5 Career Site Ideas to Inspire You

Candidates are 2X more likely to visit a customized career site than a review site to research jobs. Once they are on your site, it’s your handshake moment – the exclusive opportunity to capture their interest and convert them into candidates. NAS has created many career sites for our client partners. In this blog, we’ll give you some ideas on how to take your site to the next level.

#1: Let your employer brand sing.  

Employer brands can be seen as the themes or messages you are using to motivate candidates to consider joining your organization. If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an employer brand – and you should – the best place to feature it and tell your story is your career site. When NAS creates an employer brand for a client partner, we always keep in mind how it can be represented on the career site for maximum effectiveness.

Here’s an example of a career site we created for MetroHealth that prominently features their employer brand. A major trauma hospital in the metropolitan Cleveland area that serves the underserved, they’re an ideal employer for health care professionals who are driven to serve the community. So, the employer brand theme we created is Made for This Mission.

The theme is implemented in the headers on the career site pages, along with a headline and photos that complement the specific topic for each page. The employer brand is flexible to accommodate a variety of messages and job families but also varied enough to stay fresh across the site.

#2: Consider the impact of video.  

A well-made recruitment video can attract, entice and motivate the right candidate to apply. It’s always a great idea to include video content on your career site. Videos increase engagement and time spent on your site, and they allow you to showcase your people, culture and work settings with minimal effort on the part of the viewer.

One impactful way to use video is to add it to the header of your career site, like City BBQ has done. This simple “sizzle reel” of employees at a restaurant location creates an immediate positive impression and showcases what it might be like to work at one of their restaurants.

Consider adding job family or day in the life videos that show the reality of the jobs. These can help to attract the right people when you are transparent about the work setting, the duties and what it’s really like to work for you. Candidates can picture themselves as part of your team – or opt out if it does not fit with their goals and expectations. Check out some great examples of day-in-the-life videos on Oatey’s career site. Candidates for a manufacturing job can understand the environment and physical requirements for the job before they even apply.

Create a good layout that allows you to show your videos in a more visually appealing way than the traditional carousel. This way, a candidate can see several videos and choose the one that they want to view, rather than having to scroll through a bunch of videos – they may never get past the first one. In the example below on the ASPCA career site, the videos are all visible, allowing the candidate to quickly see them all and choose which ones they want to view.

#3: Make job families a priority.  

One thing that many sites often overlook is including job family pages. These pages allow you to target messaging more specifically to a job family and give you a great destination to drive targeted candidate traffic to a page that is especially relevant.

For example, Wake County Public School System has many job family pages, and these can range from teachers and school leaders to bus drivers or food service workers. Each of the roles has different selling propositions, benefits and attractors, plus we can showcase photos and testimonials specific to the jobs being offered.

Another way to think about this is setting up pages by location. The Krusteaz Company has locations in multiple states and hiring is localized to those manufacturing locations. So instead of job families, we have location pages where we tell the story of what they make, who they hire and what the culture is like at each of the factories. As with job families, this provides a customized destination with content that is more relevant to candidate needs.

#4: Create a site that fits your audience.  

When writing and designing your career site, gear the style and content toward your ideal audience as much as possible, especially if you have a well-defined profile of your best candidates. For example, Cinemark largely hires high school and college students, so the career site is full of bold images, snappy headlines and brief messages. We highlight the things that are important to this candidate, like free movies and educational programs.

For a company like National Futures Association, which targets specialized candidates in the regulatory field, the look, feel and content are very different – more professional, with an informational and educational tone.

Both sites do a great job of showcasing employees, culture and the company. They just frame the content differently based on the target audience.

#5: Really tell your culture story.  

Candidates use career sites to see if they want to work for you. And one thing that career sites can do really well is tell your culture story. Telling your culture story with authenticity allows candidates to decide if they’re a good fit for your culture. That way, you’re bringing the right people on board and avoiding unnecessary turnover.

That means showing real photos of employees, including testimonials and videos and adding content on your values. CareSource is a company with a fully developed culture story that we tell across their career site with multiple pages that include programs, metrics, employee resources groups and even employee spotlights. This is a great example of how to provide deep content on culture that can make a difference for candidates who are deciding based on these factors.

Ready to take your career site to the next level? Get in touch with NAS today and we’ll share our ideas on how you can improve your employer brand and career site content, design and performance.

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