In the current climate, you can understand that many people are currently unemployed. These people vary from fresh new graduates, to laid off experienced professionals, to potential go getters from school. However, having more potential future employees around doesn’t change the fact that companies still want the best candidates.

In this day and age of the rising influence of social media and online recruitment, it is understandable that these people’s application process of choice is online. However, one observation that they have made again and again, which seems to be a very important contributor to whether they apply for a job or not, is the quality of the company’s careers website. A couple of my friends suggested that I have a look and perhaps write a post about it.

From looking around myself, I am sometimes amazed at how put off I am by badly designed application pages or slow loading, completely different looking vacancy pages. I can understand how little things like clashing fonts can be enough to put a candidate off applying and this has really brought home to me the importance of candidate experience.

With this in mind, I am going to write a series of posts which outline some factors that affect a candidate’s experience when navigating around a careers page. A positive candidate experience can make the difference between a fantastic candidate applying or giving up and going elsewhere.

This week, I’m going to look at branding.

Branding

There is nothing more frustrating for a jobseeker when they click on a careers page and a new tab opens up, which stays blank for five minutes while it loads and when the new window eventually shows itself, it looks nothing like the company home page you have just come from. The layout is sloppy, the company name looks like it’s been slung in as an afterthought and the fonts are completely different from the pretty complimenting company colours you have just been looking at. At this point, I shut the tab and go elsewhere.

Even if the careers page is outsourced and designed/run by another company, simply making sure the company employment brand is still prominent on the careers site can really make the difference – the bounce rate on a poorly branded careers site can be significantly reduced merely by making sure that little things like layout and font colours and styles are the same as your home page. I’m sure if people tried navigating from their home page to their careers page themselves, they could not fail to notice what’s wrong and see how off putting an unattractive, badly branded page is. Sometimes even if the careers home page is beautifully done, companies don’t make the effort for the vacancies or job searching page. It seems madness to me that though companies have done all the hard work of attracting the candidate from their home page, they then undermine all that focus by completing losing your employment brand. A lot of companies seem to completely ignore their vacancies or application form pages but surely this is just as important as the careers front page as you want your candidate to stay on the site and apply for a job.

A lovely example of company branding is Virgin Trains. After attracting the candidates, they keep their employment brand strong throughout the process and there is no noticeable difference between any of the pages as you navigate through.

Phew! Next week, I’ll be looking at application forms.