Have you ever reviewed the content on your careers site through a candidate’s eyes to understand what might improve candidate engagement when a candidate arrives at your careers site? We review the types of content that could make a difference in candidate engagement, positioning your company as an employer of choice.
How often do you post a new vacancy to your careers site in the hope that you’ll attract the candidate/s you are looking for to apply? According to the UK Candidate Attraction Report 2023, Website/Careers site is the top sourcing channel used by 97% of in-house recruiters.
Have you ever reviewed the content on your careers site through a candidate’s eyes to understand what might improve candidate engagement when a candidate arrives at your careers site? In this insight, we review the types of content that could make a difference in candidate engagement, positioning your company as an employer of choice.
We know from the UK Candidate Attraction Report 2023 that the content on your careers site impacts the quality and quantity of candidates sourced.
The report findings identified those organisations with a ‘Peak Performing Site’ - these are characterised by sites where candidate quality and quantity are consistently rated as ‘high’.
We then analysed the types of content available to candidates on the sites of these peak performers. Finally, we compared it to those organisations who ranked their careers site low for both quantity and quality of candidates.
Before we delve into the types of content, it is worth noting that 97% of respondents post job vacancies on their website or dedicated careers site, and for 9%, this is the ONLY job content they publish.
We found that most careers sites contain limited additional content over and above Job Vacancies - and much of it is designed around the company and the early stages of the talent attraction funnel.
But peak performing careers sites are far more likely to contain ‘candidate-centric’ content that is useful at every funnel stage...
The effectiveness of your website/careers site and how it works to attract a better quality and quantity of candidates can be determined by several factors.
We know that size matters; the larger the company, the better careers sites fare.
Companies that regularly create and update their careers site content report better results than those whose content remains static.
4 elements that will make your careers site a peak performing careers site
Peak performing careers sites are:
1. 5x more likely to have Job Search & Apply content
2. 4x more likely to have Career Pathways and Department/Team landing pages
3. 3x more likely to have Employee Videos, Interview Hints & Tips, How the Recruitment Process Works, FAQs & Learning & Development information
4. 2x more likely to have Employee Stories, Chatbot, Rewards & Benefits than poor-performing career sites.
Finding the optimal content for careers sites
By testing the various combinations of careers site content, we were able to identify the optimal content - the content which is used on the best-performing careers sites, shown in the image.
The clear connecting feature of these content types is that they are designed to be valuable and useful for the candidate throughout their evaluation process, from first enticing them to apply, right through the application and assessment stages.
In general, we report a moderate increase in the use of many of the candidate-centric content types, for example:
Career Pathways 29% (22%, 2021)
How the Recruitment Process Works 34% (30%, 2021)
Hopefully, this trend will continue.
Get your free copy of the report
The full 80-page report is now available for download free of charge - access here. You can read the full section on Careers/websites, pages 28-33. This is just one of the many sections of the report that provides excellent insight into the challenges and ways of working across sectors, providing a valuable guide to candidate attraction in the UK.
