. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, and Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media networks in the world because of the power of visuals.
- Video is 6x more effective than print.
- Companies with video on their site increase their likelihood of making a first page Google ranking by 53 percent.
- And visitors will stay on average 2 minutes longer.
- 81 percent of marketers use video in marketing activity.
These are just a few things that the leading careers sites are doing to make the candidate experience easier to navigate and more appealing. The biggest difference between these sites and the poorly rated sites was the obvious emphasis that these employers put on improving the candidate side of recruiting. The career site shouldn’t be crafted for HR or recruiters; it should be crafted for the candidate.