How to Build Your Company’s Career Page

November 1, 2013 at 7:07 AM by Rob Stevenson

Talented candidates will arrive at your career page for a number of reasons. Perhaps your API was recently featured in Programmable Web, they saw your ad on LinkedIn, or typed your address directly into the toolbar precisely for the purpose of perusing your career page. The goal of your site must be to attract and sustain all of these onlookers, regardless of how they landed there.

Your career page should entice and inform candidates while also being easily navigable. You want the personality of your company to shine, so strive to present a unique, exciting glimpse into employee life. Yet personality and flair can’t overshadow clarity. Describing tasks for a position may not seem as compelling as bragging about how awesome your culture is, but if you need a C++ programmer specifically or if the developer visiting your page wants to utilize more JavaScript frameworks, mentioning these specificities will attract the proper candidates more so than a funny quote might. But an abundance of content about culture and role might crowd your site, frustrating and deterring great talent. The most successful career sites, then, strike a balance between: flair, descriptiveness and navigability.

Here are examples of how companies from 5-person startups to tech giants balance spunk, descriptiveness and an easily traversable site:

Palantir

palantir

Palantir is an extraordinarily successful company with almost a thousand employees who revolutionize data, primarily for the government and finance industries. They dedicate entirely separate pages to life at Palantir, engineer profiles and a blog about their culture. Conveniently, the “open positions” section appears at the bottom of the page, so a user knows that clicking that link will lead to purely job postings. However, while quirky and unique, titles like “Palantir Cycle Engineer” or “Civil Liberties Engineer” don’t inherently denote the core function of the roles. Once clicked, some descriptions clearly present the position’s requirements, while others remain somewhat vague. Jobs can be easily filtered by team, location, and type to narrow down search results.

Microsoft

microsoft

Microsoft faces the challenge of indexing an extremely high volume of open positions. Company culture seems to take a backseat during the job filtering process, because displaying the vast amount the opportunities neatly is a daunting task. However, the resulting output appears daunting to the user as well, with thick, verbose job descriptions spanning the entirety of the page, row by row. Upon selecting a job, though, the description features exciting words like “fantastic,” along with exclamation points and a detailed outline of the job requirements and expected tasks. Proof of this happy yet professional culture can still be found a few clicks away.

Apple

apple

Apple neatly navigates prospects through the components of their site. They kindly inquire whether or not a user is ready to start her search before directing her away from a slightly sparse explanation of life at Apple and toward openings. The layout of the job search page echoes the simple elegance of an Apple product, with the descriptions fading in and out to the right of the list of jobs as the user opens and closes each one. The user can filter by a variety of parameters, with the results updating on-click. Because of the clean layout and the emphasis on filtering (the filtering component takes up half of the page), the volume of jobs seems less daunting and the site more usable.

Birchbox

birchbox
Birchbox disrupts the cosmetics and ecommerce industry by sending users awell-priced, monthly package of goodies. The career page advertises a warm, happy culture with a team video, stresses engineering with both a “life @ Birchbox” and a “tech @ Birchbox” section. It displays the “job openings” link on the left hand column with the list just one click away. The job details are descriptive, expandable and collapsible, the caveat being a lack of job filters.

LocalOn

Localon
LocalOn is a website and marketing platform for small businesses and one of the 10 hottest startups on AngelList. While there is at least a “Job Openings” section of the homepage, it merely indicates that LocalOn is looking for “talented engineers” and “UI/UX designers,” instructing those interested to email. It makes no mention of type of language or team culture other than profiling the team members. It seems clear that their focus is not on hiring, but if you are a small startup (LocalOn has 6 employees) who is actively hiring, a little more on role and culture can only help.

Mattermark

mattermark
Mattermark, another top 10 AngelList startup, similarly neglects to outline any open positions. Prompting the job seeker to email them for his next career step suggests a slightly greater awareness of potential employees, though. Like other intriguing startups of this small size, no mention of their technology stack or anticipated positions appears.

Dropbox

dropbox

Dropbox showcases both culture and well-categorized job availabilities on their career page. Their company vibe comes across in the description of benefits and perks as well as the creative doodle at the top of the page. The engineering job descriptions excellently balance the high-level product challenges the engineers face with the specific technologies used. Site usability, descriptiveness and persona merge wonderfully.

A trend in this small sample seems to emerge: the startups with employee sizes ranging in the hundreds oftentimes fared better than those in the thousands or tens. The large corporations don’t describe culture and listings within the same page because of volume of listings, while the AngelList startups might not know enough about what career openings they need. Yet the effects on the site-visitors are still the same: the smaller startups seem unconcerned or as though they aren’t hiring and the larger companies (in some cases) seem like no fun.

If you’re reading this and are at a smaller startup, you care about recruitment. Take the time to muster up whatever you can regarding potential openings at your startup and document the technologies you’re currently using, even if they may change. This paints a clearer picture for talented job seekers and shows you care. If you recruit for a huge enterprise, follow Apple’s lead: use site layout as a way to let your brand permeate through the page. JavaScript makes for less page refreshes and easier navigability. Lastly, when in doubt and if you happen to be in that fortunate middle range, just do what Dropbox does! 

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