Earlier this week, Dr. John Sullivan wrote an article "RIP - Announcing the Death of the Corporate Careers Website".   In this piece, he wrote a piece on why Corporate Career sites are ineffective and may not be worth putting the time and money into with the wealth of social media and job distribution portals that are available today.

I think some of his points were right on including the lack of compelling content on career sites as well as information for non-job seekers.  However, I wouldn't call having a career site useless and still think having a career site that is your recruitment marketing hub for your recruiting strategy is important.

But Dr. John Sullivan is right.  It's not enough any more to just have a webpage with job opportunities on it on your website.  To truly make your Career Site a valuable asset to your recruiting strategy you need to make it more than that.  From interactive content to videos to news and yes jobs, you need to give a candidate to click on multiple pages on your career site by making sure the content is compelling.

Here are several things you can do to make the most out of your Career Site:

Company Content:  You need to provide content that candidates want to see.  Whether it's videos on your company culture, on cool projects employees have been a part of, an employee run blog that highlights why it's great to work for your company or a hub with news about your industry.  Make your career site a place where candidates want to come back to because of the useful and helpful content.

Social Profiles: If your recruiting organization has social profiles make sure to include them in your career site.  First, enable candidates to easily follow these channels.  Second, find ways to significantly include the content from these channels within your career site.

Easy Job Matching:  When a candidate searches for jobs that they are qualified for, it should be easy for them to do so.  Make sure your search process is bringing back significant results and not just sending back junk (i.e. non-applicable positions) to candidates.

Opt-In: Any candidate that comes to your career site has some level of interest in your company and your potential job positions.  For the convenience of the candidate and for your recruiters, make sure that there is a clear way for candidates to opt-in to targeted job updates (via email, RSS, SMS, etc.).  And make sure this is included strategically on each page.

SEO: While I think this aspect of Recruiting gets inflated some, it is important to make your Career Site SEO optimized.  When candidates are searching on "[Your Company] jobs" you want to direct them to your Career Site and content, not a job board.

The goal of your Career Site should be to sell candidates on your company and job positions.  To do this you not only need to provide interactive and compelling content but be helpful in the recruiting process.  Think about the content you would want as a job seeker and provide this valuable content on your Career Site.

For more articles, check out the SmashFly Recruitment Technology Blog.