Employer Branding and Your Career Site

Your career site is one of the most important tools for showcasing your employer brand and selling candidates on why your organization is the best fit for them. Of course, it is home to your job postings, too, but it can be so much more. And should be.

Five things your career page should do to promote employer branding is:

1. Reflect a sense of the work environment, what kind of employer you are.
2. Detail why someone would want to work for you.
3. Showcase your employees, what kind of people work there.
4. Tell the employees’ stories: why they choose to work for you.
5. Target the kind of candidates you want at your organization.

Since the release of the August BLS report of unemployment dipping to 5.1%, we’re at the lowest rate since 2008. That has sent the job growth rate skyrocketing but also means people are more willing to leave their jobs (about 2.1%, according to the BLS) for something else or something better (84% – Glassdoor); and employers are starting to notice.

Given that 75% of job seekers consider employer brand in their job search, it’s more important than ever to enhance your career site to get the most out of your employer brand.

Your career site is where the candidate experience starts, and quite possibly, ends. So your employer brand must be at the top of your priorities here.

Below are five best practices we’ve learned from more than a decade of experience that has the most impact on your employer brand.

1. Be a Candidate-First Recruiter.

First and foremost your career site should focus on the candidate perspective. By taking a candidate-centric approach to recruiting from your career site – and that means going through the process of finding and applying for a job, joining your talent community, and signing up for any other features you offer – you can see where exactly the obstacles are that get between a job seeker and finishing your application.

Then you can take the correct actions to remove those barriers and make a more complete and satisfying experience.

This will help elevate your employer brand above those competitors with a less than appealing candidate experience, which will win you the talent battle.

2. Use Story Telling.

Part of creating a successful employer brand is to showcase what makes you an employer of choice. That requires all of the things I listed above necessary to promote your brand.

Provide all the information about your company that will entice a candidate into starting an application. That could be benefits, continuing education, scheduling – all of the basic company culture policies.

Have a dynamic section on the page that pulls stories from blog posts about your employees, have images with employee quotes of why they love working for you, and have images of the workplace with employees hanging out and enjoying themselves.

Pull out all the stops to make your brand shine through no matter what industry you are in. Make sure it doesn’t contradict your brand, but really push the envelope.

3. Make Your Job Search Easy to Find.

The point of your career site it to point candidates to your jobs. You want that particular call-to-action to be easy to find.

Everything else is secondary to getting job seekers in front of your jobs.

If your story telling does its job of pumping up candidates about working for you, you want them to be able to start a job search without questioning how once they decide to work for you.

Have your job search right on the main page. Above the fold. Right in plain sight. Don’t hide it in a dropdown, or bury it in a second page of information.

For every click beyond two that it takes to find your jobs, you lose a potential candidate.

Get them to your jobs within three clicks. This provides for an exceptional candidate experience and will boost your employer brand.

4. Optimize Your Career Site for Search Engines.

Candidates will most likely find several of your jobs through search engines like Google and Bing. But they will find them residing on sites like Indeed.com or CareerBuilder, or one of the hundred other job boards.

The problem with these job aggregators is that your jobs are listed among your competitors’. There’s also no employer branding to set you apart and nothing personal whatsoever to make you or your jobs stand out.

It also causes you to lose valuable data that your career site provides to help you turn candidates into applicants.

If your career site is optimized for search, using some basic on-page SEO, you will find your career site in direct competition with those aggregators and ahead of your competition that hasn’t optimized.

Cutting out the middle man, so to speak, gets job seekers in front of your jobs faster. And that is the name of the game.

5. Monitor Your Employer Brand.

Your brand will always be there. It’s an integral part of your organization that is always evolving. It needs to be nurtured and coddled.

If you want to make sure your brand continues to represent you as an employer of choice over your competition, you need to monitor workforce perceptions and adapt accordingly to keep things in alignment with your goals.

Employee satisfaction surveys and exit interviews are just some of the tools that can help provide insight into employee perceptions.

Results in the surveys and interviews can be used to brand your career site and further enhance the candidate experience for all future talent.