Diagnosing your career site: 10 points to check

Why is a diagnostic of your career site essential ?

Thomas Paoli, an engineer at CleverConnect has already diagnosed around fifties career site. Here’s his opinion on the subject :

Before anything else, it's important to remember that the purpose of a career site is to convert. I often hear recruiters talking about “candidates” when talking about visitors to their career site. However, when someone lands on a career site, they are only a visitor. If the career site measures up, the visitor will become a candidate because they will have carried out the act of applying. But even today, few career sites manage to convince the visitors and they will leave the site without applying.

Diagnosing your career site will enable you to identify whether this main goal is being met. Generally speaking, you can list all the problems encountered during your visitors' browsing experience, so that you can correct them more effectively.

There are three main criteria to keep in mind for a successful career site :

• ‍A graphic identity and design consistent with the brand's positioning and the company's overall environment (corporate site, social networks...)
• A reduced number of pages focused on what will be useful for the talents and up to date relevant content.
• Several different paths to the application process, in order to maximize the chances that everyone will find what they're looking for. No one browses a website the same way. Some people would rather find an offer from the career site's search engine or from the global list of offers, others from pre-filtered offers proposed on a job page or in a mini quiz on the home page…

People often talk about "smart" career sites: this is the kind of tool we need to be moving towards today, as it enables us to offer career paths tailored to each individual's needs, without the recruiter having to set up complex parameters. It’s the first step towards personalizing contact with talent and turning them into candidates. If you want to go further, other tools can be used in conjunction with it, such as CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) platforms.

So, how smart is your career site? Check it out in 10 points.

Checklist : Is your career site of good quality?

There are several types of criteria to check:

1. The link with your other environments
2. The path between the different pages
3. Your corporate identity
4. The story you're telling
5. Accessibility
6. Job offers
7. The application process
8. Personalization
9. Content freshness
10. Home page

Taken together, these criteria make your career site a high-performance space, aligned with your employer brand and adapted to candidates' expectations. Let's look at all this in detail: you'll discover the different questions you need to ask yourself to identify areas for improvement on your career site.

The link with your other environments

How does your career site interact with your other environments? Is it easily accessible?

What to check:

• Your social media pages are accessible from the career site, and the link to your career site is accessible from your social media pages.
• Your corporate and/or e-commerce site(s) are accessible from the career site and vice versa.
• All your job offers on other platforms (job boards, for example) link to your career site.

Good to know: it's very important for your career site to be listed on search engines (ideally on the first page, in the first results). If this isn't the case, it could mean that the search engines aren't finding the information they need.

The path between the different pages

When a candidate arrives on your career site, are they guided to the page they want or to the feature they need?

What to check:

• Is the menu visible? Are the menu headings self-explanatory?
• Can they see at a glance everything they can do on the career site (find a job by keyword, find out about the company, submit their CV, etc.)?
• Are all links functional? Are there any error pages? Are there any display bugs?
• Is there a suggested action on each page (apply, contact, etc.)?
• Does your candidate know where he or she is when on a page (breadcrumb trail, page name, link to other pages)?

Your corporate identity

As they browse your career site, do candidates understand who you are and what you can offer them?

What to check:

• Does your career site reflect your colors (logo, graphic charter, visual identity with photos or illustrations, pictograms, etc.)?
• Can candidates easily identify your sector, your mission, your organization?
• Will they find enough practical information on your career site to know what to expect when they join you?

The story you're telling

If basic information about your company is present on your career site, can the candidate identify who you are as an employer?

What to look for:

• Do you offer content that shows your personality as an employer (your story, your promise, your commitments)?
• Have you personified your career site with images of your employees, testimonials, videos of shared moments?

Accessibility

Regardless of their situation or the tool your candidates use to navigate your career site, do they have access to all the information they need?

What to check:

• Does your career site exist in a version designed for smartphones and tablets, or only for computers?
• Can a person with a disability consume the various contents in an adapted way (text size, contrast, page reading, etc.)?
• If I have any questions, can I get answers (either via a FAQ or more innovative options like a chatbot)?

Job Offers

How easy is it for candidates to find the right vacancy by browsing your career site?

What to check:

• Is a button for discovering job offers always accessible from every page of the career site?
• Does the candidate have the option of filtering to find a job offer that suits him or her?
• Are there other innovative options for accessing your job offers? For example, can they upload their CV to your career site to only access offers that match their profile? Or take a quick quiz and only get offers that match?
• Can candidates find all the essential information about a job offer on your career site (job location, salary, benefits, etc.)?
• Are your job offers designed to make them attractive (bulleted list, images, videos, animations, etc.)?

The application process

You can lose out on many candidates during the application process. Is it quick and easy to apply from your career site?

What to check:

• How many clicks does it take your candidate to access the application form? (Beyond 3 clicks, it becomes too long and complex).
• Are the form's questions optimized to ask only for essential information and avoid lengthy forms? (Beyond 5 or 6 fields, it becomes too long and complex).
• Can candidates apply in just 1 click by uploading their CV?
• When they apply, do they know exactly what's going to happen after they've submitted their application (next steps, response times, etc.)?

Good to know: you can also calculate the average time spent by a candidate to apply on your career site.

Personalization

If your candidate has a certain level of experience, a certain profession and/or certain skills, will he or she experience an identical career path to another candidate with a totally different profile?

What to look for:

• Do you give your candidate the opportunity to say who they are and what they're looking for when they become a visitor to your career site?
• Do you offer different content according to your candidate's profile (job offers, videos, testimonials, photos, etc.)?
• Do you personalize application forms according to the position?

Content freshness

Are you taking care to update your employer brand content on a regular basis?

What to check:

• Do you have dated content on your career site (videos, testimonials, key figures, number of employees, etc.) that is more than 2 years old?
• Are your company and organizational details up to date (team organization, management team, partnerships, etc.)?
• Are there any pages with old logos, slogans, promises, etc.?
• Have all job offers that have already been filled been removed from your career site?

Home page

On its own, it covers almost all the other criteria on the list. Have you taken care to build it the right way?

What to look for:

• Does it immediately identify your value as an employer?
• Does it provide key information about your company?
• Does it provide easy access to other pages (job offers, about us, our professions, etc.)?
• Is it possible to apply directly from this page?

Diagnosing your competitors' career sites: the right idea

So, you've diagnosed your career site? This is already an essential first step in determining whether you can improve it, or whether it might be appropriate to completely redesign it.

However, it's also a good idea to complement this work with several small audits of your competitors' career sites. After all, it's often these competitors that candidates will compare you to. The same goes for your career site. You can test the different paths: finding a job offer, applying for a job, identifying the company's promise, etc.

You'll see what works well and what doesn't on these other sites, so that you don't repeat the same mistakes, or consider drawing inspiration from best practices.

Good to know: you can also visit the career sites of other companies, neither competitors nor partners. A good way to open up your imagination and find tips for improving your career site.

Diagnosis of the tool used to create and administer your career site

Obviously, the diagnosis of your career site as described in this article is based on your candidates' experience of navigating it. But as a recruiter, the way you administer your career site is essential.

So here are the 6 main questions to ask yourself about the quality of your career site administration:

1. Does the technology you use allow you to easily modify the content of your career site without having to ask an agency to do it?
2. Can you modify pages beyond the content (adding or deleting text blocks, videos, etc.) without paying an external partner for these actions?
3. Can you add/delete pages within your career site without having to ask an external company to do so?
4. Can you track the performance of your career site and its various areas to identify positive and less positive results and improve the candidate experience?
5. Can you control the rights and accesses of the various members of your team?
6. Are you guided by the administration interface to write and integrate your content so that it can be indexed by search engines like Google?

👉 Our Career site CMS can help you to build the site you need: request a demo