That means most candidates are lost as soon as they stumble on one of these sites, Crispin told a pre-conference workshop at ERE Expo on Tuesday.

As you contemplate your own system, check out a few other insights Crispin shared with attendees:

On virtual career fairs:
“I see some pieces to this, but I don’t see it adding value to the candidate experience. If the company doesn’t provide any additional data or value, in the end, it doesn’t add value to your candidate experience,” he says. 

He points out that Phillips has the “most interesting approach” to this, with a series of people willing to talk to you.

On checking your careers site:
“I challenge any company to check their own jobs at least once a month,” he says. Many sites, he says, lose credibility with broken links, outdated job postings, etc.

On internal movement:
More positions are filled with internal employees than any other source, he says. 

“It is kind of fascinating to me,” he admits.

The most important thing is a map on the corporate careers site to show how people move within organizations. Look at source of hire, be transparent, and let people choose to come to you.

“You say you develop employees, but not a single company in the United States publishes internal employee movement. Most won’t even reveal it to their own employees,” says Crispin.

“The only company I know that does it in a transparent way inside their company is Pepsi. Every month they publish how many people were promoted from division to division, level to level, etc. Those figures are then broken down by race and gender,” he says.

On managing job expectations:
“You have to be able to say why you come and why you stay,” he says.

He points to RIM’s site, as well as KPMG’s site.

At KPMG, for example, prospective applicants get deep data in terms of a profile of an individual and why they are there.

“Different value propositions can let you search on profiles of partners. If that person isn’t like me, it’s very simple, and I can navigate it quickly, and that adds a lot of value to me,” he says.

The U.S. Census Bureau recruited 3.7 million applicants and hired 1 million temporary census-takers for the 2000 Census, which was the largest peacetime recruitment of American workers in history; the goal for the 2010 Census is 3.8 million applicants. The 2010 hires (explored in more detail in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) are likely to be a little older and more ethnically diverse than the last, because the population demographics have shifted since 2000 and the bureau maintains a goal of hiring contingent workers that reflect the local community.

Based upon data compiled by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these will be the major demographic shifts from 2000 to 2010 that the bureau must address through its diversity hiring initiatives:

• Between 2000 and 2010 the number of people who are between the ages of 45 and 64 will increase nearly 30%.
• The Hispanic population will grow 34% from 35.6 million to 47.8 million.
• The African-American and Asian populations will outpace the growth of whites.

Census Bureau leaders say there’s no magic bullet for meeting the recruiting numbers and the diversity goals, so recruiters from local census offices will be out in force at churches, community centers, and schools. But given the aging population, the Bureau has also taken steps to tap pools of retirees and a diverse applicant base.

“I requested permission to hire retirees (federal government annuitants) and that rule was changed beginning this calendar year,” says Tyra Dent Smith, chief of the human resources division for The U.S. Census Bureau. “The annuitants will be able to work without any offset to their salaries.”

In addition, Dent Smith applied for other waivers that will allow federal employees to moonlight if they wish to work as part-time census-takers. People receiving federal assistance will also be allowed to work without benefit offsets.

In preparation for the main event, the bureau runs a series of dress rehearsals and test censuses.

• Where are they?
• How do they want to receive information?
• What makes them respond and engage?
• What’s the same and what’s different about the generations?

Carol Mahoney, Yahoo’s VP of talent acquisition, talked about the questions today at an HCI event. For Gen-Xers, Yahoo is focusing more on career sites as well as recruiting events. For younger applicants, the emphasis is on social networking (Twitter is big among Yahoo hiring managers) and a long courting process. “They do not want to just drop in and get their info and go,” she says, of millennials. They want to be courted. It’s more than information. It’s a relationship.”

This courting includes friends and family. In India, Yahoo laid off what Mahoney says was a very small number of people, and many were placed in other roles. But it was “such a huge deal” in India that Yahoo had to explain the layoff to families of wary job candidates.

With generational differences in mind, Yahoo has redone its career site. On the upper left, for example, the quick job search is aimed at Gen X-ers who don’t want to beat around the social-networking bush. In contrast with most career sites, which could put a wild boar to sleep — Yahoo has done it right, actually using the career home page to excite people about working at the company. (Its older versions, Mahoney, who arrived at Yahoo five years ago says, were “appalling.”) You leave the site with the impression that a Yahoo job involves doing something important, something that has an effect on people.

There’s more on generational recruiting from this webinar:

Each month, fewer and fewer people read newspapers and books, and more of us get our information from moving media, including online videos, film, and TV. Why? Because videos require little effort to watch but still provide a powerful message. Written “words” are weak tools for quickly transmitting the energy and the passion that your employees have for their work. A better alternative is pictures, but they too can be limiting.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…then a video must be priceless. Recruiting videos can excite by allowing potential recruits to better “see, feel, and hear” the passion and the excitement at your organization. Videos allow an outsider to “meet” your employees, to see your technology, and even to tour your facilities.

However, for some reason, despite their incredible power, videos are the most underutilized powerful electronic recruiting tool.

Let’s face it, most traditional recruiting tools are waning in power. Brochures are time-consuming to develop, hard to distribute, expensive, and seldom read. Still pictures and narratives posted on corporate websites have value but they seldom stimulate or excite the visitor.

Videos on the Internet are one of the hottest trends in society and especially among the younger generations. With the growth of the Internet and mobile phone technology, videos can be viewed almost anywhere by almost everyone. In fact, 56% of Americans with Internet access have viewed a video or listened to audio online, so it’s important for organizations to get their recruiting message out via recruiting videos.

Benchmark firms like Google have learned how to exploit recruiting videos. For example, Google’s powerful seven minute “an inside look at Google” has been viewed by well over half a million people.

Microsoft has also demonstrated its leadership in leveraging video on its “viewmyworld” site, which portrays the company in a way that many feel is more “honest” than ever before. The U.S. Army has utilized videos in a broader range of applications than any other organization in order to demonstrate that their jobs can be exciting.

Online video has become so pervasive that not to consider it while developing your recruiting strategy would be a serious mistake. Even IBM, long considered a conservative organization, was an early adopter of online video for mobile devices.

Today, more than 200,000 people download IBM podcasts monthly. Octagon Global recruiting showed that videos have a place on TV by placing its recruiting video as an ad in the season finale of the popular TV show Lost.

What is a Recruiting Video?

A recruiting video is a relatively short video that is available for viewing on the Internet. Its primary goal is to excite potential candidates by showing them the compelling features of your firm and jobs.

Recruiting videos can be placed on your corporate careers website, on popular video sites like YouTube, or can be packaged as downloadable podcasts for mobile media devices.

Types of Recruiting and Branding Videos

Most recruiting videos can be categorized into nine basic coverage areas:

• The traditional overview of the company and its products
• A “day in the life” of an employee
• Profiles of individual employees
• “Why I work here” videos covering critical recruiting factors
• Facility tours
• Humorous videos demonstrating that your firm is a “fun place”
• Videos and highlights of company perks and benefits
• Videos of company events
• Videos that demonstrate the firm’s excellent management practices

Ways to Create Recruiting Videos

Hold a contest or competition among employees to create a range of videos. Both Deloitte and Hyatt have utilized contests to encourage their employees to create creative videos. Deloitte called it a “film festival” to give it a little more panache.

The concept is simple. Hold a friendly competition among your employees and between departments on who can produce the most powerful video that depicts the excitement of working at your firm. Having a contest creates a buzz within the firm about your employment brand image, which is exciting by itself. Using employee videos combined with the employee referral program provides every employee with a chance to be involved in recruiting, and because almost every employee has access to an inexpensive video camera, you will likely get high participation rates.

Contests are an effective tool because they allow employees to use their creativity in order to identify and cover exciting factors that those in corporate might never have thought of. In addition, the high number of videos generated gives you more choices of videos and more different approaches to choose from.

Content to Include

When creating recruiting and branding videos, here are some tips on how to make the content of the videos more impactful:

• Focus on well-managed practices. Many videos focus on benefits, but it’s important to realize that top performers care less about benefits than they do about working at a “well-managed” firm. Although demonstrating excellent management practices can be dry, it’s critical that you highlight them if you want to attract innovators and top performers. Management practices to profile include rapid decision-making, two-way communications, challenging opportunities, and great managers.
• Show off your technology. Right after being “well-managed,” top performers and innovators expect to be able to use the latest technology. Show what technology you use; make sure the script describes how your technology is superior to competitor firms.
• Use employee-generated videos. There’s just something about employee-created videos that make the viewer “believe” that the message is coming directly from employees.
• Show unique perks. Google became famous by highlighting its unique perks like free food and in-house washing machines. Be sure and highlight them by having employees utilize them.
• Have a tour. A virtual tour of the facility can show not just the building but the level of excitement that you feel when you visit. Make sure that the “sounds” depict the excitement at your firm.
• Have employee profiles. Everyone wants to work at a place that has “people like me,” so profile a cross-section of your employees. If you’re highly competitive, consider including comments from employees who used to work at competitors highlighting how much better this firm is. Be sure and include their first and last name to show that you’re not afraid of “losing them” to recruiters from other firms that view the video.
• Think global. Demonstrate that your firm is a global player by including videos created by your teams around the world. They should also consider making your videos available in several languages.
• Think diversity. Make sure that your video shows a broad range of diversity including race, gender, age, disability, and nationality (other potentially controversial possibilities include sexual orientation and religion).
• Use college videos. College students are the most frequent viewers of videos, so it’s important that you develop targeted videos for university students.
• Feature events. Include coverage of company events that might interest an outsider. Avoid the corporate annual meeting, but consider including short coverage of celebrations, parties, and awards ceremonies where the company is recognized as being a top place to work.
• Show “real” executives. Provide clips of executives directly involved in day-to-day work activities, and demonstrate when possible that executives at your firm have risen from entry-level jobs to the top.
• Make the industry exciting. If your firm happens to be part of an industry that most consider to be dreary, consider including a separate video that highlights the excitement and the challenge that few outsiders get to see.
• Highlight the region. If your firm’s facility happens to be in an area that many consider to be less than desirable, highlight the exciting things to do and see in your region.
• Involve customers. If your product is available to the masses, include customers praising the impact of your products in your recruiting videos.

Tips on Increasing Viewability and Impact

Some additional tips to help increase the number of video views:

• Paint an “imperfect” picture. Obviously, the goal is to highlight the best features of the firm but you must be careful that your video doesn’t include a 100% perfect message. If you want the company to come across as “real,” acknowledge at least a few things about the firm that are not perfect. You might have to fight with PR on this issue, but any video that looks like an “ad” or political speech won’t get very much traction. Incidentally, if you over-brag, expect ex-employees to comment or even to create counter “mocking” videos.
• Increase its viewing potential. Keep videos short and compelling. The best are between two and three minutes, and seven minutes is about the limit that most will watch. Don’t forget to “pre-test” your videos among your target audience to assess their impact. The very best videos are “passed on” to others because they’re so funny, exciting, or compelling.
• Periodically change your videos. All but the most compelling videos will eventually need to be replaced by newer videos. Either offer the visitor a choice of videos or periodically rotate them to give the visitor reasons to return in the future.
• Track their effectiveness. When possible, provide a “number viewed” calculator so that you can track the number of people who view your videos. You can also add a feature that allows viewers to “rate” your videos. Finally, because the very best videos are powerful enough so that viewers will want to send them to their friends, provide a feature to track the number of links that were forwarded to others.
• Use blogs to support videos. Employee blogs are another powerful tool to make your firm appear “real” to outsiders. Work with bloggers to get them to talk about your videos.
• Share with product videos. Work with product advertising to convince them to include a few short “it’s a great place to work” scenes in their product videos and commercials.
• Search for negative videos. Because employees and others can post videos in a variety of places “on their own” and without permission, periodically search for videos that might hurt your firm’s image. If an employee posted it, you can ask them to revise it or take it down. However, if it’s posted by a non-employee, you need to offer either a counter video or request that the site remove the video.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve ever watched a compelling TV show, documentary, or film, you already realize how powerful videos can be in sending a memorable message. Now that most mobile phones have Internet access and video recording capability, potential recruits have increased opportunities to view compelling videos.

Rather than making video a “one-time” event, develop it as on ongoing powerful channel to communicate with a massive audience that has already adopted video as its preferred channel. Conceiving, producing, editing, and publishing video needs to become a permanent process and a primary strategy in 21st-century recruiting.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

Audit Part One: Assessing the Critical Program Design Elements

When you assess the design of your branding program, the following are critical elements that must be included if your effort is to be successful:

• Program plan. The program has a written plan with milestones, timetables and individual accountabilities.
• Program goals. The program spells out each of its specific measurable goals. These goals must be widely communicated and there must be a specific metric (with a measurable target) to assess whether each program goal is actually met.
• Focus on job acceptance criteria. It’s critical that there be a process for identifying the “job switch criteria” of the candidates you’re trying to attract. Successful programs have a process for matching your firm’s strengths with the requirements of potential applicants. The program should then focus image-building efforts on those targeted factors or brand pillars.
• Excitement. Branding is a sales and bragging effort, so identify and spread several specific WOW’s or features that will measurably excite potential candidates. Branding can’t be successful unless it excites potential candidates to take action (i.e., visit your website or apply for a job).
• Emphasis on “hot” topics. Assess whether your overall campaign sufficiently emphasizes all of the current hot topics including green/sustainability, innovation, emerging technology, global reach and job security.
• Minimize advertising. Recruitment advertising adds value but does not constitute employment branding. If you must “pay” to get your branding message out, it’s just not as credible. A focus on leveraging traditional recruitment advertising is the most common employment branding error. The best employment branding messages are spread virally.
• Clearly differentiated. If you mention programs or features in the information that you provide that everyone has, your firm cannot appear superior. As part of your audit, compare your branding programs, features, and messages with those of your talent competitors to make sure that your programs and features stand out as clearly superior in more than one way.
• Focus on stories. Great branding works because it emphasizes stories which can be easily spread by your employees and the media. Stories about what it’s like to work at your firm are the most effective tool for spreading your brand message. If your information doesn’t contain stories or if the stories are not compelling enough to be repeated, you have missed a great opportunity.
• Focus on referrals. Nothing is more credible or powerful than having your own employees tell stories and provide examples about how great it is to work at your firm. If your referral program has not been refurbished so that it results in over 40% of your hires, you have to grade your branding program as mediocre.
• Relying on collateral materials. In an electronic world, brochures and handouts send a message that you are antiquated. Because ads and collateral materials cannot contain video, blogs, or detailed information, you cannot justify their high expense or rapid obsolescence.
• Referral cards. Providing powerful referral cards (both hardcopy and electronic) to key employees is essential if you are to take advantage of their broad social and professional networks.
• Your website. Every potential applicant will visit your website as a mechanism for validating whether what they’ve heard about your company is really true. Your “careers” and “jobs” websites must provide opportunities to read detailed information, to review employee profiles, to read blogs, and to view videos.
• It is tested. Never assume that your materials and approaches are effective. Test information you provide on your target audience in order to assess the resulting image and the action that each message obtains. This involves surveys and focus groups among the targeted individuals that you are not currently able to attract. (Do not ask them whether they liked it, only whether it would lead them to make an application.)

Audit Part Two: The Information You Provide Has the Maximum Impact

The next phase of the audit is to assess whether the information that you provide effectively sends the correct message to your target candidates. Regardless of how you communicate with your target audience, your efforts should meet these criteria:

• A story. The information has at least one repeatable compelling story contained in it.
• No trite words. It doesn’t use a single trite word or phrase (i.e., teamwork, values, ethical, a challenging career, exciting opportunities). If these vague words are used, there must also be examples included so that the reader can easily differentiate what you offer from what everyone else offers.
• Quantified results. Using numbers to differentiate is one of the most powerful ways of improving program information (e.g., we offer 25 days of vacation the first year versus “we have paid vacation”).
• Degree of participation. Potential applicants often view HR programs with a degree of skepticism. Overcome some of that cynicism by showing the degree that the program or feature is utilized by your workforce (e.g., 96% of the workers participate in our flexible work schedule).
• Dollars and time spent. List the amount of money (or time) spent on it each year (e.g., employees devoted 2,005 hours of paid time to community-based programs).
• Direct comparisons. Already powerful stories with examples and numbers can be made even more powerful when they include comparison numbers. This might include comparisons like “we spent an average of $2,000, the highest in the industry, while the average in the industry was only $700.” Stating that you were the first in the industry to do something can also be a powerful brand builder.
• Compelling quotes. Almost any bit of information can be improved and made “more real” when a compelling quote from an employee or customer is added.
• Programs have names. HR and people management programs get more recognition and are more likely to be passed on if they have compelling names (e.g., periodic meetings versus “departmental CEO coffee talks”). Program names should be tested to ensure that they convey the right message.
• Involving ordinary people. Almost universally, applicants like to read information or hear stories that involve the success of “ordinary” people. Providing information and stories where the “little guy” becomes very successful within the corporation is a strong brand builder (even if your applicant isn’t an ordinary person). Assess whether these powerful programs are open to participation by hourly and even part-time workers.
• Testimonials from individuals. Where more detailed information can be provided (i.e., the corporate website) effective branding information includes testimonials from employees. These can be narrative but they’re more effective if they are available on video and in podcasts. Profiles of your employees who are compelling can also be effective.
• Real examples. Examples can highlight either program features or of a typical employee’s experience with the program. Without compelling examples, programs can appear dull and ordinary.
• It includes media coverage. Narrative information about people management programs becomes more credible when it includes quotes or an actual newspaper/magazine clipping from when the program was profiled in the media. When possible, provide access to the actual media stories for the visitor to review.
• Videos. Any successful branding effort must provide one or more compelling video clips. Nothing is more powerful than seeing and hearing what it’s like to work at your firm. Often, the most effective videos are prepared by your employees in an ad-hoc manner. These videos can be made available for viewing on your website or on popular sites like YouTube.
• Pictures. When writing articles or including information on your website, always include a compelling picture showing the involvement of an actual employee (not a “canned” diversity picture with actors).
• Imperfection. Nothing reduces the credibility or believability of information more than the fact that it appears to be perfect. When you assess the information that you provide, rate it lower if it’s overly glossy or if it provides a 100% perfect story. Instead, make a story appear “real” by including one or two things that are currently being improved.
• An opportunity to read in-depth. Link to detailed information on a particular topic (the additional information is usually provided through a link to a website or blog entry).
• Values. Nothing is drier and less compelling than listing a firm’s mission or values without providing details and examples to prove that these values are real. If you can’t differentiate your values and how you act on them from other firms, don’t list them.
• Technology. Almost every picture and “nugget” of information that you provide needs to emphasize the fact that your firm is an extensive user of technology. Don’t provide pictures or descriptions that show antiquated equipment or methods. Instead show in every bit of information that technology permeates the firm
• Trite slogans. After the use of trite words or phrases, the next most common brand killer is the use of trite slogans (e.g., “We care about our employees!” or “We focus on quality!”). If you must use these slogans, at least provide examples or illustrations to bring them to life. Avoid all slogans that can’t be demonstrated and differentiated.

Audit Part Three: Your Branding Effectively Covers Each of Your Employment Sub-Brands

Although every firm has an overall employment brand, few realize that a firm’s brand includes up to 12 employment sub-brands. Two examples of sub-brands are a firm’s image on the Internet and your firm’s image as a “green” environmentally conscious firm.

The very best employment branding programs focus on providing information that effectively builds their image in each of these areas. When conducting your audit, assess the effectiveness of your efforts on each of these sub-brands:

• Your Internet brand. This includes information on your own site and information that potential candidates can find on other sites, on blogs and in videos. Effective branding programs ensure that it’s easy to find the desired information about your firm.
• Your internal brand. Your internal brand reflects how well your employees are enabled to bring the organizations brand to life based on their experience with the organization. Internal brand strength can be measured through surveys and by assessing customer reactions to employee service levels.
• Visibility in the media. Effective branding programs proactively spread their message in highly credible business and trade publications as well as on TV and radio. Assess the amount of exposure that your firm receives in the desired outlets and to what extent that coverage is positive.
• Professional event brand. Assess whether your leaders have successfully increased your firm’s exposure and image by speaking at industry events.
• Your referral program brand. The image and the information that your employees present when they are talking to potential job referrals is your referral brand. Assess its effectiveness both by the messages and the stories that employees convey, as well as by the percentage of new hires who come from referrals.
• Your image post-orientation. How well your firm manages and improves your image during orientation/on-boarding is critical because so many individuals call new hires during their first few weeks to ask them “what is it like there.”
• Your brand among college students. How well-known and how positive is your image among the college students you’re targeting?
• Your “well-managed” brand. Many firms choose to bolster their brand image by offering excellent pay and employee benefit programs. An alternative approach that focuses on your firm’s excellent management practices (incidentally, the approach CEOs prefer) is more effective in attracting top performers, innovators, and game changers. This “well-managed brand” approach communicates that your firm has great managers and excellent management practices. Focus on surveying only top performers and innovators who care more about excellent management practices than the average worker.
• Your “negative” brand. Assess the visibility of negative messages that can be found about your firm. Counter or “bury” those negative messages so that they are difficult to find.
• Green image. A strong branding effort proactively builds the firm’s image and reputation in the important area of the environment. If most of the potential applicants to your firm view it as having a positive impact on the environment, you have done a good job. However, if they view your firm as a leader in this area, you should rate your effort as outstanding.
• Your community brand. Your image in the surrounding community as a result of your proactive efforts to “give back” to the community is your community brand. This brand can aid in recruiting and in minimizing local legal and business restrictions.
• Your geographic brand. Firms need to assess how well they have provided information that causes potential applicants to view the local area and the region in which a job is located in a positive light. Great branding identifies any potential negatives associated with your locations and provides information to counter them.
• Your industry brand. If the industry in which your firm operates has a neutral or negative image, build up the image of your industry as an exciting place to work (i.e., retail, fast food, nuclear power, oil industry). Ask applicants during interviews if they have seen or heard any of your firm’s “pro-industry” messages.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are just now designing an employment branding program or if you are auditing one that is already in operation, it’s critical that you understand which factors make a program effective.

By using this simple audit checklist, you can force your efforts to focus on the critical elements that lead to a successful employment brand. If you need additional help on branding you will find numerous articles that I have written on the subject on ERE or on my personal site at www.DrJohnSullivan.com.

The fact that most companies now acknowledge applicants by sending a generic e-mail is actually a significant improvement, according to the CareerXroads 2008 Mystery Job Seeker Survey, because some companies still don’t reply to applicants at all.

Annually since 2002, CareerXroads has engaged a mystery shopper, who applies online at the 100 companies named as the Best Companies to Work For by Fortune. This year, a record 78 employers sent an automated e-mail response after the mystery shopper applied, 22 didn’t respond at all, and only a handful maintained any type of communication with the applicant after the initial e-mail. In some cases, only the return e-mail address identified which company actually responded.

“The best and the brightest employers are starting to get it,” says Mark Mehler, co-founder of CareerXroads. “They are updating their technology so candidates can click in and see where they are in the process and they are making their online application process friendlier, because job seekers will go where they can apply in an easy manner.”

“Never Underestimate Negative Chatter”

A lack of empathy for the candidate was one of the first things Kristen Weirick changed, when the director of talent acquisition for Whirlpool launched an initiative focused on improving the candidate’s experience.

“Every candidate who comes into contact with your organization is a prospective customer,” says Weirick. “There’s an old paradigm out there among some HR folks and managers that this is an employer’s market, so applicants have to conform to our process. In reality, the application process is really an extension of your employment brand. You should never underestimate the impact of negative chatter in the marketplace.”

Weirick says that she’d heard stories about candidates’ mixed experiences with the Whirlpool recruiting process, so she knew there was room for improvement. She also realized that every applicant is a potential customer, because they all buy appliances. A poor experience with the company on any level could linger with the candidate and influence their decision the next time they purchase a home appliance.

Weirick focused on improving the experience for those applying for the company’s approximately 6,500 U.S. salaried positions. She separated the candidate experience into three buckets and focused on improving each candidate’s experience at every stage of the process.

“The applicant experience starts with their first touch point,” says Weirick. “If they apply on the website, visit our booth on campus or at a career fair, they get an e-mail response that sounds and feels like the Whirlpool candidate experience we are trying to achieve. Their communication is customized, based upon their experience level.”

Candidates who progress to in-person interviews are picked up at the airport by drivers, tour the surrounding community, and then tour the Whirlpool campus. First-time interviewers are thanked for their time and gifted with Whirlpool portable utensils; those who progress to a second interview receive a portable appliance and a thank-you note delivered to their homes.

“The third step is the close,” says Weirick. “Regardless of what happens, we want that candidate to feel good about their experience with Whirlpool, so we train our recruiters how to extend offers and regrets.”

Mehler says he often advises reluctant recruiters to turn down applicants by leaving voicemail messages during lunchtime or after hours. He estimates that 17 to 18% of applicants who interview in-person never receive final disposition about their status in the hiring process.

PepsiCo is one of several companies installing Web-based technology designed to extend the company’s employment brand into the courtship phase by allowing candidates to view their status in real time, according to John Delpino, director of executive staffing. Other companies are installing systems that provide instant feedback to candidates, as they submit responses to online qualifying questionnaires. The Web-enabled system (developed in-house) stops the hiring process immediately if the candidate’s response eliminates them from consideration, and the system then furnishes the candidate with a reason for the termination of the hiring process.

Weirick says that a lack of expertise, technology, or time just isn’t an excuse for recruiters failing to give candidates updates about their status or feedback as to why they were rejected.

“Most of the time when we extend regrets, we think we’re helping the candidate,” says Weirick. “Even if we’ve just conducted a phone screen, that candidate will receive a personal phone call and receive feedback within a couple of days; we don’t send an e-mail.”

At Whirlpool, recruiters are given extensive training about what type of feedback to give applicants and how to give it. Then, following the conclusion of the hiring process, every applicant receives a 20-question e-mail survey soliciting their perceptions about the hiring process. Weirick says the survey results are 90% positive, with only an occasional howler, and the feedback helps her measure the company’s progress toward the goal of extending Whirlpool’s employment brand through the entire hiring process.

“We think of ourselves as ambassadors for our employment brand,” says Weirick, “Our goal is to make sure that even those applicants we decline maintain a strong loyalty to Whirlpool.”

It’s no wonder applicants often have bad impressions of the hiring process, according to Joe Murphy, vice president for Shaker Consulting Group, because employers start out taking information from applicants, when they should be giving them information first. In fact, Murphy says that hiring processes which demand up to an hour from applicants, while giving them no insight into how well-suited they might be for the work or the environment, sets the stage for dissatisfaction.

Murphy’s firm pioneered the Virtual Job Tryout, which gives candidates an interactive preview of the job, the performance expectations, and the company’s environment, allowing applicants to decide if they want to invest up to an hour of their time applying. By recreating parts of the job online, such as giving Starbucks’ managerial candidates a preview of the operating statements, applicants can decide for themselves if they are well-suited for the position.

“When candidates are able to make an informed decision about a prospective opportunity, it improves their experience,” says Murphy. “Now they aren’t wasting time filling out applications and being frustrated by a lack of response, and companies aren’t collecting huge amounts of data that quite frankly, they’ll never use.”

Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:

TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs - 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs - 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs - 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs - 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs - 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs - 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs - 301,000 searches

TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs - 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs - 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs - 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago - 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs - 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs - 550,000

After you play with this Google keyword research tool, you’ll see how huge the opportunity is for employers who optimize their career site and job content, so that you can drive these Google users directly to your career site.

While most corporate career sites look very snazzy and are designed for employer branding, those efforts can in many cases hurt your chances at getting your career site optimized. By using flash animations, pop up windows, pull down selections, and frames, you could be making your site very cool for users to experience, but at the same time making it so that nobody will find your cool site to visit in the first place.

Try it yourself. Try to Google one of your own job titles and see if you can find your job online.

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is a difficult game, and it’s not helped by most of the ATS players out there, who never built their platforms for marketing purposes, only to manage the recruiting process.

Most employers’ job content is hidden behind a keyword search engine which is great for a candidate who knows what they’re looking for. Google does not, and therefore won’t execute the keyword search, thereby never seeing your job content.

Even if Google did find your job content online, in many cases the basics of optimization aren’t followed by most ATS systems, which means the job titles, locations, zip codes, and other important content components aren’t put into the key areas of each job (titles, headers, meta tags, filename, etc.), which would be necessary to achieve any level of search engine placement. There are dozens of other aspects to optimization that need to be executed in addition to these, but we’ll save those for another day.

Another problem with getting your career site found by Google (using job content only) is that jobs go on and off your career site on a daily basis, which makes it difficult for you to get a higher placement ranking with the search engines using job content which is very dynamic.

Employers would be better off developing “talent landing pages,” which are job profiles for their key hiring need areas that stay online constantly (whether you have open jobs in that category or not), so that Google can always find that page, and that the content within it holds your currently open jobs matching that job profile.

If you’re a smaller employer, then you might be able to do this with HTML pages (talk to your webmaster) that you create and put online for a few of your locations and job titles.

However, enterprise clients with hiring needs in multiple locations and categories will need to seek an alternative. First, try a solution that can interface with your ATS system and automatically pull the open jobs into these pages. Second, the solution will then route candidates back to your ATS system when they want to apply.

This provides candidates with the best possible experience and gets you highly placed in the search engine rankings on Google and other search engines. (By the way, this is a similar strategy to how job boards do their search engine marketing, but rarely do we see employers using the same tactics in their interactive marketing).

In summary, innovative employers (or those looking to go beyond using job boards to do online recruiting) will learn how to compete for these candidates at their first search for jobs on Google, and drive them directly to their career site using either search engine optimization, or search engine marketing to cut recruiting costs dramatically.

Now’s the time to get started. Fall is coming faster than you think, and you’ll need to get started today in order to get on Google’s first page of search results if you hope to be there by September or October.

–Meanwhile, Disney is sued for allegedly not hiring someone who didn’t have the “Disney look.”

–Who says the newspaper is dead? Well, I do, often. But Brian Hauswirth of the Missouri Department of Corrections tells me the paper’s the main reason why his career fair just surpassed all expectations. “When we ask people, ‘where did you hear about the career fair?’ the no. 1 reason is the newspaper,” he says. About 165 people attended the fair, he says, and about 103 applied for Corrections Officer 1 positions at a new prison. They still need to pass background checks, but Hauswirth says the results are “very promising.” Those with military experience make up about a quarter of corrections officers.

–Cellular South has completed a redesign of its careers site. It’s no EY site, but the company does use video to try to get applicants who fit its culture: fast-paced, challenging, competitive. It had Bernard Hodes (profile; site) help out (after realizing that consumer marketing and employment branding are cousins, not siblings, so Cell South can’t just use its in-house marketing folks), but still uses Sonic (profile; site) to track applicants.

Barb Miller, VP of human resources for the 1,000-employee company, one of the largest privately held wireless companies in the U.S., says the employees you see on the site are indeed employees, not actors, though Hodes and Miller’s team did discuss the idea of using actors (some Cellular South employees underperformed on camera, resulting in an SVP filling in at the end). Cellular South will measure results of the site through the “capture rate” (who leaves the site?); quality of hire (performance reviews, retention); traffic; and productivity (how many customers they can get with a certain number of employees). I asked Miller about the company’s snooze-inducing job descriptions. “You hit on something good,” she says. “That will be the next phase of what we do.”

In this final installment of the four-part series, I tackle a critical issue: making content on your careers site seem genuine. When candidates are asked about careers sites and their shortcomings, one of the biggest issues identified is the lack of candor nearly every site presents. Most candidates know that it would be nearly impossible for an organization to adequately describe every aspect of what it would be like to work for the company, but they also know that not every firm can be a recognized leader. They are looking for more than marketing points; they are looking for facts and honesty. In addition to tackling this issue, we will finish off the feature categories and briefly cover metrics for assessing your efforts.

Features That Bring the Firm to Life and Make the Firm Appear Genuine

Most careers sites provide little more excitement than reading a paper brochure. One of the goals of the website should be to include information that brings the firm to life and makes the work experience seem genuine (e.g., real or more believable). This information differs from “wow” features in that these elements are more down to earth and focus more on the operational aspects that a potential employee might be interested in. Some of these elements have also been mentioned in other parts of this article, so the purpose of this section is to show how, in combination, they can make the firm appear real or genuine.

96. Understand the Company’s Direction. This element provides the potential candidate with some insight into where the company is headed. It might include the company’s stated goals and announced geographic and product expansion plans. It also lists the firm’s strategic partners. It might also include a link to the annual report.
97. Profile of the CEO. Applicants often want to know if the CEO for whom they will work is a real or down-to-earth person. Providing a profile of not just his work history, but also of his hobbies, community work, and recreational interests can make the company’s leader seem more genuine. The website can also include links to his or her recent speeches or even a video of what the CEO says when welcoming new hires.
98. Understand the Company’s Employees. In order to ensure that the potential applicant gets an insider’s perspective, links to blogs written by company employees are provided. Employees who have positive profiles on social networking sites could also be listed.
99. Understand the Company’s Products. This element highlights the company’s product lines. It profiles some innovative products and their features and provides links to product specifications. Dates and locations of product demonstrations and announcements are also provided in case the individual wants to experience the products firsthand.
100. Know the Company’s Customers. This element provides information on the customers who buy the firm’s products and services. This information can be powerful if it demonstrates that your firm’s products and service offerings are so good that the best firms use them.
101. Exciting Equipment and Facilities. By highlighting unique and advanced equipment and software, you can excite individuals who are focused on the tools that they will have available to them. In the same context, unique or advanced facilities can also be profiled.
102. Exciting Projects. By providing profiles of recent major projects, you can give potential applicants insight into the type of projects that they might have an opportunity to work on.
103. Detailed Information on Employee Benefits. Rather than the generic list of employee benefits that most websites provide, links would allow the individual to learn additional details about specific benefits. In addition, your firm’s benefits would be compared directly to those of competitor employers using a side-by-side chart. If the company’s salaries are, on average, above mid-range, this information could also be provided.
104. A Special Focus on College Students. The careers page should highlight (or provide a link to a separate university page) topics that are of special interest to college students. Information should be targeted specifically to current students, recent graduates with undergraduate degrees, and graduate students.
105. A Special Focus on Different Generations. If your firm buys into the concept of generational differences, the website should contain links to segmented information that uses the language and focuses on the needs of the different generations.
106. A Focus on Retirees. If your organization is targeting recent retirees for either part-time or full-time work, there should be profiles of employees who represent this group. There should also be links to information that would be relevant to this group of potential employees.

Features That Assess Job Qualifications

Few websites have the capability of quickly assessing the qualifications of individuals while they are active on the company’s site. However, implementing this capability allows the website to customize the information provided and to change the application process to expedite those who are determined to be highly qualified. And, even though it’s often difficult to get applicants to provide you with qualifying information without incurring a percentage of early drop-offs, the problem can be reduced if you continually excite them at every step of the application process. Key elements of this qualifying feature include:

107. Assessing Their Fit. Advanced websites don’t just assess an individual’s qualifications. I also assess the individual’s fit with the organization’s culture, values, and way of doing business. This element can include a self-assessment tool that would allow the individual to determine for himself whether this was the right organization for him. If it’s a required assessment, the need for it must be justified and it must be completed in less than two minutes. You can also let potential applicants know that if they are a match, their applications will be expedited.
108. Technical Skill Assessment. It’s becoming increasingly more common for firms to conduct technical skill assessments online. However, you must excite your applicants with a great employer brand or an exciting careers website if you expect most of them to take the time to go through a skill assessment process. You can certainly make it optional, allow for self-assessment (so that they can self-select out), or you can let individuals know that a good score will move their applications immediately to the top of the pile. Online simulations and games are good choices because they can be in themselves exciting. You can also link to sites that offer technical assessments.
109. Judgment Assessments. You can provide careers page visitors with “what-if” scenarios, and assess them on the steps they take (or don’t take) in response to the scenario’s problem or opportunity.
110. Mini-Questionnaire Interviews. Future websites will have the capability of providing the candidate with an opportunity to sit through a mini-interview. This online feature is essentially a short multiple-choice questionnaire that lasts under five minutes. It can be an optional feature or candidates can be made aware of the fact that a high score on it guarantees them at least a telephone interview.

Features That Provide Feedback to Candidates

Most websites are one-way communication tools. That impersonalizes them and makes them less effective. So, it’s important to provide immediate and accurate feedback whenever possible if you want candidates to believe you’re being honest with them. Some of the elements of this feedback feature include:

111. Instant Feedback. Little excites potential candidates more than immediate feedback indicating they are the type of person that your firm is looking for. Positive feedback encourages them to stay on the website and to eventually take the time to apply for a job. If you decide not to provide feedback to every applicant, the website should, at least for highly-qualified candidates and those applying for hard-to-fill jobs, automatically provide positive feedback whenever the candidates provide information that indicates that they meet or exceed the firm’s expectations.
112. Live Q&A. Websites can have the capability of live chat, in which questions can be posted and answers can be immediately typed in by someone on your recruiting staff. This ability to get instant answers to “your” questions sends a clear message to potential applicants (even if they don’t take advantage of this feature) about your responsiveness and your interest in them. Other Q&A options include “next day” responses and posting frequently-asked questions on the site.
113. Probability of Success Feedback. At any time during the process of providing information, individuals could be notified of their approximate likelihood of getting an interview (e.g., “Based on the information you have provided so far, you have an 85% chance of getting called in for an interview”). This probability is relatively easy to calculate based on the qualifications of previous applicants for jobs that were granted interviews.
114. A Phone Link. When highly-qualified candidates or those who apply for hard-to-fill jobs visit the website, they could automatically be provided with a telephone number or a VOIP connection to a recruiter (or your call center), so that they can get an immediate and personalized response. (For example, “Mr. Woods, we’d love to have you on our golf team. Can you call this number immediately so that we can talk further?) Text messaging can also be used to communicate with potential applicants who are not currently on a computer.
115. Feedback After They Apply. Even after applications are completed, the website could provide e-mail updates to let candidates know where they are in the hiring process, and, on average, how many days until a final decision will be made.
116. Referral Feedback. Candidates from employer referrals should get immediate feedback when they enter the website. The feedback should make them feel welcomed (they are prized because one of your employees prescreened and presold them on the company). Immediate and periodic feedback encourages employees to refer others based on the positive experiences that the colleagues they referred received.

Elements That Build the Relationship over Time

When you are attempting to attract either potential candidates who are currently employed or top performers who are in high demand, you should realize upfront that there is a low probability that you can even interest them in jobs on the first contact. Most of the time, these highly sought-after individuals must build up a level of trust before seriously considering a company. The best approach, whether you’re utilizing a website or not, is to build a relationship with them over time. A website can help you begin to build this relationship. The key is to use their visits to your company’s home page, product page, or careers page to get their permission to keep in touch. Not everything that your firm does to build a relationship will go through a webpage, but it is an important starting point. Some of the relationship-building approaches that can be utilized include:

117. Send Them an E-Newsletter. Provide individuals who visit your website with the opportunity to opt-in and to give you permission to periodically send them a “friends of the company” e-newsletter. The purpose of the newsletter is to keep them informed about what’s happening at your firm. It can contain information about new products, exciting projects, and other things that help build their respect for your firm (such as Google’s “friends of Google” e-newsletter). You should also encourage them to sign up to receive company blogs or podcasts.
118. Push Information on Updates to Your Website. No more than once a quarter, let them know about exciting features and information that you’ve added to your corporate website. Then, encourage them to visit and solicit their feedback.
119. Push Opportunities to Attend Corporate Events. With their permission, send them invitations to corporate events in order to aid in the process of them getting to know you. Consider inviting them to new product announcements, executive speeches, internal corporate training classes, or even corporate parties.
120. Provide Them with Your Products. You can send them trial or sample products or product discounts. This helps build the recruiting relationship because if they learn to like your products, it increases the odds that they will consider working at your firm.
121. Push Jobs Announcements. This is the most job-oriented element of the relationship-building options. Ask for their permission on the careers or jobs page to periodically send them information and a link to the jobs that are directly relevant to them. Don’t overdo it or you will lose them.

Geographically-Localized Features

If the corporation has openings in many locations, the careers site should have a feature that changes the information that is provided to the visitor to fit the region or country where the potential candidate either is currently located or where he or she wants to work. In addition to the geography-specific features mentioned earlier, here are some additional localization features to consider:

122. Electronically Identify Their Locations. Start the localization process using their IP addresses to identify where visitors are coming from.
123. Provide a Local Information Option. Whether or not the location can be determined, visitors should be offered the option to quickly identify their locations from a drop-down menu or map, and then immediately have the screen change so that it now provides localized information and jobs.
124. Multilingual Capabilities. Make sure that all of your sites have multilingual and translation capabilities.
125. Consider Regional Subpages. Some organizations choose to develop separate webpages that focus entirely on a particular country or region. Make sure that the information on these targeted sites is tailored to the unique needs and cultures of the candidates in that region.
126. Facility Information. Make sure there are links to information about features of the local facility, the city, and its surroundings. Also, include information that might be relevant to the family of a new hire who is moving to the region.
127. Localized Pay and Benefits. Include a link on your corporate or regional pages that allows individuals from around the globe to view and understand the local salary structure. It’s also important to educate both locals and expatriates about the different benefits offered in this particular geographic region.

Other Things to Do Related to the Site

In addition to developing these actual features, there are some other things that you need to do in order to build a successful website. They include the following:

Metrics and Program Assessment

In order to identify website features and elements that work and those that don’t, it’s important to gather metrics and to assess results.

• Measure the volume and the performance of those hired as a result of the site to determine if the website produces superior hires compared to other sources.
• Ask new hires during orientation what attracted them and caused them to accept. Identify whether the website was a major contributing factor and, if so, what features were positively or negatively received.
• One of the key metrics to use is one adapted from sales; it is called the conversion rate. It measures the percentage of participants in one stage that advance to the next stage of a predefined sales process. You should also track the percentage of all visitors who actually complete an application.
• Track where candidates come from and go to (using a cookie) after they hit your site to see if you are attracting the right people.
• Survey a sample of your visitors in order to identify your site’s positive and negative features and to get a better understanding of what features should be added.
• Track the percentage of visitors that drop off and how much time passes before they typically do so. Follow up with surveys to find out why.
• Run an ROI analysis to identify the economic value of the website.
• Use mystery shoppers (such as employees or vendors) to periodically visit your site to test to see if the sorting and other features actually work as designed.
• Measure the satisfaction of website users (applicants, hires, drop-offs from the site, recruiters, and managers) and use the information in order to improve.

Miscellaneous Things to Do

In addition to metrics, there are some other things you should do in order to develop a world-class corporate jobs site. They include:

• Before beginning the recruiting process, conduct a survey of top employees in order to identify what they would look for in a website and what frustrates them on a careers website.
• Identify the websites (of any type) that your top performers visit the most and attempt to have your careers site link to them.
• Realize that as corporations become more global, companies become larger, and travel becomes more difficult, remote hiring will become the norm. And, as a result, recruiting will require more remote (not face-to-face) finding and assessment tools, so include them in your site at the very beginning.
• Form an advisory group of top performers to help you design and improve the website.
• Get your site ranked or written about in leading publications, blogs, and websites (such as CareerXroads) in order to increase traffic.
• Have your site evaluated by outside experts and targeted candidates. Make sure that it is unique and that it isn’t your typical jobs page.
• Compare your website to that of your direct talent competitors. Continually improve it to ensure that it gives your firm a competitive advantage. Where possible, design it so that it is hard for your competitors to copy it.
• Link your company’s “who’s-who” database (a list of previously identified and highly-rated individuals) so that it can match the names of those who hit the website. When a match occurs of a previously identified target candidate, the website should morph to treat them differently.
• Make sure there is a process to thank candidates for applying, and be sure to notify them when they’re no longer being considered. In your database, forever store the names of key highly-qualified candidates and applicants for hard-to-fill jobs.
• Consider offering a small gift or payment for submitting a qualified resume for a hard-to-fill job.

That’s it. A “wow” careers site is a lot more than a simple front end to an ATS application. It is a mechanism to communicate and service a population of people that may someday work for your organization. Too many companies take the design of their careers sites too lightly, asking more about what it can do for them versus what it can do for candidates. A great effort takes resources, time, and lots of dedication. Best wishes in your next redesign.

Numerous studies have confirmed that nearly everyone who eventually gets hired by an organization visits the organization’s corporate careers site at some point prior to being hired. Most leave disappointed, having had received no value whatsoever from a site that is supposed to be all about them. The first two parts of this series presented a lot of ideas about how to change that, but we are only half way there.

This article focuses on gathering information from visitors and on presenting content to sell visitors on the prospect of joining the organization.

Other Information-Gathering Elements for All Visitors

In addition to assessing qualifications and capturing resume details, there is other information you should attempt to get from all visitors, whether they are active or passive, during their visit to your site. Elements under this feature include:

57. Capture Their Job-Switch Criteria. This element requires applicants to list the criteria they would use when they decide to switch jobs. By identifying applicants’ job search criteria, interests, or job acceptance criteria, you can better sell them on your firm and the job.
58. Identify From Where They Came. If individuals are visiting from a computer owned by a particular company, you can identify that by its IP address (this allows you to treat visitors from target companies differently). In addition, technology often allows you to identify the last website they visited right before yours, which might (if they came from another firm’s jobs page) help you determine what other firms they are considering and whether they are active job seekers.
59. When Do They Need a Job? Great websites treat active job seekers with a sense of urgency, because you are likely to face competition in landing candidates. As a result, you should attempt to find out if visitors are actively seeking jobs at this time. Usually just asking them to tell you the number of weeks before they desire to have a new position or the number of firms they are presently considering will tell you all that you need to know. If they do not specify, you should now classify them as “non-lookers,” and assume that you’ll have to treat them differently in order to convince them to apply and accept.

Careers Page Features That Sell Them on the Firm

In most cases, it is necessary to convince visitors that you are a viable employer before you sell them on jobs. Selling them on the firm or organization is usually done on the initial landing pages of a site. The key to success is identifying the compelling and differentiated features that make working at your firm unique and exciting. Elements that are generally effective in this selling-them-on-the-firm feature include:

60. List Best-Place-to-Work Awards. Nothing builds your employment brand image faster than winning a “best place to work” type award. Each page should highlight your awards and provide information on each of the national and local “best places to work” awards that the firm has received. Be sure to highlight the specific features that helped you win the award. Whenever your firm was among the top firms in your industry, make sure that visitors are aware of that fact. Also include when your firm is listed among the “most admired” firms or when it is recognized for excellence in diversity hiring.
61. A Recruiting Video. Provide a five-minute or less recruiting video (Google has an excellent example of one) featuring a few of your employees. It can either be professionally done or done in a more amateurish fashion by one of your employees (to make it appear more genuine).
62. Show the Physical Aspects. Many candidates want to know about exciting physical aspects of the firm. You should include a list with examples and provide pictures or a virtual tour of the headquarters or local site. Include aspects like an onsite gym, great food, recreational aspects, “green” features, modern technology, and equipment. In order to identify these physical features, survey recent hires and employees to identify what might excite visitors.
63. A Live Web Cam. Providing a live Web cam showing the hustle and bustle and the energy can be a powerful tool. You can also utilize multiple cameras to allow them to choose different views of your facility (including the lobby, onsite childcare, the cafeteria, the gym, and the weather). Another option is to provide taped footage.
64. Employee Testimonials. This element provides short testimonials (video, audio, or narrative) from selected individuals on why they find your firm to be a great place to work.
65. Demonstrate Your Firm’s Success. Provide graphical information to show the successes of the firm that would impress potential applicants. Consider successes in the stock price growth, profit growth, market share increases, growth in employee headcount, expansion into new geographic regions, and the fact that the firm has had no major layoffs. Include positive comments by industry analysts or from the leaders of admired firms that are your customers.
66. Demonstrate Your Firm’s “Greenness.” As more potential recruits expect firms to have an excellent environmental record, it becomes increasingly important for organizations to demonstrate what they’ve done on their home pages and careers websites. Highlight both the actions you’re planning and those you have completed in the areas of sustainability, minimizing your carbon imprint, utilizing alternative energy, recycling, purchasing locally, utilizing electric and hybrid vehicles, encouraging the use of mass transit, and the support you give your employees so that they can reduce their impacts on the environment.
67. A Day in the Life of an Employee. This element provides a more detailed profile of the activities of a typical day of one of your employees. It can be a narrative, audio, or video format, and it could include a question-and-answer feature as well.
68. “People-Like-Me-Already-Work-Here” Feature. This element allows individuals to see that people with similar backgrounds and interests already work at the firm. The simplest format is to provide profiles of your employees (narrative or video). You should also consider a search that allows them to both enter their interests, background, education, demographic features, sexual orientation, hobbies, university affiliation, etc., and to seek out similar profiles of individuals. On the opposite end of the spectrum, profile employees who have won major awards and honors. Some firms make the profiles anonymous (to avoid raiding) while others provide only the first name. However, providing the picture and the full name has a more powerful impact.
69. Highlight Your Diversity. Merely stating that you celebrate diversity will have little impact on applicants. Instead, you must demonstrate your diversity in the most desirable jobs (manager and professional positions). You should also use statistics, employee profiles, lists of diversity-related activities, use of diverse suppliers, community activities, and your firm’s support of diverse affinity groups.
70. Illustrate Your Culture and Values. Provide information illustrating your company’s values and unique aspects of your culture. Listing them is not sufficient. You need to provide examples that show how the company actually lives up to its values every day.
71. YouTube Links to Demonstrate Excitement at Your Firm. Include links to videos that appear on YouTube or similar sites that positively highlight the firm or demonstrate the energy and excitement associated with working there.
72. Meet the Manager. The careers page will have a “meet our managers” feature (video, audio, or narrative) that allows visitors to understand the culture and management style of your firm by seeing the profile of one or more of your managers. It may be general in nature or it can provide the specific profile of the manager who they might be working with. Profiles should include how managers communicate, involve workers in decisions, encourage innovation, and praise or recognize their employees.
73. Profile Opportunities to Learn. The careers page should provide detailed information on typical growth and learning opportunities. It’s important to note that general statements or lists of educational benefits is not powerful enough to differentiate your firm or to convince potential applicants that managers are superior to what they have now. Consider including video clips of some seminars that are offered, a listing of specific courses, a sample employee learning plan, or the average amount of money or number of hours of training that the average employee gets (compared to the industry average). Also, consider a profile of the learning experiences of a selected employee whom you profile.
74. Profile Outside-of-Work Activities. The site provides information about outside-of-work activities, such as community involvement, employees’ sports teams, sponsored recreational trips, and other fun events the company helps organize.
75. Profile Technical Accomplishments. Include listings of the firm’s recent patents, innovations, technical awards, and technological advances to demonstrate that your firm is on the leading edge.
76. Press Releases. Include a link to recent press releases to let visitors see for themselves what’s happening in the company.
77. Articles Highlighting the Company. Include copies or links to articles from leading publications that mention the firm or its key employees. Also, include the best articles written by your employees and a listing of books and key research reports they have written.
78. TV Show Clips. When technology allows, include video clips (links or transcripts) from TV shows featuring the firm and its employees.
79. Professional Presentations. Provide copies or links to samples of professional presentations and speeches given by key employees. It can be as simple as a link to the presentation slide show or a video of the presentation.
80. Highlight Your Firm’s Alumni. Demonstrate how your firm is an excellent training ground for future leaders by listing the firm’s alumni who have achieved fame in the industry or in public service after leaving the company. In the same light, consider listing the names of some new hires and their credentials to demonstrate the quality of people who are joining your firm.

Jobs Page Features That Sell Visitors on “This Job”

No matter how exciting the company appears on the website, you won’t get very many applicants unless your follow-up jobs page (where actual job openings are listed) also excites the visitor. Some of the elements that can help sell visitors on your individual jobs include:

81. Exciting Job Descriptions. The action with the most impact on the jobs page is to write position descriptions so that they’re compelling. Unfortunately, most job or position descriptions that are posted on websites are painfully dull. Don’t let compensation write whatever you post on the Web. Instead, the duties and responsibilities should make the job interesting. When appropriate, make sure to show that the job involves teamwork, innovation, and the latest equipment, and that the job’s output is important to the company. Work with marketing to ensure that each description makes the job sound like something that would be a step up from the ordinary. Test them to make sure that they have the desired effect of exciting the potential candidate.
82. FAQ’s About “This” Job. If individuals have questions about a particular job, it causes them to hesitate before they apply for it. The best way to avoid this problem is to provide a link to frequently asked questions and answers about this particular job or job family. Unless it’s a brand new job, you should be able to identify the likely questions by surveying candidates and new hires in those positions. You can also identify the typical frustrations that people in those jobs and at other firms frequently face, and then provide information to show that those frustrations are less likely to happen at your firm. Be sure to test your answers to ensure that they clear up anything that could be vague. As an alternative, you can allow potential applicants to e-mail their personal questions to a designated recruiter.
83. Job Search Feature. It’s important to make sure that the search feature on the jobs page (there might also be a search feature on the careers page) allows potential applicants to enter terms related to skills, tools, responsibilities, locations, or their hobbies in order to display the jobs that fit their interests (even if they don’t know the job’s title). If visitors used your jobs page’s keyword search feature to identify their relevant opportunities, use technology to highlight each of the search terms they entered within the actual position description, so that they can see its relevance.
84. Selling the Location. Because most jobs are location specific, the jobs page itself should provide a link to positive information about the facility and the city in which the job is located. This information could include compelling features of the job facility as well as information about the region’s weather, low crime rates, great recreation, cultural activities, clean air, easy commutes, low housing prices, or superior schools and universities. Global jobs, in particular, need to provide more detailed information to convince leery potential candidates.
85. Convince the Family. Because family and friends can influence an individual’s decision to seek a new job, the careers page should target information that also helps to sell anyone who might influence this individual. For those who are part of the millennium generation, information should be included to help convince the parents, should they get involved in the job-search process (Enterprise Rent-A-Car excels at this).

Unique Treatment on the Jobs Page for Targeted Jobs and Highly-Qualified Applicants

In some cases, hard-to-fill jobs and high-volume positions need to be treated differently than other opportunities that are posted on the jobs page. In the same light, individuals who are assessed to be highly qualified should also be treated differently. Some of the elements of this targeted approach include:

86. Direct-Contact Opportunity. For highly-qualified individuals or for any nearly-impossible-to-fill jobs, the site should provide an opportunity for direct personal contact (phone or e-mail) with current employees who are in or are familiar with the position (the Cisco “friends” program was an excellent example of this concept). When direct contact is not feasible, having an employee write a blog related to the particular position can also have an impact.
87. Profiles of the Team. Consider linking hard-to-fill jobs and high-volume hiring jobs with brief narrative profiles of the hiring manager and team members in order to give potential applicants an idea of what kinds of individuals they would be working with. Employees can be profiled in a baseball card format.
88. Additional Information for “Hard-to-Fill Jobs. Any jobs that have been historically hard to fill should receive special treatment. That is an opportunity to view more in-depth information in all areas in order to increase the number of qualified applicants.
89. Additional Information for High-Volume Hiring Jobs. Jobs that involve hiring a high volume of individuals during the year should also get special treatment. Potential applicants should be given the opportunity to link to more detailed information (including short video clips of workers in this job) in order to increase the number of qualified applicants and help reduce recruiter’s workloads by decreasing the number of unqualified ones.

Features That Make it Easy to Find “My” Job

Many times, visitors don’t want to read through the painfully long list of job openings that is found on the jobs page of a corporate website. As a result, it’s critical that the page prior to it (usually the careers page) contain a search feature that allows an individual to go directly to the job that is the best fit for him. Although on the surface it might seem easy to find the right job, it often is not because different firms use markedly different job titles. If you want to avoid frustration and ensure that applicants apply for the most appropriate jobs, your website must have a sophisticated job-finding feature. Some of the elements of that find-a-job feature include:

90. “Find the Right Job” Search Feature. The jobs search engine on the careers page allows a visitor to find a job without knowing its title. Like any search engine, this feature would allow you to enter job titles, skills, and responsibilities and instantly call up any relevant jobs. Like a Google or Yahoo! search, it should rank in descending order the jobs that the search feature finds based on how closely they fit the search string the candidate entered. The search feature must be continually tested to ensure that it brings up all relevant jobs without any omissions.
91. A “Suggest a Job” Element. This element is similar to many shopping websites in that it identifies other jobs that previous searchers who looked at a particular position also applied for. By providing the visitor with suggestions about similar jobs that he would likely be interested in (based on the search experience of others), you help ensure that he easily finds all of the relevant jobs.
92. Jobs That Fit the Targeted Region. The job search feature on both the careers page and the jobs page should only pull up jobs that are within commuting distance of where the individual wants to work. Remote jobs would appear regardless of their targeted geographic area.
93. Jobs That Fit the Targeted Pay Range. Much like shopping sites, this job search feature would allow you to enter a minimum salary and would only provide jobs that have the potential for meeting that minimum. In addition, if the individual only wanted a job that included full benefits or certain perks, only those positions would be listed.
94. A “Closed Position” Search Element. Because not all positions are open whenever a potential candidate visits, this element allows the visitor to search all existing jobs. The individual would then be told how frequently a selected job comes open. In addition, he or she could sign up for an automatic “push” notification via e-mail when that position does open up.
95. A College Student Search Element. The search feature would allow students to search for internships or co-op or part-time positions that would be of interest to undergraduates. It would also allow soon-to-be graduates to identify the types of jobs that recent graduates have successfully obtained at your firm.

Hopefully, you can see that creating a “wow” career site really is all about servicing the candidate. In the next and final issue of this series, I will tackle the remaining feature categories and a few miscellaneous things you should do.

Currently, the most underperforming corporate recruiting tool is the careers or jobs webpage. Honestly, taking your own for example, is there any chance it conveys the energy and excitement that you encounter on a regular basis as an employee? You and I both know that the answer is probably not, because 99% of corporate careers sites are just plain ugly and boring. It’s truly unfortunate that one of the primary channels of communication that both applicants and candidates experience is so poorly managed.

I realize that right now some of you are nodding your head in agreement, while others are getting defensive. Before you start spewing defenses, I realize that most corporate careers sites do receive a lot of traffic, and some actually receive more traffic than the parent site itself. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that study after study has identified that nearly all applicants, regardless of their application channel, visit a company’s website to learn more about it or to verify that what they have heard about the firm is really true either before applying or shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, as many failed dot-coms will tell you, traffic alone isn’t success. How many visitors leave your site more enthused about the prospect of joining your organization than before their visit? How many are inspired to some action other than completing the administrative application process, such as registering for a newsletter or referring a friend? What percentage of the insane number of applications collected by your careers site belong to candidates who even have a slim chance of someday being hired? These are the types of questions you should be asking to determine how successful your careers site actually is.

Regrettably, when you ask the really valuable questions, the answers are often overwhelmingly disappointing. In reality, most visitors leave the site no more enthused or even informed than they were prior to visiting. A good percentage of visitors, most likely the most valuable percentage, drop off before even applying. Despite the huge potential such sites have to attract, inspire, motivate, and drive to action, it’s sad how little has been done with them by corporate HR. The time has come to end the drought on great corporate careers sites. If you agree, read on.

The Current State

In general, most corporate careers sites vary from boring to downright embarrassing. The vast majority of those in existence are essentially online brochures that are not very convincing or even informative. They currently serve as little more than a wrapper for a series of data entry screens that get applicants to enter the information required by the firm’s applicant tracking system. Their current purpose seems to be to simplify the workload of recruiters and not to service applicants, answer their questions, or to “wow” them.

As competition for talent escalates on a global basis, organizations that seek to thrive by attracting top talent will need to radically rethink their approaches to leveraging Web technologies to support their recruiting strategy. The corporate careers website has tremendous possibilities, but its current development seems to be hampered by low expectations, excessive benchmarking (see, their careers page isn’t any better), and a lack of vision on the part of HR leaders.

Corporate careers sites progress at a glacial speed. Advanced careers websites can allow a firm to provide in-depth and personalized information to potential applicants. In addition, the Web also allows the firm to provide multilayer information to potential applicants to satisfy any level of curiosity. Unfortunately, the majority of current corporate careers sites don’t take advantage of the Web’s multitude of selling capabilities (see the list of advantages below). Fortunately, HR leaders can learn what is possible from the many great non-HR websites exactly what it takes to deliver a compelling, value-driven experience to the visitor.

16 Reasons Why the Web Is a Powerful Recruiting Sales Tool

There are many reasons why the Web is a superior way to provide information about the firm and its jobs to potential applicants. The advantages over newspaper ads, brochures, posters, etc. include:

1. It is current. It can be updated instantly with new information at a very low cost.
2. It fills the senses. Unlike print media, the Internet can leverage striking visual displays combined with sound and video to deliver an engaging sensory experience. In short, it can make you feel like you are actually there at the firm, even though you are 10,000 kilometers away.
3. It provides global access. The Web is the only recruiting tool that can actually reach the entire worldwide population of potential applicants. No amount of cold calls from a stable of recruiters could reach this population. No newspaper ad, magazine article, recruiting brochure, or poster could also ever be seen by such a large population, 24/7. For access, it’s simply number one.
4. It can provide many layers of information. Depending on the interest level and time availability of the visiting person, the options regarding the level of detail or level of information offered to the visitor can be extensive. The level of detail options offered to each visitor can range from a short “It takes just 10 seconds to scan” bullet point to “As much detail as you like” by providing, for example, a PDF of a 30-page research study written by your firm on the same topic, for those who really want more in-depth information.
5. The format can vary from the narrative to the visual. The Web allows you to vary the format that the information is presented in. Ranging from information provided in simple text format to links to other sites, still pictures, audio podcasts, videos, or even to real-time interactive discussions, the format options are amazing.
6. It can be interactive. It can be powerful because it can offer interactive features that engage the visitor. These features include live chat, video games, questions and answers, virtual meetings, or even employee blogs, all of which can be compelling.
7. Information can be targeted. Information can be narrowcasted or customized to meet the unique needs of visitors from different demographic groups or geographic regions. Information can also be tailored to meet the unique interests of both the active job looker and those not currently in a job search.
8. It can help build relationships. The Internet allows you to easily build long-term relationships with people who initially are not very interested in your firm or a new job. Relationships can be strengthened by sharing e-newsletters with potential applicants, through blogs, and with employee profiles.
9. It costs little. Once built, maintaining a well designed site is relatively inexpensive.
10. It highlights your technology capabilities. By providing a website with the latest technology features, you can demonstrate, better than any words can, that your firm “walks the talk” when it comes to using the latest technology and Web tools.
11. It offers multi-language capabilities. Information can easily be presented in multiple languages to serve a global audience.
12. The message is consistent. Because a careers website is managed by a single HR manager, it is easy to find out what message is being sent out, as well as to ensure that a consistent message is being presented across business units and geographies. This central control also allows the firm, should the need arise, to shift the message quickly to fit changing talent market conditions or to counter a competitor’s recruiting actions.
13. Details can be provided inexpensively. At almost no extra cost, any amount of information about individual jobs or the firm can be provided. While in contrast, newspaper ads or job boards charge big bucks for any additional exposure.
14. Linking is easy. The site can provide easy links to credible information provided by neutral third parties at no additional costs, such as award sites, benchmark or case studies, or articles that highlight the firm.
15. It can be fun. Brochures and newspaper ads just can’t be fun. A website can provide fun things ranging from video games and Dilbert strip links to virtual tours and top 10 lists to attract the interest of non-job lookers and those who want to work at a work hard/play hard firm.
16. Word spreads fast. Because people who visit your site are already on the Web, it’s relatively easy for them to virally let a large number of their colleagues and friends know about the “wow” features that they have just discovered.

Given the many advantages and the relatively low cost, it makes one wonder why so much of the corporate HR budget is currently spent on newspaper ads, brochures, posters, and slogans, instead of this more powerful tool. Perhaps it is HR’s fear of technology or just that old habits are hard to break.

It’s also important to note that contrary to popular practice, leveraging Web technologies is not a one-size-fits-all game. Which technologies are used and how they are deployed should change, based on your branding and recruiting strategy, the profile of the talent you are targeting and the organizations that you compete against for talent.

Visualize the Corporate Careers Site of the Future

The following list introduces website features that are possible using technology that exists today. While no corporate careers websites or their follow-up jobs page exhibit more than a handful of them at the present time, these are the features that you should be adding to your corporate webpage as your courage increases. The keys to selecting the right features for future site revisions is determining if they provide value to the visitor, are so powerful that they allow the visitor to “know the people” at your firm, and convey the energy and excitement at the firm.

18 Categories of Website Features or Capabilities

1. The careers page is easy to find on the lead-in page
2. Immediate “wows” to get their attention
3. Quick identification features
4. Initial classification of the visitor
5. Features that provide personalized information
6. Personalized features and expedited treatment
7. Features for attracting employed top performers
8. Features for attracting active job seekers
9. Other information-gathering elements for all visitors
10. Careers page features that sell them on the firm
11. Jobs page features that sell visitors on this job
12. Features that make it easy to find jobs
13. Features that bring the firm to life and make the firm appear genuine
14. Features that help assess job qualifications
15. Features that provide feedback to candidates and that answer their questions
16. Elements that help build the relationship over time
17. Geographically localized features
18. Other things to do related to the site, including metrics

Elements That Your Current Corporate Careers Site Probably Doesn’t Have…But Someday Will

There are 127 suggested features or capabilities for the corporate careers website of the future. The best websites will, of course, have all the featured categories but not necessarily all of the elements from each category. If you think for one minute that these features are unrealistic or not necessary, you are probably part of the problem, as each already exists in some form on a website already.

The Careers/Jobs Site Is Easy to Find on the Corporate Lead-In Page

There is no careers or jobs page that has a chance to impress if no one can find it or if the minute that they do find it, there is simply no compelling feature to retain their interest. Here are some of the elements your corporate lead-in page must have if you expect to get a high click-through rate to the careers and jobs page behind it.

1. On the Home Page. The link to your careers/jobs page must be clearly visible on the corporate website’s home page.
2. 10 Seconds to Find It. The jobs link must be easy to spot within 10 seconds.
3. Fast Loading. When clicked, the link must load fast (within 15 seconds).
4. No More Than One Click Is Needed. No more than one click should ever be needed to connect to the careers/jobs page. Multiple clicks mean a dramatic increase in page drop-offs.
5. Job-Related Information on the Home Page. The corporate home page should contain at least one compelling bit of information that is relevant to a job seeker. This job-related hook is necessary so that the potential candidates don’t drop off before even clicking on the careers/jobs page link. An example might be an image indicating that your firm is recognized as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune Magazine.
6. Links to Other External Sites. Not everyone will visit your careers page by way of your corporate home page. Obviously, you need links directly to your careers page on frequently visited niche and large job boards. However, you also need to survey your best performers in key jobs to identify what industry, business, and functional and general websites they visit on a regular basis. Attempt to put a link to your careers page on as many of these frequently visited sites as you can.
7. Product Link. There is a careers/jobs page link on the firm’s products and customer service pages.
8. A Jobs or Careers Page Choice. When feasible, the company’s home page should give visitors a chance to go to the careers page (with information about the company) or alternatively, go directly to the jobs page (where job openings are listed).
9. An Accurate Search Feature. When jobs, careers, openings, positions, or other job search related words are entered in the search engine on the corporate home page, the jobs page must either appear at the top of the search results, or the page needs to open automatically.
   

   Immediate “Wows” to Get Their Attention

   The first thing you have to do when the careers/jobs page first opens is to grab visitors’ attention by wowing them within the first 30 seconds. A “wow” is a piece of information or a website feature that is powerful enough to cause an individual to say out loud, “Wow.” In order to qualify as a “wow,” this element should be compelling enough so that they’re willing to provide some basic information like their names and e-mail addresses. Under this “wow” feature, here are some of the elements that your page should contain.

10. Firm Information. It provides “wow” firm information like significant growth in stock price, the industry rank of your firm’s sales, awards won, listings of well-known customers, or any information about the firm that proves that you dominate your market or industry.
11. Product Information. It profiles and provides examples of your breakthrough new products, product features, technologies, or innovations.
12. Something Funny or Interesting. The careers page contains something that is funny, such as a humorous top 10 list or listing of famous people that use your product.
13. A Memorable Web Function or Technology. The careers page should give visitors a chance to experience an exciting capability of the webpage. A memorable function might include a “boss button” that you can push/click on the screen that immediately changes the screen to an Excel spreadsheet (so that if your boss walks in, he or she won’t know immediately that you are searching for another job). Another example of a memorable function might