Does your career site turn off potential candidates?
12 May 2009 8:17am
Corporate career sites should be customised to their target audience and manage candidates' job expectations, according to technology and HR expert Gerry Crispin.
Too often, they fail to engage candidates in ways that influence their career decisions and only very rarely do they let candidates know what to expect during the recruitment process, he says.
Crispin told last week's Australasian Talent Conference that career sites should:
be customised to your target audience - know who you want to hire and tailor your content and design to those people. To engage people, they should recognise "people like me";
cross-link to other platforms - have a Facebook page, for example, that scrolls your hot jobs;
demonstrate a sense of urgency - have a chat room where potential candidates can ask live questions;
omit static information and diagrams of 'career ladders' - "it gives the wrong message";
offer a user guide - "If you're interested in doing this, go here, or if you just want more information about us, go here";
increase the transparency of the application process - offer "clear data about how you hire people and what the process is". Explain how frequently you have jobs open and what they are;
detail your community involvement - "what are you dealing with in terms of sustainability? People make decisions based on that";
manage job expectations - "ask key questions of employees that get deep into core values of your company, such as how they excel in terms of performance, and how they innovate in terms of products", and post videos of their answers. The messages on the site must be aligned with the reality or people won't stay;
tie in self assessments - more employers are doing this, but the next step is to share the data with applicants. "Both the organisation and [the applicant] should know whether [they] should go forward; and
respect candidates - "acknowledge every action". Disclose what comes next in the process; promise to protect applicants' data; offer them status updates and explain why they weren't selected.
"Most companies are not here yet," Crispin says, "but you see pieces of it being built in the most competitive organisations".
