Every company has a career site. Most career sites are focused on providing great candidate experience with UI / UX, creatives and diverse content pieces. While great design, creative and UI/UX help a career site to get attention, the elements that help convert on a career site are entirely different. They often cant be achieved on a custom built website.

Some of the important elements for a career site to be an active conversion vehicle are

1. Distinguish between user and candidate – From content and journey perspective, it is important to distinguish that there are 3 stages in the job seeker journey. When one first lands on a career site, they are just a user. When they start browsing through job descriptions and start applying, they are converted into a candidate. It is important to recognize this differentiation and present content at various stages that is relevant and nudges one to take next action.
2. User experience does not start on a career site – User experience often starts from a search engine. How many clicks does a user take from search engine results page to taking the action they intended to take. For ex: It is an undesirable user experience if search for “java jobs at XYZ” lead to a landing page that asks users to input the search term again. Users often exit the page if they don’t find relevant information immediately.
3. Job discovery – Awareness of a brand and awareness of opportunities in that company are two different things. This is where job discovery becomes an important element of the career site. It is important to make the job search and job discovery an easy process for the user. Faceted search for example will help users to drill down the locations, categories and functions etc in an intuitive way and help them understand the type of jobs they could be fit for.
4. Personalization and job recommendations – In an age with limited attention span (could be less than 8 seconds now), career sites should present relevant content and jobs to the users to convert them as candidates. And this is just not possible for a stand-alone custom-built web site. A platform can achieve this with wider anonymized data. For ex: if a platform recognizes a user with certain affinity to finance jobs, it will be purposeful and impactful to present finance jobs (if the company has them live) than asking them to search.
5. Retargeting – It is a well-known fact that only fraction of users on a career site apply to jobs and part of the those don’t always complete the application process. A career site should enable the capability to retarget to the audience at various stages.

The above is only a partial list of elements for a successful career site. But it is imperative that a career site is not just repository of content, killer UI / UX, but a conversion vehicle requiring AI / ML capabilities and constant learning, improvements and innovation. All this could be delivered only by a platform and seldom by a custom-built career site and highly successful career sites are platforms that actively engage and convert users into candidates.