Your careers site is a critical stopping point on the candidate journey. While there are an increasing number of places where candidates can find out information about working at your company, recent research from the Talent Board shows that your careers site remains a top resource.
Company careers sites are still the most important aspect when researching career opportunities for 58 percent of candidates (Talent Board, 2017).
However, keeping your careers site up to date is a lot of work! As a result, you might only have the time to do a major upgrade every few years, unfortunately leaving your site to grow stale in between these update periods.
The good news is you don’t need a “major upgrade project” to drastically improve your site and the information you’re providing to candidates.
You can improve your approach in a really easy and effective way: by leveraging the stories that your employees already have to tell and updating your site with new stories in different formats on an ongoing basis.
Why update your site with more employee content?
Candidates are 3x more likely to trust what your employees have to say about working at your company vs. what you tell them in other company messaging.
Probably not news to you, but this is a great reminder that your employees’ voices and stories make for really compelling and attractive Recruitment Marketing content! Authentic information shared by your employees can help candidates make informed decisions about whether your company is the right fit for them.
Here are 3 quick updates you might consider making to keep your career site updated with your employees’ stories and voices:
1 – Feature employee quotes on your site
Our first easy update is to add employee testimonials to your careers site. These are short quotes (1 or 2 sentences is ideal) that should be pretty easy to collect. Partner the quote with a picture of the employee who gave the quote, to humanize your organization and add a touch more authenticity.
The inspiration: Whole Foods has a great rotating panel of quotes and employee pictures on their career site, that are worth taking a look at. Their employee quotes cover topics like growth opportunities, the rapport between colleagues and the strength of their training programs.
Questions you can ask employees to get these quotes:
- “Why did you join?”
- “What do you like best about working here?”
- “How would you describe our culture?”
- “What would you tell a friend about what it’s like to work here?”
2 – Ask employees to explain your company values in action
Your company values influence your culture in a major way. However, it can be hard to translate how your values actually affect everyday life at your company.
Ask your employees what your company values mean to them or what they look like in action. You can then add these to your careers site as blog posts, videos or as short testimonials.
The inspiration: Nestle Purina explains their values in a visual format that captures site visitor attention. They then drive these points home by having employees break down what the values mean to them and sharing these in a carousel format underneath the values.
Questions you can ask employees about your company values:
- “What do our company values mean to you?”
- “Where have you seen our company values in action?”
- “How would you describe our company values to a friend?”
- “How do our company values help us serve our customers?”
3 – Pull in a social feed or hashtag that showcases employee generated content
Lastly, a great idea to keep your careers site fresh and incorporate employees’ perspectives on working for your company is to pull in a social feed or company hashtag (if you have one that’s active) on to your career site. Showcasing employee generated content from social media is a great way to showcase what a day in the life of your company’s employees look like, employee events that are happening and more.
The inspiration: AT&T pulls in content that their team members post to Instagram and Twitter using the hashtag #LifeAtATT. The content is displayed on the “Culture page” of their career site so candidates can get a sneak peek into how employees spend their time.
Ways you can encourage employees to share content using your company hashtag:
- Create a social media deck or webinar that teaches employees how and why they can share parts of their work lives on social media using your company’s hashtags
- Send around a weekly email, or post to a company internal communication channel, showcasing the top posts from that week that employees shared with the company hashtag
- Start a social media contest and give out prizes for the best social post using your hashtag in a given time period
- Get your leaders on board! Encourage your executives to use the company hashtag regularly in order to model behavior for their teams
Looking for more examples of how you can create a best-in-class career site? We have you covered! Take a look at our Rally Lookbooks, 3 Career Sites Where Employees Shine, and 12 Features of an Appealing Careers Page, for more inspiration.
