How to Make a Career Page Stand Out on Your Website
Charlette has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance and 2 years of partnering with HR leaders on freelance projects. She uses this extensive experience to answer your questions about payroll.
Jennifer Hartman is an HR Specialist and staff writer for Fit Small Business, with over 15 years of experience in accounting, payroll, and human resources.
This article is part of a larger series on Hiring.
The best career page is a fully featured page with images, links, and information on company culture that helps your business stand out so you can attract top talent. The career page should list what job opportunities are available and inform the job seeker why they should work for your company.
When creating your career page, be sure to provide all necessary information—without cluttering the page. The following guidelines will assist you in creating the best career page.
Your career page should be easy to navigate and make applying for your open positions simple.
1. Make It Easy to Find
If a job seeker can’t find your career page, they can’t apply for your open positions. A link to the career page should be on your homepage and in the footer of your website. It’s best not to hide it in a drop-down menu or sidebar. Job seekers should be able to access your career page with one click. Also, give it a logical page name like www.yourcompany.com/careers or www.yourcompany.com/jobs.
2. Use an Eye-catching Design
Career pages can include a lot of information without getting cluttered. Include white space, keep the design light, and let pictures carry the tone and information. Avoid crowding a page with too many words or long paragraphs, and use photos and video for a dynamic career page that is interesting and appeals on several levels.
The career page should show genuine employees, actual offices, and real events. It is not recommended that you use stock photos on your career page. Follow your company’s established branding as much as possible so the page looks like a continuation of your own website, even if it’s on a different site.
3. Ensure Your Career Page Is Easy to Navigate
A career page that is easy to navigate means potential candidates can easily find the information they need to make a career decision. Follow these rules for a clean and concise career page:
- Set the tone immediately. The first item on your page should tell the candidate at a glance what your company is like and why they should apply. This usually includes an image, caption, and branding. Captions may be an invitation, a mission statement, or the primary value of working for your company.
- Provide a clear job title—and include the location and whether or not you’ll accept remote work. If you have a large number of job listings, consider creating a searchable database that can handle a search by title, career field, qualifications, and locations.
- Make use of subheadings and groupings, and use jump links to get to jobs if you put them at the bottom of the page.
- Links to other pages that explain a section in detail can make your career page cleaner and easier to navigate. However, always include a link back to the jobs page.
- Use lists such as “Top 5 Reasons to Join our Team” or “What We Believe In”—rather than long explanations or company descriptions out of the employee handbook.
4. Share Company Culture, Purpose, Mission & Your Awesome Team
Be sure you explain on your career page why you’re a great place to work. Try to be specific to your company—benefits, recent company successes, special events, or group activities can help attract the best matches. It may be tempting to follow the latest trends when showing your company culture, but showing your true nature will draw the right candidates for you.
Tell your company’s story—its mission, objectives, and purpose. Here are some tips as you think about how you want to tell your story:
- Sell yourself to the job seeker—as much as they will be selling themselves to you. Most job hunters say company culture is important to them. Show it off.
- Include some candid photos of company events or people working together in a way that exemplifies the best of your culture.
- Feature your team. If you have a small team, this lets a candidate get to know future co-workers virtually.
- List or post images of awards, especially those related to work culture or employee satisfaction.
- Consider an FAQs section. It can cover some of the extra company information and address common questions your HR staff receives from interested job seekers.
When talking about your company, be sure to keep your career page clean of any extra advertising that may be on the rest of the website. This is not the place to ask them to sign up for a newsletter, purchase your products, or view ads.
5. Optimize Your Career Page for Online Searches
Use keywords in your job listings that a job seeker would use in a search, even if the actual job title is different. Adding keywords specific to the industry (fintech product manager or holistic health products manager) will attract the right candidates as opposed to simply using product manager.
6. Discuss the Hiring Process
Include a simple summary of how to apply and another about what happens next. Explain in detail if the job seeker will fill out an application or be required to submit their resume and cover letter. Will they be asked to take online skills tests? Do you schedule team interviews? Include this on the career page, or add it at the end of the application. This simple step can save your hiring manager a lot of time when you begin the process to hire a new employee.
7. Make It Simple & Easy for Passive Job Seekers to Express Interest
In addition to making your jobs easy to find and apply to, consider adding an option to email a friend. This can significantly increase the number of applications you receive. For candidates who aren’t immediately interested in a current opening, offer a job alert registration. This lets you collect emails for future vacancies and to notify job seekers about new job openings.
You can also add your company’s LinkedIn, Indeed, or ZipRecruiter career page to your website for easy applying. These links will take job seekers directly to an external job board where they can apply for your positions.
8. Provide an Email
Candidates often have questions. By providing a specific email where they can ask questions or apply to your open positions, you will get a larger pool of possible candidates.
9. Simplify Applications
Ideally, your candidates should be able to apply in three clicks: one to get to the career page, one to see the job description, and one to fill out the application or submit a resume.
Also, make sure you write your job description in a tone that reflects your company culture. Every job description should contain the following elements:
- Job details
- Salary/compensation
- Benefits
- Basic company information
- Why someone should work there
- Company mission/values/vision
10. Update Your Career Page Routinely
Set reminders or automation to update your career page. Job seekers may get frustrated if the listings direct them to positions that are no longer open. Also, keep company information up-to-date by adding new awards, changing out photos, and listing new events or people.
Examples of Dynamic Career Pages
The best career page informs the job seeker in an easy, clean, and creative fashion. Also, keep in mind that many people are “passive job seekers,” meaning they are actively employed and only casually looking to see what is out there for alternative employment options. Your career page should appeal to this group of people as well as those actively seeking employment.
Below are three examples of career pages that both entertain and inform.
Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants is a restaurant chain with a simple but powerful career page. While it uses subpages heavily, it nonetheless gets props for its clean design that shows you more than tells you about the company.
At first glance, the hero image fills the screen, and it’s great for three reasons: 1) It immediately gives you a feel for the kind of restaurants they run; 2) it uses three words (and alliteration) to give the purpose immediately; and 3) the jobs section is above the fold. As a bonus, its website has a banner about the effect of COVID-19 on hiring, provides a job alert, and supplies a place to ask questions or send resumes.
As you scroll down the page, it uses photos and short descriptions to share company ideals and opportunities by team, with links to jobs that apply to each team. It also uses bright, simple icons for searching for jobs by location and features a video about working at Lettuce.
ZURB is a digital product design company with a distinctive voice, which it portrays fabulously on its career page. The company is serious about its mission of helping people. It also takes time to explain a little about the hiring process and reassure you that it makes quick hiring decisions.
Yes, there’s a cow in the corner of the page. Why? Click on it and find out! It’s quirky fun and fits with the tone it is trying to portray. It carries this through the entire page, with comments like, “Light speed is so 1987” and “Insert internet high-five here” and jokes about world domination. Candidates will feel right at home or be put off immediately, which weeds out bad fits.
Clif Bar & Company is a family- and employee-owned company that creates energy bars under a number of healthy, active-living-based brands. Its culture, pay, benefits, holistic wellness programs, and dedication to employees’ career growth create a unique and meaningful workplace that employees value and want to help grow.
Clif’s career page captures you right away with a look at its office space. It also gives you easy access to the company’s five key aspirations, food values, and career opportunities. Although this is generally frowned upon, it shares some of its brands that you can click directly into.
Bottom Line
Well-designed career pages can help you attract and land the right candidate. They do a good job not only listing positions and facilitating applications but also representing the company culture, setting candidate expectations, and encouraging ideal candidates to apply now or in the future. It’s worth the investment of time and effort to create an entertaining and informative career page.
By adding a career page to your website, you can show up on search engines, attract casual job seekers, and provide the information serious job hunters need so they can decide if they really want to work for you. Job board sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter are popular; however, they are limited to job descriptions and applications.
