In an era where first impressions happen online, your career website isn’t just a tool—it’s the front door to your employer brand.

Yet despite this, many companies are unknowingly turning away top talent. Outdated designs, clunky navigation, slow mobile performance, and overly complex application forms create friction that causes qualified candidates to drop off—often before they even hit “Apply.”

The good news? You can fix that. A high-performing career website—one that aligns with your employer brand, simplifies the path to application, and engages talent from their first click—is not just a nice-to-have. It’s a critical investment that drives better candidate experiences, stronger brand perception, and ultimately, faster and more effective hiring.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a career website that doesn’t just attract visitors—it delivers real results.

The Essential Elements of a Successful Career Website

Why Building a Career Website is Worth the Investment

A high-performing career website isn’t just a recruitment nice-to-have—it’s a strategic asset that delivers measurable results across your hiring funnel. From boosting visibility to accelerating time-to-hire, here’s why investing in a modern, optimized career site pays off.

Increased Visibility and Traffic

Your career website is a magnet for job seekers—if it’s built right. With proper SEO, mobile optimization, and structured job data (for improved Google for Jobs performance), your listings become significantly easier to find.

• According to CareerBuilder, 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. If your jobs aren’t visible there, you’re missing a huge portion of potential applicants.
• Optimized career sites see up to 35% more organic traffic, lowering reliance on paid job ads and increasing ROI.

Bottom line: A well-optimized site ensures the right candidates find you before they ever hit a job board.

Stronger Employer Branding

Your career site is often the first branded touchpoint candidates encounter. If it feels outdated, off-brand, or confusing, it sets the wrong tone—and you may lose qualified applicants before the first click.

• 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying, and 50% won’t apply to companies with a poor online presence, even if they’re interested in the role (LinkedIn Talent Solutions).
• A branded career site featuring employee stories, company values, and a consistent tone can increase engagement and improve perception as an employer of choice.

Improved Candidate Experience

Candidate expectations have evolved. They want a fast, transparent, and user-friendly application process, and they want to feel a connection to your organization before they even apply.

• 60% of job seekers report a negative candidate experience due to confusing sites or overly complex application flows (Glassdoor).
• On the flip side, companies that invest in candidate experience report up to a 70% improvement in application completion rates (IBM Smarter Workforce Institute).

Reduced Time-to-Hire

An optimized website doesn’t just benefit job seekers—it also streamlines your internal hiring process.

• Clear job organization, robust search tools, and fast-loading application pages mean qualified candidates find roles faster and apply sooner.
• Companies with modernized career sites report a 15–30% decrease in time-to-fill, thanks to higher candidate volume and fewer application drop-offs (SmashFly).

The result: Faster recruiting cycles, lower overhead, and fewer open roles dragging down team performance.

Must-Have Features of a High-Converting Career Website

Personalized Candidate Journeys

Each person visiting your site should feel like it is speaking directly to them. Do your research and develop personas to represent the perfect candidate for each of your priority job categories. Create tailored experiences based on the candidate’s role, industry, or career level that help guide them to their ideal position.

Dynamic Job Recommendations

Once you have someone on your site, keep them from hitting the back button and looking at the competition’s open posts by recommending the most relevant roles. This will increase engagement and application rates.

SEO-Optimized Job Postings

If the search engines can’t index your site, they can’t display your jobs. If the job boards are scraping your ATS, they’ll drive candidates right past all of the work you’re putting into a fantastic career site.

Job posting properly tagged with structures data and making sure that the job details pages on your career site are the source of truth for the job boards are the bast way to increase traffic to your site.

Integrated Talent Communities

If you have someone on your site that can’t find the right fit, make sure to capture their information for a later date when you do have their dream job available.

How to Build a Career Website: A Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Start with Employer Brand Alignment

Ensure that your career website matches the visual identity, voice, and values of your overall employer brand. Use colors, fonts, and imagery that also connect with your corporate identity and brand guidelines.

Your career site is the place job seekers can get a feel for your corporate culture, virtually meet their new team members, learn about benefits and the hiring process and search open jobs — all in one place.

Step 2: Choose the Right Platform

Research the options for building your website, whether through recruitment marketing platforms like HireControl, in-house development, or using third-party services.

Step 3: Implement Advanced Search Capabilities

If a candidate can’t find the right job, your site can’t convert. Search features that people expect to find on your site include predictive text, map-based search, as well as filtering based on bonus, relocation, visas and other criteria.

Step 4: Focus on SEO Optimization

Ensure your career website is optimized for search engines (particularly Google for Jobs) to increase organic traffic. This goes beyond traditional keyword-based strategies. Semantic markup of structured data ensures search engines will properly catalog your job listings. A blog provides valuable info to passive candidates while also boosting your site’s ranking.

Step 5: Integrate with Existing ATS

Avoid create a tedious new workflow by using the job requisition data that already exists in your applicant tracking system. Work with the IT team developing your site to ensure a proper feed of live requisitions is always available on your career site.

Step 6: Test and Optimize for Mobile

Make sure the website is responsive and provides a great user experience across all devices, particularly mobile. We know that the majority of visitors will come to your site from a mobile device. Make sure the process isn’t tedious on those handheld devices.

One big thing to think about: how will a candidate attach a resumé or CV from the cell phone. Try the process yourself to see how it works.

How Career Websites Drive ROI in Talent Acquisition

Higher Application Rates

A well-designed career site that tells a great brand story with an easy application process can lead to more completed applications.

Reduced Cost-Per-Hire

An optimized career website makes it easier for candidates to find your job listings organically, which means fewer resources spent on job advertising.

Enhanced Employer Brand Perception

A professional career website helps position your company as an employer of choice, attracting higher-quality candidates.

Conclusion: Build a Career Website That Works for You

Ultimately, the best career site for you is the one that helps you meet your recruitment goals. Feel free to book a demo with HireControl to learn how we can help you build a high-performing career site that enhances the candidate experience and improves recruitment outcomes.

You’ve invested in employer branding. You’ve built a great team. You’re promoting jobs across channels. But if your best candidates aren’t applying—or worse, aren’t even engaging—there may be a silent culprit undermining your recruitment efforts: your career site.

One study shows that 40% abandon applications due to poor career site user experience. Sites that are outdated, slow, difficult to navigate, or poorly optimized for mobile cause high-intent candidates to bounce before ever submitting an application.

And here’s the kicker: in most cases, you’ll never know it happened.

Job seekers behave more like discerning consumers than passive applicants. If your site doesn’t deliver a seamless, engaging experience, they’ll simply move on to your competitors. That’s why career site optimization is no longer optional—it’s foundational.

In this post, we’ll explore how your career site might be quietly pushing top candidates away, what signs to look for, and how smart optimization strategies—from SEO to mobile responsiveness to frictionless apply flows—can help you re-engage talent, reduce time-to-hire, and strengthen your employer brand.

How Will I Know If My Career Site Is the Problem?

If you’re asking yourself, “Is it my job descriptions? My media strategy? Or is something broken in the experience?”—you’re not alone. The truth is your career site could be creating friction in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Here are four key red flags that signal it’s time to take a closer look:

1. High Traffic, Low Applications? That’s a Conversion Problem.

If candidates are visiting your site but not applying, it’s often a sign that something’s off. Whether it’s a confusing layout, hard-to-find job listings, or a tedious application process, usability issues quietly tank conversion rates. Great candidates don’t have the time—or patience—to struggle through a clunky experience. They’ll simply move on.

Pro tip: Compare your site traffic to your completed applications. A large gap = friction somewhere in the process.

2. Poor Mobile Experience = Lost Candidates

The Appcast 2023 Benchmark Report shows that over 60% of job seekers now apply via mobile devices, and that number keeps growing. If your site isn’t optimized for smartphones—meaning fast load times, touch-friendly buttons, and easy job search—you’re losing qualified talent the second they hit your homepage.

Not sure how your site performs? Pull up your careers page on your phone and try applying to a job in under a minute. If it feels frustrating, it is—especially for the talent you want most.

3. Slow Load Times or Clunky Navigation Are Deal-Breakers

Candidates expect modern, responsive websites. If your pages take too long to load, or if the path to job listings is buried under unnecessary clicks, they’ll leave before engaging. Remember, every second counts—pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load can lose up to 40% of users (Google Web.dev Report, 2022).

Clean navigation, logical job categories, and clear calls to action are non-negotiables for today’s digital-native job seekers.

4. You’re Not Showing Up on Google for Jobs

73% of job seekers start their job search on Google (CareerArc Future of Recruiting Study). If your jobs aren’t appearing on Google for Jobs, Indeed, or other aggregators, you’re missing massive exposure. Many career sites aren’t structured to be crawlable or indexed properly—especially older platforms or sites not using structured data.

Optimizing your job listings with SEO best practices and schema markup is essential for discoverability. If you’re invisible in search, you’re invisible to passive and active talent alike.

Bottom line: If any of these issues sound familiar, your site may be working against you more than you think. But the good news? Every one of these problems is fixable—and the payoff can be huge.

Ready to Fix It? Here’s How to Start Optimizing Your Career Site

Now that you know the signs your career site may be underperforming, the next step is action. The good news? You may not need a full rebuild to start seeing results. With the right approach—and the right tools—you can turn your site from a silent dealbreaker into a top-performing recruitment engine.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Audit Your Current Site

Before making changes, assess where you are now. A simple audit can uncover the hidden barriers that are costing you talent. Here’s a quick Career Site Self-Audit Checklist:

• Page Load Speed – Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check load times.
• Mobile Experience – Open your site on a smartphone and apply to a job. Was it intuitive?
• Application Funnel – Track drop-off points. Where are candidates abandoning the process?
• SEO Visibility – Google some of your job titles. Are your listings showing in Google for Jobs?
• Navigation and UX – Is your search bar easy to find? Can candidates filter by location or role?

2. Measure and Improve

Optimization isn’t a one-and-done project. To get lasting results, you need to track performance and refine regularly.

Metrics to monitor:

• Traffic-to-apply conversion rate
• Mobile vs. desktop engagement
• Top exit pages and drop-off points
• Which jobs are getting the most search visibility

Use tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to get actionable insights.

3. Invest in Recruitment Software That Enhances the Candidate Experience

Once you know what needs improvement, it’s time to equip your team with tools that can solve real UX and visibility challenges. If you don’t have web developers at hand to make updates to your current site, consider a platform like HireControl that uses data from your existing ATS and acts as a front-end experience layer, offering:

• Persona-led candidate journeys tailored to job seekers’ personas, backgrounds and intent.
• Optimize data from your ATS to ensure exposure on search engines and job boards
• Custom-branding that match your employer brand—not your ATS’s default template.
• Dynamic on-demand landing pages for campaigns and events.
• 10-second easy apply that minimize friction while maximizing conversion.

Why it matters: Tools like HireControl don’t just make your site prettier—they make it perform better. The result? Higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and a pipeline full of right-fit candidates.

Final Tip: Start Small, Improve Fast

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Prioritize quick wins—like simplifying your apply process or making your job listings indexable on search engines—and build momentum from there.

Candidates expect more than a one-size-fits-all experience that doesn’t reflect their unique needs and motivations during the hiring process. And if they do get what feels like a generic candidate journey, they just might move on. This can be especially true for top talent who know their worth. Persona-led candidate journeys can play an essential part in helping your organization stand out and help build stronger connections with the people you hope to hire.

What Are Persona-Led Candidate Journeys?

A persona-led candidate journey is a strategic approach to recruitment that moves beyond demographics and a job description to tap into what truly drives candidates for a specific role or job type—their motivations, challenges and career aspirations.

The power of persona-led journeys lies in their ability to reinforce your employee value proposition (EVP) to ensure that every touchpoint—whether a job description, career site, social media content or recruiter conversation—feels personal, relevant and compelling to the right candidate.

Key Benefits of Persona-Led Candidate Journeys

1. Personalized Candidate Experience: Customizing content, job recommendations and messaging according to a candidate’s persona enriches the recruitment experience, making it more relevant and engaging to convert the candidate into your pipeline.
2. Increased Candidate Engagement: By presenting information and opportunities that align with a candidate’s career aspirations and stage in the hiring funnel, persona-led journeys foster deeper engagement with your organization.
3. Improved Job Matches: Personalized job recommendations ensure that candidates encounter roles that more closely match their skills, experience and career goals for a more positive—and less frustrating— candidate experience.
4. Strengthened Employer Brand: A recruitment process that acknowledges and addresses the individual needs of candidates strengthens the employer brand, showcasing the company as one that values and understands its applicants.

How to Craft Candidate Personas

Collect Insights and Information: Start the process by gathering data. This step involves delving into the backgrounds of past successful hires, engaging with current employees through surveys or interviews, and keeping an eye on prevailing industry trends. Aim to collect diverse details, such as demographic information, job preferences, motivations and aspirations related to their careers.

Create Segments: Organize your potential candidates into clear segments that share common attributes. These segments will serve as the groundwork for developing your candidate personas. Typical segments might encompass categories, such as recent college graduates, or be role-based, like a nurse specializing in critical care.

Highlight Challenges: Pinpoint the specific challenges and obstacles faced by candidates within each segment as they navigate their job search or seek career progression. These challenges could range from achieving a satisfactory work-life balance to meeting salary expectations to finding opportunities for career advancement.

Understand Aspirations and Drivers: Get to the heart of what propels candidates forward in each segment. Is it the pursuit of a rewarding career, the desire for swift professional growth, or the search for an employer whose values resonate with their own? Clarify their underlying motivations and objectives.

Build Rich Personas: Using the insights from your research and segmentation, construct comprehensive candidate personas. Assign each persona a name and a visual identity to bring them to life. Flesh out each persona with critical details, including their job title, educational background, career ambitions, key challenges, where they go for news and entertainment, and what motivates them. This step transforms abstract data into tangible, relatable profiles that can guide your recruitment strategy.

Implementing Persona-Led Candidate Journeys on Your Career Website

Implementing persona-led candidate journeys on your career site involves identifying key candidate personas, mapping out their typical journey from job discovery to application to conversion into a talent community, and pinpointing where personalization can have the most impact. Think about:

• Improving ways to streamline navigation by creating easy pathways by persona.
• Removing friction by tailoring the apply process to different experience levels and job types. Develop and deliver content that caters to each persona’s needs, whether through personalized job recommendations, company insights, testimonials or storytelling,
• Adding rich content to job postings, such as a day in the life video, and authentic job expectations to encourage self-selection from candidates who might not be the right fit.

Utilizing analytics to track interactions across the journey will help you continuously optimize your persona-led journeys too.

The ROI of Persona-Led Candidate Journeys

In a recent Candidate Experience Report by Career Plug, 36% of job seekers said they have declined an offer because of a negative experience while 66% of candidates said that a positive experience influenced their decision to accept an offer. Adopting persona-led journeys yields significant improvements in recruitment outcomes, including higher application completion rates, improved candidate quality, reduced time-to-hire and stronger employer branding.

If you are reading this blog post, you probably understand the pivotal role that a seamless application process plays in attracting and retaining top talent. Today, we’ll delve into the importance of simplifying the application process, particularly on mobile devices, and explore strategies to enhance the experience for both candidates and your recruitment team.

Mobile Matters

In an era where mobile devices dominate, it’s essential to acknowledge that most job seekers conduct their searches on handheld devices. Have you ever attempted to navigate your applicant tracking system (ATS) on a mobile device? If so, you’ve likely experienced the challenges that an intricate process can pose. Recognizing the prevalence of mobile job searches (60–70% of visitors to most sites AB&C maintains), you must ensure that your application process is optimized for mobile users. A user-friendly interface that is quick and easy to use on a handheld device is not just a convenience but a necessity in attracting a diverse range of candidates.

Alternative Calls to Action

For roles that are harder to fill and could benefit from a more human touch to the application process, consider implementing alternative calls to action. Provide a quick and straightforward method for candidates to express their interest. This initial step is not a substitute for the comprehensive application process but serves as a strategic starting point. Empower your recruitment team to take the lead in guiding candidates through the application process. By offering personalized assistance, recruiters can address concerns, provide clarity, and ensure that candidates feel supported at every stage. For positions with too many candidates, leave the full ATS application process in place.

Efficiency in Recruitment

Simplifying the application process is not about shortcuts but about efficiency. A streamlined process not only enhances the candidate experience but also enables our recruiters to focus on doing what they do best: ensuring that the right candidates progress through the hiring pipeline smoothly. Minimize the number of fields in your forms. Only ask for the bare minimum info your team will need for effective follow-up.

A Candidate-centric Approach

Ultimately, simplifying the application process is a testament to your commitment to job seekers. It’s about respecting their time, acknowledging their preferences, and fostering a positive impression of your organization from the very first interaction. By simplifying the application process, you not only enhance the candidate experience but also position yourselves as an employer of choice.

In the increasingly competitive and dynamic realm of talent acquisition, the job description stands as the initial handshake between your organization and potential candidates. Beyond listing responsibilities and qualifications, it serves as a powerful tool to entice, engage, and connect with prospective talent. Let’s dive into seven key elements to writing effective job descriptions that go beyond the ordinary and resonate with candidates on a deeper level.

1. Create a Vision for Candidates: Job descriptions often fall into the trap of simply listing requirements and responsibilities. Instead, envision the job description as an invitation to a potential career journey. Go beyond the basics and paint a vivid and authentic picture of the role, the team, and the impact it has on the organization. Communicate the organization’s employment culture and back it up with proof points such as employee stories, awards you’ve won, or unique ways the organization provides for team members.
2. Speak the Candidate’s Language: Avoid industry jargon and internal language that might be confusing to candidates. Use clear, straightforward language that resonates with your target audience. Imagine you are explaining the role to someone outside your industry. This ensures accessibility and feels more inclusive.
3. Table Stakes: Salary, Benefits, and Hours: While these are essential components, don’t merely treat them as checkmarks. Present them as value propositions. Clearly outline the competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and flexible work hours, emphasizing your commitment to supporting work/life balance. With new laws coming online, accurate salary ranges are becoming mandatory requirements.
4. Go Beyond Incentives: Distinguish your job description by showcasing additional perks. Highlight how candidates will be able to make a difference, as well as sign-on bonuses, remote or hybrid work opportunities, and any unique quality-of-life offerings. These incentives not only attract attention but also convey a commitment to employee well-being.
5. Embrace Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB): Incorporate DEIB content into your job descriptions. Highlight your organization’s genuine commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. Showcase ongoing initiatives, programs, and support networks that contribute to creating a sense of belonging for every employee.
6. Remote and Hybrid Opportunities: In today’s evolving work landscape, remote and hybrid work options have become expected. Clearly communicate your organization’s stance on these possibilities, providing transparency and flexibility that resonate with the modern workforce.
7. Tell a Story: Go beyond the bullet points. Use storytelling techniques to create an engaging narrative about the role and your company culture. Do you have employee testimonials? Share them so prospective employees can hear from individuals with whom they can relate. Help candidates visualize their place within your organization with video job descriptions that are not overly polished and produced to foster a sense of connection and belonging.

By going beyond the basics, speaking the candidate’s language, and showcasing the unique aspects of your organization, you transform a routine task into a powerful tool for talent attraction and engagement. In a world where talent is sought after, the job description becomes your first chance to stand out, make an impression, and cultivate meaningful connections.

A careers site is vital to a quality candidate experience. As we established in our previous post, Harnessing SEO and SEM to Showcase Your Job Opportunities, most referral sources will push candidates directly to a job description. If that description is coming from your ATS, those candidates will miss any employment brand messaging, benefits info, and hiring events you have added to a careers section on your main site.

Job Description Pages That Convert

Since most candidates will enter through a job description page, it is vital that you put everything they might need right at their fingertips right from the start. How can a single page promote your entire employment value proposition (EVP)? Since there are limitless ways to improve on the standard ATS job description, here are some things AB&C includes on our clients’ job description pages in our HireControl career sites:

• A well-crafted job description that helps the candidate see themselves working for your organization (more on this in our next blog post).
• Easy Apply. Since we know that most candidates search on mobile devices and that a full application through the ATS is cumbersome on mobile (to say the least), give them an alternative, quick and easy way to express their interest.
• Promote relevant hiring events. Rather than hoping candidates will discover an event in their field, promote it right here where you know they will see it. But it must be relevant—don’t clutter the page with content that doesn’t directly relate to the opportunity.
• Contact info and a headshot for the recruiter who owns this requisition. While it may not be ideal for every organization, candidates want to know their application will be reviewed by a real person, not some soulless algorithm.
• Similar opportunities. Now you have them on your site. If the job they landed on wasn’t their dream job, you want to keep them from clicking the back button to another site that also includes your competition. Feeding a list of other options and providing an on-page search helps entice them to begin exploring the rest of your careers site.
• What sets you apart? Bring your EVP to life. Include videos or blogs of employee stories. Highlight sign-on bonuses, remote/hybrid opportunities, awards, DEIB initiatives, unique benefits, and anything else that might get them to hit that Apply button.

Campaign Landing Pages

Maximize the ROI of your online marketing campaigns by targeting job categories instead of specific positions. In this case, we know that everyone who clicks one of your ads will definitely wind up here. This allows you to develop more content related to the EVP for your organization and how it relates specifically to someone interested in the job category targeted by the campaign. The types of content outlined on the job details page section make great thought starters for what should appear here.

Other campaigns to consider for landing pages could include relocation efforts, expansion/new buildings, military outreach, and many more.

This landing page should have a general contact form to express interest to a recruiter, as well as a feed of all relevant jobs from the ATS, so the candidate can explore to find which opportunity is right for them.

Other Benefits of an Information-Rich Careers Site

• Manage events. Add events to your site with details and registration info. Promote them on specific relevant job detail pages.
• Working Here/Meet the Team. Create a section of the site where candidates can see some of their future coworkers and get a feel for your corporate culture.
• Benefits. From medical coverage to work/life balance, let them know what you have beyond basic compensation that makes your offering special.
• Quality of life. Especially if you are recruiting from other geographies, let candidates know what your area(s) have to offer.
• Talent community. Be sure to capture candidates that don’t see the right job for them on your current list.
• Application process. Job seekers want to know what to expect next after their application is submitted.

As much as we all wish candidates would come to your main consumer-facing website to learn about your employment value proposition, compensation, benefits, hiring events, and application process before looking through your available positions and selecting the most suitable one, statistics indicate that 70% start with Google followed by Indeed and the other job boards.

Knowing that, we can develop a strategy to make the most of that experience by ensuring your jobs show up in those results. Your digital strategy should incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) tactics. Here is a primer on both:

SEM

Google/Microsoft Ads

The quickest guaranteed way to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERP) is advertising. While not the least expensive option, it will get your jobs in front of active job searchers immediately. A great tactic is to advertise job categories rather than specific positions. Driving traffic to a well-crafted landing page for a category gives you an opportunity to help candidates see how they can fit into your organization while improving your quality score.

The search engines want to be sure they are delivering what the individual really wants. They weigh your ad’s relevance, clickthrough rate, and landing page experience to create a quality score. Higher scores lead to lower costs and better ad placement. Focus on relevance and user experience to boost your quality score.

Even if you are paying for placement, they want to be sure your ad drives people to relevant content. For example, if your ad is for red shoes, it had better link to a page about red shoes that engages people to prove relevance. We’ll dig deeper into creating compelling landing pages in the next article of this series.

SEO

Google/Bing Jobs

Google and Bing have both developed convenient job tools that allow job seekers to find an up-to-the-minute list of jobs right in the search engine results page. These tools serve relevant results for each individual from your sites like your careers site and job boards. Ranking in these job tools relies on an algorithm similar to the rest of their search results. Following are two tactics that will help ensure your jobs show in these sections of the SERPs.

The Importance of Structured Data

Schema.org has defined a format called “structured data” for job listings that aids search engines in comprehending and displaying employment-related content more effectively. This structure contains relevant details about the job, such as the title, employer, location, kind of work, pay scale, and application materials. Using structured data to ensure that your jobs comply with schema.org standards is a part of any SEO strategy that will improve the visibility and depth of job ads in search results.

Feeds to Job Boards

Despite all your best SEO efforts, some of the job boards’ authority scores might be too high for your careers site to overcome. That’s the reason part two of an omnichannel SEO strategy is to take control of how your jobs appear on job boards. By default, job aggregators such as Indeed scrape your ATS, which sounds great at first blush. But this creates a less-than-ideal candidate experience. When a job seeker who finds your job on one of the job boards and clicks through to apply on a generic job description within your ATS, they miss out on almost everything you have to say about your organization that might convince them to choose you over the competition.

How AB&C solves this is a bit involved, but well worth the effort. It begins by setting up a careers website that serves a feed of live jobs from your ATS. From there, you’ll want to make sure your careers site becomes the official source of truth for any job board showing your listings.

You’ll need to reach out to them to set up a properly formatted feed of your jobs in the format they require. Some may simply start scraping content from your careers site instead of the ATS once they know it is now the official source of truth. However, to have the most control over the candidate pathway, you’ll want to provide them with a feed that incorporates the structured data and any other content that helps separate you from other choices a candidate might be considering.

Bonus points for your efforts to control the outbound feed to job boards. When a candidate clicks to apply from a job description, they wind up on a fully optimized job details page on your careers site instead of directly in the ATS.

We will get into full details on how to optimize job details in upcoming blog posts in this series. Sign up now to get an email when our next post about how to make the most of that experience goes live.

While a bad candidate experience might cause to a candidate to quit your hiring process entirely or hurt your employer brand with a negative review on Glassdoor, a great candidate experience can help you turn your top prospects into hires. 

So, what can you do to create a great experience that helps your organization stand out from the competition? Our Redefining Recruitment series will provide answers in the coming weeks through blog posts focused on how to: 

1. Harness SEO to Showcase Your Job Opportunities 

People can’t apply to jobs they can’t find. 70% of all job searches start with Google—150 million of them every month. And Indeed can still boast that it reaches nearly 93% of online active US job seekers. Structured data and properly formatted feeds are the key to helping these sites find and properly identify your content. 

2. Create a Compelling Careers Site 

A careers site is vital to a quality candidate experience. Most referral sources will push prospects directly to a job description. If that description is coming from your ATS, those candidates will miss any employment brand messaging, benefits info, and hiring events you have invested in for your careers site. From delivering the right first impression to content that authentically presents insights candidates seek before they convert to applicants, we’ll outline the must-haves for creating a compelling careers site. 

3. Master the Art of Effective Job Descriptions 

Go beyond the requirements and internal jargon. Help the prospects see themselves in a career with your organization. You can also use the job description as a filter to connect with the talent you want and dissuade those you don’t. Salary, benefits, and hours are table stakes that should be included in all job descriptions. Stand out by highlighting sign-on bonuses, remote/hybrid opportunities, and quality of life and DEIB content and, most of all, differentiating your organization from the competition. 

4. Simplify the Application Process 

Have you tried applying for a job through your ATS? If so, was it on a mobile device? Most job seekers conduct their searches on a handheld device. If your ATS application process is long and involved, consider an alternative call to action where candidates, especially those for your harder-to fill-positions, can express their interest quickly and connect with a recruiter who can take it from there to guide them through the next steps.  

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Think of social media as a piece of the brand engagement puzzle. To be effective, it needs to fit into a strategy aimed at the right audience.

Well, you can — if you don’t mind it ending or taking on an entirely different tone when the next semester starts.

Social media has become the latest stepchild in the world of digital marketing campaigns. At least it has good company. When Quark and Pagemaker came out in the ’90s, everyone was an instant print designer. With the dot-com bubble, everyone’s nephew was a web developer. Digital cameras turned the world into professional photographers. Now, interns can manage social media campaigns. Why not? They spend their whole day on those sites anyway.

It’s easy to think of social communities as the realm of kids hanging out with their friends and boomers sharing cat videos. In reality, the social networks are one piece of what has become the omni-channel. Read full post...

To create a better landing page, follow these 10 steps.

So, you have marketing tactics driving people to your website. Great! The next question most marketers ask is, “How can I make the site work harder for me?”

1. Identify business goals.

Before you can figure out how to make a landing page work harder, ask yourself, “What was the business need behind the campaign?” Lead generation, patient education, engagement? Answering this will help define a call-to-action (CTA) to engage visitors on the landing page. It will also help you find effective ways to measure how well everything is working.Read full post...