Career Sites that Sell

Career Sites that Sell:
4 Ways You Can Win More Applicants

Career Sites that Sell: 4 Ways You Can Win More Applicants
Introduction 3
The Power of Branding 4
Does your brand do enough? 4
Translating your brand to your career site 5
Let them Apply Anywhere 6
Don’t Forget Mobile! 6
Tips for mobile career site success 7
Strut Your Stuff: The What, The Why & The Who 8
Set your voice with images and tone 9
Get personal and share your values 10
Are you for real? 11
Strategies for hard-to-fill positions 12
Write strong copy 13
Be engaging 13
Get to the point 14
Be Nice To Your Applicants 15
Keep it simple 15
Go extra sleek 16
Don’t lose people 16
Not everyone is ready to apply 17
Socialize your jobs 18
Help candidates be successful 19
Next Steps: Conversion & Metrics 20
Conclusion: Keep Optimizing Your Career Site 22
About the career sites 22
Contents

Career pages are among the most highly trafficked pages on a
corporate website. Visitors to these pages arrive due to interest
in the company or via job advertising, Internet searches, word of
mouth, referrals, recruiters, and any other recruiting channels.
Some arrive with a purposeful goal (applying for a new job), while
others are just window-shopping for a better opportunity.
The enduring tag line for the U.S. Navy recruiting campaign
struck a resonant chord with many when it first debuted—and
still does today. That’s because prospective employees want
more than just a paycheck and benefits; they want a work
experience that fits their values and aspirations. By the same
token, you want visitors who arrive at your career site to feel
welcomed and understood. You want them to want to apply.
Unfortunately, the timeframe you have to capture their attention
is a very small window. You have to make every second count.
This eBook, the third in our Insight4theEnterprise series, is
geared toward helping you produce a more compelling career
site—one that paints an inspiring picture of your open jobs, your
company, and the people who work there. With examples from
numerous successful businesses, we’ll identify four critical ways
in which you can better capture the interest of targeted talent
and convert that interest into applications:
1. Use branding. Are you making the best use of this secret
weapon?
2. Strut your stuff. Are you showing candidates the real people
and culture of your company?
3. Write strong descriptions. Is your copy motivating and
attractive?
4. Be applicant-friendly. Are you asking applicants to jump
through hoops?
We’ll also discuss how you can use specific analytics to promote
the ongoing optimization of your career site—and continue to
attract top talent for years to come.
Introduction

How to Choose Your Applicant Tracking System Page 4
Career pages often get shortchanged during the company site design process.
We’ve all seen the beautiful corporate website that hits a wall at the careers
section, getting stuck with generic imagery, indifferent copy, and clunky job
listings.
Is your career section a victim of neglect?
When creating a career site, the first and most essential aspect to consider is
your brand. It is your company’s most powerful recruiting asset. After all, it’s the
brand that you are trying to grow by hiring more employees. And when visitors
look at your company’s career site, you want them to understand that this is the
message and umbrella under which they may be working. If your brand is not
fully and engagingly incorporated into your career site, you are missing a huge
opportunity.
Does your brand do enough?
You want your prospects to understand your brand message and be excited
about building that brand by working for your company. An effective brand
should do the following:
Deliver A Message Be Credible Connect On An Emotional Level Motivate the Prospect Create Loyalty
When creating a career site, the first and
most essential aspect to consider is your
brand. It is your company’s most powerful
recruiting asset.
The Power of Branding
Think about your brand’s unique selling
proposition or what sets your products
or services apart from competitors.
Ask yourself:
• What is the promise to our
customers on which we want our
employees to deliver?
• What drives our company?
• What do current employees focus
on when building campaigns and
creating an emotion around our
company offerings?

Translating your brand to your career site
After you’ve identified the key elements of your brand that you want to convey to prospects,
consider how you can apply them on your career pages. The following examples offer some insight.
Zynga
On the website of this social games
developer, the transition between
corporate website and career site
is seamless. Fun abounds. Open
positions and job description details fit
in smoothly with the overall structure
and theme of the website.
Rue La La
Rue La La carries its magazine-like
style onto its career pages, giving it a
fresh and fashionable look that easily
conveys the heart of the company.
Match.com
Match.com’s career site provides a unique take on their
brand and utilizes its message to attract and engage
prospective employees. The product is online dating, but
the brand is love. The Match.com career page highlights that
brand in a playful, but truthful, manner. On this page, you
can see that Match.com wants their prospects to both love
their work and understand that employees are working to
help people fall in love.

Don’t Forget Mobile!
Everyone’s talking about mobile these days, but it is really necessary for your
career site? Absolutely. Here’s why:
• Career sites not built for mobile won’t display correctly. If you’ve ever
tried to look at a web page and been forced to turn your phone, resize, and
scroll repeatedly in order to view it, you know how annoying it is when a site
isn’t designed to be responsive. Don’t annoy people.
• Sometimes, they won’t load. Non-responsive sites can take longer to load
on mobile devices because they aren’t designed to be lean. Unfortunately,
many mobile users (30%) will abandon a site after 6-10 seconds if it hasn’t
loaded—and that’s being generous. 19% of mobile users will only give a
mobile site a five-second max load time1
.
• Often, they don’t even work. Let’s not forget that certain tools, file types,
and software components won’t function on mobile platforms no matter how
much time you give them. They just aren’t compatible.
• And forget trying to apply. No one is going to even bother attempting to
complete an online job application process from a phone if that process
wasn’t designed for a mobile device. They are, however, going to expect you
to provide that mobile process. In fact, 27% of millennial job seekers expect to
able to apply for jobs on their mobile devices, and that number is only going
up2
.
Whatever you decide, remember this:
1 http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
2 http://web.jobvite.com/rs/jobvite/images/2014%20Job%20Seeker%20Survey.pdf
Let them Apply Anywhere
Without an intentionally designed
and functional mobile career site and
application process—and a staggering 80%
of businesses today don’t have either—you
risk alienating, frustrating, and deterring
potentially high-quality prospects3
.
3 http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2014/02/
mobile-recruiting-statistics-infographic

Tips for mobile career site success:
• Be accessible to everyone by ensuring full compatibility with both Android
and iOS devices. You know Apple products don’t play Flash video, so don’t
use it for mobile.
• Don’t forget about your employment brand! Be sure that your mobile career
site provides a seamless, branded experience for users that reinforces
the look and messaging of your other sites. This will help instill candidate
confidence and loyalty.
Tips for a solid mobile application process:
• Keep your application content simple and tailored to the mobile experience.
As one TalentHQ editor put it, “Mobile users want a snack, not a 7-course
meal.”1
• Minimize form length and the number of clicks required—and that doesn’t
just mean whittling down your word count. Make use of things that are
specific to mobile devices, like cameras and social networking apps. Jobvite
offers a mobile career site solution that enables users to upload resume
photos or connect to LinkedIn profiles or Dropbox accounts via their mobile
apps, so users don’t need to access offline documents to complete an
application. With 38% of candidates stating they couldn’t apply via mobile
device because they don’t have a resume stored there, this could open up
tremendous advantages2
.
• Remember it’s not an all or nothing game. While some candidates will be
ready to apply from their phones or tablets, others might not be—and that’s
okay. You can still accommodate their needs and capture their interest right
from a mobile device. Jobvite offers options that allow mobile prospects to
opt into your talent pool from wherever they are, so they stay updated on
new opportunities as they arise.
1 http://www.talenthq.com/2013/09/20-mobile-recruiting-insights/
2 http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2014/02/mobile-recruiting-statistics-infographic

Strut Your Stuff:
The What, The Why & The Who
It’s one thing to talk about what your company represents—innovation, free
lunches, active lifestyle—but it’s another to show it through imagery and tone.
For example, there’s no mistaking that you’re working for a company that
emphasizes athletic culture when you look at Adidas. However, this may not
be so clear for other companies.
Before prospects hit the apply button, they need to be engaged in a vision
of your company, what it’s like to work there, what daily life is like, who they
will be working with, and what goals they’ll be working toward. What you say
and how you say it will shape each candidate’s experience and will give these
prospects the insight required to apply and pursue the opportunity.
One of the most important things your career site can accomplish is the
visualization of life—not just work—at your company.

Set your voice with images and tone
Don’t assume that visitors to your career site know all about
your company or who works there. Photos, illustrations and
videos can shape the story about your company’s culture, work
atmosphere and the opportunity offered. If you don’t have a
big budget for photo and video shoots, don’t worry. Companies
frequently use snapshots and videos captured by employees at
company events or around the office. The informal nature of the
images contributes to the insider view feeling. Take a look at how
Shutterfly makes that work.
The tone of your copy should work with the graphics to tell a
story. Zappos, for example, offers visitors a real sense of the
playful, social, and hard-working environment the company has.
Culture is the headline on the Zappos career site, and visitors
have plenty of opportunities to explore blogs, videos, and other
social media channels to understand the dynamic of the office.

Get personal and share your values
In addition to your brand and unique selling proposition, candidates want to understand
what makes your story so relevant to them.
Your career site can do more than
simply list jobs; it can share your story,
your mission, and the reason why it’s a
great place to work. Jive does a great
job at all three.
Consider this: What about your
company would make someone
want to work there? Zappos
demonstrates an environment
that’s “fun and a little weird,”
but makes the point that this
environment is about more
than a free lunch and fun times.
Zappos is a family with its own
set of core values.
Other companies, despite having fun products, have
a more serious demeanor to their company story.
Etsy, an e-commerce website that allows artists and
consumers worldwide to buy and sell crafts, clearly
states its vision “to build a new economy and present
a better choice: to buy, sell and live handmade.”
Their career site includes a video that conveys a level
of emotion toward crafts as well as key company
accomplishments.

Are you for real?
Rest assured that, before they apply, candidates will certainly consider the people with whom they will be spending 40+ hours a week.
They will want to know if they’ll fit in and what working with a team at your company will feel like.
Always be authentic. You know there are people behind the corporate machine, so pull back the curtain and show candidates who
they really are. Putting employees on your career site gives your talent brand a face—multiple ones, in fact.
Spotify’s career site incorporates
the product and company culture by
showcasing current employees and
linking to their favorite song on Spotify.
Redfin achieves authenticity by
offering visitors a photo series
highlighting the top 12 reasons to
work for Redfin. The clean format
allows people to browse through
the accomplishments and faces
of the company and quickly learn
more about the company culture.
Trustwave takes a similar
approach. The popular cybercrime-
fighting company offers real
pictures of the many faces of
its employees along with the
company’s values and identity.
“Always be authentic.”

Strategies for hard-to-fill positions
Companies who compete to fill certain types of jobs or hire a large volume in key functional areas often focus parts of the career site
on those jobs. Blogs that are specific to a functional area or job type are a meaningful way to help candidates learn more about what
it’s like to work in that area of the company. You can create specific sections of your career site to market these positions, using blogs,
employee profiles, video interviews with employees, and key points of pride.
Jive Software is a prime example.
The company uses one page to tell
engineering prospects about locations,
values and open jobs.

Write strong copy
Now that you’ve taken the time to properly brand your site, share your culture,
and feature employee life, you need to motivate people to apply. That’s where
persuasive and powerful copy can play a huge role. Why? Because many site
visitors may arrive at a job description page without seeing any of your beautiful
career site branding, imagery and messaging. The words you use can go a long
way toward converting prospects into applicants.
Be engaging
The best-performing career sites feature engaging job descriptions that reflect
the company’s brand, culture and environment. In other words, don’t post
impossibly long laundry lists of qualifications and requirements, and don’t bog
down your descriptions with a lot of administrative boilerplate text. No one wants
to read that. Remember: A boring job description conveys a boring job.
Also remember that you are trying to attract the best candidates for the job.
Think about who those people are. What do you need to say in order to get them
excited about the opportunity? More importantly, how do you need to say it? Use
a voice that speaks to your target audience. For some companies, this means
incorporating humor, freshness, or whimsy. For others, it means offering a tone
of pure professionalism. Obviously, it will depend on the key positions available
and the company’s brand.
Remember:
A boring job description
conveys a boring job.

Get to the point
You spend a lot of time, money, and brain power on driving traffic to
your career site. But when those people land on your job descriptions,
you have the opportunity to convert traffic to applicants. Keep the end
goal in mind. You want quality conversions, not just high volumes of
traffic. Don’t get so caught up in crafting witty copy that you forget to
be realistic and direct about what you need. Do a little market research
to help position the job in an appealing yet direct way. Interview people
with similar job roles or ask the hiring manager, “What are the best
parts of this job, and what skills are essential?” Circulate descriptions
to people in the department and test which ones are most effective.
Would your coworkers apply?
Tivo does a great job of using engaging copy on the front of its career
site while remaining concise and purposeful in its requisitions.
Meetup uses a conversational tone to clearly explain the job and
responsibilities; this is far from a dry-as-toast job requisition.

Be Nice To Your Applicants
Keep it simple
Your interview process can still be as rigorous as needed;
however, keep in mind that you are not trying to intimidate
visitors. It’s a cost/benefit analysis. Extra screening questions on
your forms make it easier to review applicants, but may dissuade
highly qualified prospects from applying. You want them to apply
and to be excited about their application, not irritated because of
the number of required fields.
Zappos uses a simple two-page application process. Applicants
fill out their contact information, cover letter, resume and relevant
samples on the first page; and wrap it up on the second page with
some additional relevant information. It only takes a few minutes
to answer the job-related questions that help recruiters decipher
which candidates fit the company’s needs.
The last thing a prospect wants to do is go through a tedious, multi-step process in order to apply for an exciting job.
The most qualified and in-demand people will be the least motivated to jump through hoops on your website, especially if they are
already employed.
Marketing professionals are constantly testing and discovering how to maximize registrants by minimizing the number of fields on
each form. For every field subtracted, the number of applicants will increase. Think about the bare minimum that you need so that
hiring managers and recruiters can make an educated decision on which applicants to contact.

Don’t lose people
Be sure that your rich content and engaging employment
brand find a home in a career site that’s easy to navigate,
so that casual browsers don’t get lost on the way to apply.
SayMedia uses straightforward navigation that remains
visible on the side of each page, detailing exactly which
options are available for visitors. At the bottom of each
page, several options remain that will allow prospects
to instantly see all open positions or learn more about
working with the company.
Go extra sleek
Note HUGE Inc’s application. All that’s required is an
applicant’s first name, last name, email address and
resume. The rest is only nice-to-have information.
Candidates’ phone numbers will be on their resumes, and
if they’re not, candidates have the option to include it.
Four fields, and presto! Application submitted.

Not everyone is ready to apply
Many people who visit your career site are simply
checking out possibilities, or they don’t find a job that
fits right now. But you can use your career site to gain
their interest and then channel it effectively to keep them
engaged.
For example, Match.com gives passive or lurking site
visitors the option to receive future alerts about new
openings on just about every page of its career site.
It’s a welcoming alternative that tells prospects there
are always opportunities down the road to build a
relationship, even if they aren’t ready to take the next
step immediately. This encourages people to connect
with the company in the way that’s right for them.
SayMedia also provides a job alert sign up, as well as
the ability to submit a general application, in an array of
clearly outlined Job Seeker Tools.

Socialize your jobs
Social media provides an easy and powerful way for you to build
engagement with prospective applicants. Featuring a blog and links
to corporate social media accounts on the career site gives visitors
a way to stay in touch and find out the latest news about your
company.
Most Jobvite customers, like Groupon, also enable visitors to share
any job with their own networks through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Google Plus, or other networks. Jobvite matching technology can also
suggest people in their networks who may fit the job.
On Match.com, any visitor to the career site can send a Jobvite, a
job invitation, to contacts in their social networks; then recipients
can apply—or forward to their own friends. It’s an easy way to build
awareness for your jobs in the networks of your talent pool.

Help candidates be successful
Your career site should also help candidates who have already applied by providing informative resources.
For example, TiVo provides visitors with a
comprehensive FAQ section featuring detailed
information on everything from the selection process to
the ways in which referrals work.
Match.com offers a similar
section dedicated to walking
applicants through expectations
and preparations for an interview.
Finally, be sure to let candidates check on the status of their applications,
so they always feel connected. SayMedia features a status check in its Job
Seeker Tools, where candidates can log into the system and see where
they are in the process. This conveys to applicants that you take them
seriously, and that real people are working behind the scenes— not just
resume-scanning robots.

Next Steps:
Conversion & Metrics
As the centerpiece of your recruitment marketing campaign, your career site
should fulfill two additional purposes beyond simply providing job description
data.
First, you want to convert interested prospects to applicants, and eventually to
hires. Consider your brand as well as what key factors you want candidates to
visualize. What will be the most important selling point for your company? Is it the
fun and cool corporate culture or the high profile and creative employees?
Once you have a general idea of what type of candidates you want to attract,
you also need data to help you test what works. Where are the best candidates
coming from?
Answering this question does not mean needlessly pestering applicants to fill in
another field on an application. They aren’t always the most reliable source of
data anyway. In fact, according to an ATS Sourcing Data report,1 five out of six job
seekers—or more than 83 percent—incorrectly cite where they found out about a
job when asked in the application process. What does this mean? Companies who
rely on candidates to self-identify their sources are relying on imprecise data to
guide their recruitment marketing programs and budgets.
Instead, think about automatically capturing candidate source data through your
career site. By using unique URLs in your job listings shared on the web or in
social networks, for example, you can gather more precise data and build reports
outlining where your quality candidates come from—so you can see where
holes exist, which programs are best serving you, and how to better tune your
marketing strategy to capture the right candidates.
“The truth is, many hiring
managers can’t say with
confidence where their talent is
coming from. It is a dirty secret
that’s getting very little attention.”
Peter Weddle, CEO, Weddle’s
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-white-paper-cites-that-ats-sourcing-data-is-over-80-percent-inaccurate-56558172.html

Jobvite makes this effortless by automatically providing unique URLs for all
recruitment marketing and social sharing. Continually monitoring the metrics
of recruitment marketing will help you optimize your programs and the
performance of your career site.
Ask questions like, “If I were to change certain steps in our recruitment
marketing process, where would I make the biggest impact?” Think about what
would make a candidate want to apply for a position at your company. Do the
numbers match up with your theories?
Remember that applicants are people, not just resumes. If you want to retain a
high conversion rate of quality candidates, you will need to put a little love into
your career site.
Tips for applying career site
metrics:
• Which pages are getting the
most traffic? Why?
• What are the bounce
(percentage of visitors who
leave your site after viewing
only one page) and exit
(percentage who leave a
specific page) rates?
For more details on applying
metrics to improve your
recruiting programs, check out
the second eBook from this
series:
“Metrics that Matter:
4 Ways to Prove Your Worth.”

Conclusion:
Keep Optimizing Your Career Site
Ultimately, your career site is a hub for attracting new talent to
your company. Building it takes time, creativity, and effort—and
ensuring its success means calculating and applying metrics to
determine whether you are successfully converting prospects to
applicants and hires.
The examples included here represent just a small sampling
of what you can do with the right platform to support you.
Work with your team to figure out the right tone, images, style,
verbiage, and social tools best suit your company’s brand and
targeted talent pool.
Of course, building a talent pool involves more than just
amplifying your career site. In our final eBook of the series, we’ll
explore what it takes to fill that pool with the most qualified
candidates possible.
About the career sites
The corporate career sites featured in this eBook are from a
selection of Jobvite customers. Each of them has created sites
that speak eloquently to their brands, people and amazing
opportunities. We’re happy to show you their wonderful work.
On these sites, Jobvite powers the job listings, application
process, job alerts, career site analytics and many other
functions – including, of course, the ability to Jobvite your
friends through social networks.
You can easily incorporate these technologies into the Jobvite
recruiting platform or purchase a stand-alone career site that
works with outside ATS applications.

About Jobvite
Jobvite is the only recruiting platform that delivers
real-time recruiting intelligence with innovative
technology for the evolving social web. Leading,
fast-growing companies today use Jobvite’s
social recruiting, sourcing and talent acquisition
solutions to target the right talent and build the
best teams. Jobvite is a complete, Software-asa-
Service (SaaS) platform, which can optimize the
speed, cost-effectiveness and ease of recruiting for
any company. To find out more take a tour of our
product.
CONNECT WITH US
www.jobvite.com
www.facebook.com/jobvite
www.twitter.com/jobvite
www.linkedin.com/company/jobvite
650-376-7200

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