By Desiree Echevarria, CareerPlug

Your company’s careers page serves as the hub of your employer brand. Candidates use it to learn about your company and get a sense of what it’s like to work for you.

A strong careers page helps to compel job seekers to apply. On the other hand, a weak careers page can deter high quality job seekers from applying.

Put yourself in a jobseeker’s shoes. What would you find if you researched your company online? Would you want to apply for a job at your company based on what you see? What story are you telling them? Are you even telling them a story at all?

Job seekers can easily use job search engines and job boards to apply to dozens of jobs per day. That increases the importance of strong employer branding as a differentiator between companies.

In fact, today’s job seeker ranks careers pages as the #1 aspect to learn about a company when researching opportunities. Candidates are even saying they would be more likely to apply for a job if an employer actively maintains their employer brand.

What do job seekers want to see on a careers page?

Certain things have universal appeal to high performers. The ability to learn and grow. The opportunity to make an impact. Flexibility. Great benefits. These are a start, but you can do better. Focus on what makes your company special — more specifically, what your top performers have told you makes it special.

You need to answer the questions that candidates are asking themselves, preferably with examples:

A 2019 study by Glassdoor revealed that 77% of people would consider a company’s culture before applying for a job there, and 56% ranked a strong workplace culture as more important than salary. 

Putting in the work to ensure your company culture is communicated loud and clear on your careers page will pay huge dividends in elevating the level of talent applying for your open roles. Here are a few tips.

Show job seekers who you are.

The best way to find employees who will be a good culture fit is to be authentic about your goals and values. Share your mission, vision, and core values on your careers page. We’ve done this with our careers page at CareerPlug, and it’s been instrumental in attracting candidates who feel compelled to apply because their values match ours.

Let job seekers identify with you. Or let them not and save you the time of pursuing a candidate who won’t be a good match for your culture. 

Add pictures and videos.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth even more. As part of showing job seekers who you are, make sure to literally show them. One important piece of advice: Avoid using stock photos and instead put up real pictures of your team and workspace on your careers page. 

The more authentic your content, the more likely candidates are to connect with your employer brand.

Photos help applicants visualize what their lives would be like if they worked for you — could they see themselves showing up to work every day at your business? Oftentimes, seeing this visual representation of the workspace will get the right candidates energized and more invested in the role you’re offering.

Include employee testimonials.

You have employees who love working for you, let them help you recruit! Gather a few employee testimonials to add to your careers page.

When including testimonials, make sure you provide a variety of experiences and show real people — including their work location, photo, and most importantly, a name! For more tips, be sure to check out our blog post about examples of employee testimonials that work.

People look for social proof when they buy: This is why reviews are so popular.

When was the last time you decided to not buy something because you read a bad review or you couldn’t find any reviews as all? The same rules apply here. Managing your online reputation doesn’t end with your careers page.

At CareerPlug, almost every candidate that we speak with says that they read reviews about us on employer review sites before applying or interviewing. Are you aware of how employees are talking about your company online? 

You should manage this the same way that you manage customer reviews. Encourage happy employees to leave reviews for you. Respond to reviews that are negative in a caring, non-defensive way. Don’t make candidates leave your website to look for reviews and ratings. Include them with other testimonials on your careers page.

Benefits

Benefits can be your secret weapon when it comes to a compelling compensation package. Offering your team benefits says a lot about your commitment to being a great place to work. 

Certainly include the big three: healthcare, retirement accounts, and paid time off. But don’t limit your careers page to just the traditional benefits.

These days, employers are using their careers pages to show off some of their more creative perks like:

Think about how you could get creative with some new perks or improve the way you talk about the great stuff you already do. Remember that these benefits will help you retain your current team, too. Think about the value of being able to keep high performers on your team for the long run. That may create some room in the budget.

Growth opportunities

The best candidates are going to want to see how your company will help them grow professionally. They will often turn down a job that pays more if they see a path to growth at your company. Show them what they will learn by working with you and what a potential growth path could look like for them. This is what gets the top performers really excited.

Use your careers page to highlight opportunities for professional development to attract growth-oriented people to your team.

If you don’t currently have a clear path for growth within your organization, now is the time to establish one. Some years back at CareerPlug, we identified this as a potential growth challenge for us — we did not have a clear group of future leaders or a path to leadership.

We addressed this by creating our own Leadership Development Program (LDP) to identify and train future leaders. LDP is a ten-week program that gives the participants great exposure to lots of different leadership styles. Not everyone who graduates from LDP becomes a manager, but they are all leaders who help us grow, in addition to growing their own skill sets.

If you don’t have the resources to commit to a formalized leadership development program, consider offering an education stipend on a quarterly or annual basis to employees, or even offer to buy management books for employees upon their request so that they can pursue professional development in their free time.

Here at CareerPlug, we know from experience that hiring people who are genuinely excited to contribute to the growth of a company like ours is the most important indicator of success for new hires. We also know how important it is to return the favor and invest in the growth of our employees.