Your Careers Site Is Not What Converts Candidates
45-second read (+2:26 video)
Employer brander’s love their career sites. And to be honest, they’re the only ones.
Your careers site is not what converts candidates. Only those who don’t understand attribution think that it is.
Let’s stop pretending that this page means more to candidates than it does to you. It’s first and foremost a place to find and review available jobs.
At the top of the funnel, candidates don’t care about your brand pillars. They don’t care about your values. And they don’t care about the optics of your “diverse” culture. They scroll past all of that to get to the information they need in order to opt in or out of a conversation.
And if the job information looks interesting, then easy access to a hub of ongoing deep dives, industry insights, and easily accessible recruiter enablement assets is a valuable version 2.0:
Candidate FAQs
Micro branded content: team level podcasts, candidate facing webinars, and “How we do” blog posts and videos
Candidate prep material
Instead of spending your time and money designing the perfect careers site, you should be investing all of your resources into creating awareness in your market.
The page is just a home for everything that you distribute externally. (Read that again.)
Bottom line: If someone lands on your careers site, it’s not because they were searching for it.
“Whatever got them there is the thing that matters.”
If you’re a high-growth startup that hasn’t designed a fancy careers site yet, this is permission to relax and take a step back. Because it doesn’t matter.
Instead, focus on what does matter: creating and distributing content inside the channels where your candidates spend their time.
While the other tech companies blow their budgets defining their “brand” so they can build the slickest careers sites that promote all the right words, you’ll be building trust and creating demand directly with your target audience—and making your recruiters and hiring managers lives so much easier.
A company that’s really good at creating and distributing content with a simple jobs page is more effective than one with a beautiful careers site and no marketing skills.