A career site tailored to the candidate's need

The landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees is highly competitive. Many companies set up their own career site to win the war for talent.

Building a company career site 

At Oak Street we believe that online recruiting has a several advantages: 

• Attracting the right people via a well-working career site is often cheaper than finding them through specialized agencies, headhunters or media ads. 

• With a company career site you can put a spotlight on your company culture and the specific advantages you offer to employees.

• Having your own website also allows to track very precisely how people search for jobs, how they find specific vacancies, when they apply and when they abandon their search. These user insights allow you to adjust your recruitment strategy.

Convinced by the added value of a company jobsite, we decided to combine Oak Street's expertise in online marketing and e-commerce with the expertise of the HR specialists at Elements to offer a global solution for companies that want to have their own recruitement website. What we've noticed is that, even though each company is unique, there are a few common elements that are relevant for a high-performing career site. Here are some tips and tricks!

Turning candidates into leads 

A good career site has to offer the following basic elements:

• a clear overview of all open vacancies

• a search functionality 

• a complete and clear overview of all details related to one specific vacancy

• and a possibility to apply online

However, to make sure potential candidates do actually apply and turn into leads, you need to take it one step further by removing all hurdles. Here are a few examples of how to do that:

• optimise your search by using autocomplete and filters for example

• clear call-to-actions throughout the site

• Dynamic application forms. For jobs that are hard to fill, the application form should be kept short. This way you avoid that valuable candidates do not complete the form because it is too cumbersome or long to fill. For popular jobs on the other hand, you could make a more extensive form. By asking more questions, your recruiters have qualitative information to narrow down the list of candidates to interview more easily.

Match Made in Heaven

Go for personalization! By personalizing your content, you can make sure that a jobseeker quickly finds the right vacancies, sees content that speaks to him/her and leads to an actual application. Here are a few examples:

• Personalized search results & job suggestions. By keeping track of the preferences and search behaviour of the user, you can show the most relevant vacancies in the search results or job suggestion section of your career site.

• Personalised text, images, cases and quotes for every vacancy. The content that speaks to a marketing profile is very different from the content that speaks to a more technical profile for example.

• Personalized distance to the workplace for each vacancy.

Coupled with an ATS

For many companies, it is important to couple their career site with an ATS or Application Tracking System. Examples are SAP SuccessFactors and Bullhorn. Such a system supports companies throughout all steps in the recruitement process and serves as the source for vacancies to be published on the jobsite. 

Considering to build your own career site? Looking for more insights? Don't hesitate to contact us, we are happy to help.