Career seekers are an important corporate website audience
In our Top 20 Corporate Digital Estates report we measured 15 different factors contributing to effective websites. We identified two factors that showed particular strength: user experience and how corporations address their job or career seeker audiences.
In common with the digital transformation of so many aspects of life, experienced professionals and fresh job market entrants use online resources to find job and career opportunities. Much of that activity takes place through LinkedIn and other job search and aggregation websites. These sites let job seekers screen, filter and refine potential opportunities, but they provide little supplementary information about career paths or the corporate culture at specific organisations.
As a result, many job seekers use the career sections of corporate websites to find potential opportunities and better understand a corporation’s wider work and career advancement environment.
At least one third of corporate website traffic goes to careers sections. With visitors anticipating a superior experience – access to more informative content and smoother application workflow – to using LinkedIn or visiting a general job search site.
Moreover, as job seekers actively engage with career-related content, corporations have an ideal opportunity to tell their stories at a time and place that can directly influence potential employees.
Effective careers sections meet audience needs through careful design
Highly effective corporate website careers sections capitalise on sound design and painstaking implementation to address their audiences with relevant content and deliver excellent user experiences. In fact, effective careers sections provide two clear illustrations of the importance of design and implementation.
The first example is that of understanding and addressing different audiences or audience segments. As with all digital projects, overall design needs to be centred on users and their needs. We see this approach reflected in the best executed careers sections, as they clearly distinguish between the needs of new workforce entrants – typically recent graduates – and experienced professionals.
On well-executed careers sections, members of either audience can quickly find content relevant to their career stage. And, that content clearly addresses the different concerns of those distinct audiences: for example, training as opposed to career progression opportunities.
The second example is that of providing clear paths to information or task execution. Corporate website job seekers may start by reviewing general corporate information or they may dive directly into specific job opportunities. For the former, they anticipate encountering differentiated content for their specific needs. For the latter they are looking for effective career finding functionality.
And, delivering effective job search functionality relies on user-centred design practices to ensure as many potential use cases have been uncovered as possible. And, those use cases likely emerged from a discovery exercise repeatedly asking questions with the following formulation: As a [example: plant safety specialist] I need [example: to see jobs related to manufacturing and similar operations] so that I can [example: apply for jobs in relevant locations].
On the best implemented career sites, we see the career finder functionality smoothly tied into back-end HR systems along with clear workflows for submitting and tracking online applications. An approach that provides the best kind of user experience while effectively communicating corporate values.
Who does the best job of serving career seekers?
Here’s how we ranked the top 20 corporate websites for the effectiveness with which they addressed their career seeker audiences:
