How to make the “Careers” section of your website more effective?

A website is your identity on the internet. It is not only an interface between you and your customers but also an interactive platform between your prospective employees and partners. “Careers” section is a very important part of our website but how many of us use that effectively? Here we give you 11 ways to improve the visibility and usability of your company’s career section. It has been found that certain trends that set the successful career sections apart from the rest – simple features and functions that all companies can implement without losing their brand integrity. When your career section is set up well, it reduces your administrative duties, helps maintain your recruitment message and delivers jobseekers.

1. Label the section “Careers” and include it on your homepage

The best thing to do for improving the traffic to your career section is to make everything blatantly obvious. Use the word “Careers” instead of phrases like “Your future with us”! The fewer clicks it takes to get to your jobs, the faster jobseekers and search engines will find it. And the most obvious spot to put it is on your home page (some put it in About Us or Contact us)! Jobseekers get frustrated when they have to guess its location, and search engines sometimes just give up.

2. Visitor should be able to skim all openings and get to any specific job in 2 clicks

Many career sections require a form to be filled out before jobs can be viewed. Though jobseekers have little difficulty filling out simple forms, most search engines have no idea how
to complete your form to get to your jobs. This is why a “Browse All Jobs” link is very important – so search engines can find your jobs! Additionally, by providing a direct link to the listing of all job openings, you improve the PageRank of your site and all your jobs.

3. All job openings should have their own unique pages and be bookmarkable

Lumping all the jobs together on the same page gives the appearance that the listed positions are less important. There is an excellent reason why major job boards give each job its own page – and you should too! Approximately 20% of jobseekers have friends that are also job hunting – and they share relevant jobs with each other. Providing simple tools so your visitors can quickly tell friends and family about a career with your company gives you a free advertising tool. So even when the person on your site is not a good fit for your company, giving them a “Tell A Friend” feature helps you find someone who is.

4. Your jobs should be in HTML – not PDF nor DOC

HTML is the universal language of webpages. All browsers can read it and search engines are built to search it. To make your listings as accessible as possible, they need to be provided in HTML – not a file that needs to be downloaded to be viewed and thus making things easier for the non-technical elite! Granted, it may take some time, either yours or your IT staff’s to convert it from your company-native format to HTML, but that is a price worth paying for greater visibility and more applicants.

5. To view your openings, registration should not be required

If you are forcing people to register in order to view your jobs, you may be turning away passive jobseekers and blocking search engines. Also, when you force people to register, you are probably preventing people from bookmarking your jobs. Passive jobseekers like lurking around without being seen. They are sometimes afraid that registering on a site will alert their current employer and create turmoil in their current job. With 60% of people actively employed considering themselves passive jobseekers, this is not a market segment you should alienate.

6. Each listing should tie directly into your applicant tracking system

Going back to the PageRank concept, the more pages that exist on your website, the greater visibility it will have. Unfortunately, this is all the SEO benefit that you would gain by having an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) tied into your jobs. There are tremendous benefits to the jobseeker when your jobs are all connected to a method for receiving applications. Jobseekers find career sections offering online applications to be more trustworthy. They are also more willing to send an application,
seeing the company as more likely to be listing real jobs that are actively open as opposed to jobs without application tie-ins, where the jobseeker wonders if the company is still actively
seeking applicants.

7. Each webpage should be print-friendly

Make sure that it is easy to print out your job openings. There are huge benefits to this, both to jobseekers and to search engines. When your website prints out cleanly, and does not get hopped up nor distorted, it is an excellent sign that your code is well written and search engine friendly. Search engines love big blocks of text and hate when it is choppy and poorly aligned. Your printed page will give good insight into how the search engine sees your website. Jobseekers frequently print off the listings that they’re interested in, and bring them along to interviews. By putting a bit of one-time effort into the print-version of your website, you can ensure that jobseekers are able to cleanly see all the information on your opening in a very reader-friendly fashion.

8. The order of the job’s information

Order the information in a way that is logical for the jobseeker. Put the title first and largest, the description second, the requirements third, and the application information fourth. Also, using the job’s title in the title tag makes it easier for the jobseeker to track the job.

9. Frames are your worst enemy

Search engines give up when it comes to frames and typically just ignore the site. They simply cannot send a visitor to your site in the way you meant them to see it, with the navigation pane and the content pane. The search engine would probably just send the visitor to the content pane and since they lose your navigation, they will probably leave your site altogether. Simply copy the URL from one of your jobs and paste it into the form at http://framecheck.linkup.com. Within seconds, our system will tell you whether your website uses frames. If you are not, consider this tip done! By getting rid of those frames, the search engines and jobseekers will certainly thank you.

10. All job information should be in text, not graphics

Sometimes websites use a graphic of text rather than the actual text. Search engines and screen readers cannot understand words in a picture. Say you want a pretty font to list the job title, by using a graphic to represent that title instead of text, you greatly diminish the likelihood of a search engine finding that position and sharing it with potential jobseekers.

11. Use Popular terms

By using popular terms, you’ll have phrases that people will be looking for and understand. Despite “Junior Associate Of Contact Relations” sounding quite glamorous, people understand “Executive Assistant” and are far more likely to search for that title. This is where the marketing stuff comes into play! For an incredibly complete list of commonly used titles, go to www.occupationalinfo.org

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