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Every organization should have a careers page to advertise their open positions. 

But that’s the bare minimum. 

Your careers page is a golden opportunity to show off what makes your company a great place to work.

So how can you make sure that it’s not just a long list of jobs that might as well be an Excel spreadsheet?

In this article, I'll go over the essentials of a whats makes a good job page and how to elevate the content to really stand out. 

I’ll then take you through some examples of careers pages I like and how I’d improve them further.

What Is A Careers Page?

A careers page is where you bring your full identity as an employer together with all your open positions. Job adverts alone may not give a full overview of your company and are usually scattered across multiple job boards. 

A good careers page goes a long way to attracting the right candidates by providing them with key information about your company before they consider actually becoming applicants.

What's Needed On Your Careers Page?

OK let’s cover the essentials first:

Company overview

By this point, if you have gone through an Employer Value Proposition exercise (see here for how), you should be able to give a great company overview. 

This should cover the nuts and bolts of what your company does, your overall mission, and how you plan to get there. 

For example, my current employer helps companies deliver equipment to their remote employees.

Our mission, however, is to help create a world where geographical boundaries no longer impede great work and collaboration. 

Both of the above statements are true and both are needed to tell the complete story to potential job seekers.

An overview of your company values

Again coming out of the Employer Value Proposition you should have a good idea of what kind of applicants you’re seeking to attract. 

By including an overview of your values, you’re signaling the expectations and the rules of engagement in your company. Prospective candidates can decide if this speaks to them or not.

For example, Amazon display their Leadership Principles, one of which is "Have backbone, disagree and commit". This shows potential candidates that the company is not looking for consensus, only to commit to the mission. 

To some this may seem aggressive, to others exactly what they’re looking for.

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Stay up-to-date on all things HR & leadership.

An overview of your benefits 

While the market keeps going back and forth between not wanting to focus on benefits, vs only focusing on them, I think they’re good to mention—especially if you’re recruiting globally. 

Benefits reassure job seekers that your company has thought of them as people, not just as employees, for example supporting mental health, well-being, or development.

A list of all your open jobs 

Almost goes without saying but you’d be surprised. Keeping your list of open positions fresh ensures that people can explore what best suits them or someone they know.

Most modern applicant tracking systems integrate with web pages, or they themselves can host the careers page and sort jobs per department or location for easier browsing. 

Also making sure all your job descriptions follow a good consistent format will help candidates navigate through the content better.

Tone of voice

Lastly, all of the above needs to be consistent with your company's tone of voice (get marketing to help you with this if need be) as it needs to truly be a reflection of your employer brand and the opportunities you have.

How To Elevate Your Careers Page

Now we have the basics down we can move on to the more fun stuff. There’re plenty of cool ways to spice up your careers page(s), show off your employer brand, and ensure you attract the right candidates.

How-to-elevate-your-careers-page

Some of my favorites include:

"Life at [your company]" 

If you’re just starting your company journey you may not have enough content here, but it is something to keep in mind to highlight later on. 

This is where you really get to show off your company culture, how you deliver the mission, and live and breathe your values. 

People spend a lot of their lives at work, show them what it can look like—perhaps a few photos of where you had social gatherings or work sessions with the team.

Overview of your hiring process

It’s always a good idea to strive for a standardized hiring process—be it company-wide, per department, or even per role. 

This ensures that you can compare candidates directly and having a standardized process has shown to also decrease unconscious bias. 

"Structured interviews can be time-consuming. Utilizing advanced recruiting software can streamline this process, providing candidates with a clear roadmap of what to expect.That way they know what potential time commitments are necessary.

Highlight some of your employees or teams

People are naturally curious about each other. Giving insights into your team members (basically faces to your brand) is a proven marketing technique to draw in applicants/customers. 

Look to highlight some success stories of how a career can develop at your organization and show off the amazing people that work for you (here are some fun employee recognition ideas)!

Diversity, equity and inclusion statement

This is not the time for checking boxes, but a true commitment to prospective candidates that you understand what being an "equal opportunity employer" means.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) work

If you engage in any CSR work this is a great place to talk about it.

Do you give your employees time off for volunteering? Show off what they did and how you connected them with volunteering opportunities. Do you donate your used equipment? Talk about that.

Interactivity

Interactivity can naturally draw in applicants and gets them to interact with your company before they’ve even received their first email from you. 

You might want to start simple, such as a map of where you have colleagues or offices that people can hover over to see who is where. Perhaps you can include some videos of employees talking about their employee experience.

Or, if you want to go all out, why not create a really quick game guiding candidates through the application experience? (I have not seen anyone do that on the careers page yet, but I saw this amazing CV years ago that has stayed with me).

Careers Page Examples

Let's dissect some examples of great careers pages with specific examples on what makes them great and areas of improvement (nothing is ever perfect):

Twitch Careers

Full transparency—I used to work at Twitch and loved the careers page we had there. It oozes Twitch's personality. 

Visually, it’s bold and loud so immediately speaks to people that are OK with that. There is a good navigation menu at the top and bottom and also separate headings for The Blog, Early Careers, and Equity and Inclusion. It also starts to introduce you to the company jargon and language in a non-intimidating manner.

Improvements: While purple is a good colour, perhaps helping people with a visual impairment by having other contrast options would be nice. Additionally, more emphasis on the values and the mission would welcome people to the matter at hand rather than just the flashy visuals.

twitch career page screenshot
Twitch’s careers page is bold and captures their personality.

Critical Mass

I came across this careers page when researching for a careers page I was building previously. 

I like the bold, simple design and how they focus in on the values and highlight them in a few different ways, as well as what the company gives back to the employees. Note the slick video that shows off those lovely offices as well.

Improvements: They go too all-in on values and therefore miss a trick such as highlighting some of the amazing work their employees have done already (only the seniors are highlighted) or anything about DE&I or CSR.

critical mass career page screenshot
Critical Mass’ career page does a good job of displaying their values.

Deepmind

This is interesting because they include a lot of information upfront about the culture, diversity, values, and teams. There is a general open roles button towards the top and very natural filtered navigation towards the bottom with all the teams highlighted.

Overall the navigation is really well done and leads the reader through the information easily (although spacing could be worked on, but I am not a web designer).

Improvements: they assume candidates have already looked at the "about" page on the general company website, so it doesn't go into enough detail about what the company actually does.

deep mind career page screenshot
Deepmind’s careers page displays a lot of information effectively.

Personio

OK this is an example of one I don’t rate so highly. One thing I do like, however, is the inclusion of the overview of the hiring process. It’s really helpful to candidates to understand what they are about to go through.

But beyond that, while undoubtedly an attractive page with some nice elements, IMHO they’ve inadvertently hidden away the actual jobs and the important information.

For example, it is interesting to highlight how many km are driven on company scooters (although they are an HR Tech company), it would be more useful for someone to have the information on the company and the values upfront, not hidden away behind pages.

There is a video, which is great for interactivity, but it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting in introducing the whole of the company. 

The video should be another way applicants discover what it's like to work at your company, not the main way. It is also heavily image-driven and you don't want to have your content look minuscule compared to the images you have.

Overall the home careers page seems to have a "bit of everything" approach with office highlights, events etc. If this is the company you want to build, focusing on stats and numbers, by all means display that!

personio career page screenshot
Personio’s careers page is attractive but misses some key components.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to look at the list of things to include and feel like you have way too much information to write, review and present to the candidates, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

However, this is a really important step—you are opening the door to your company so applicants can come in and see if this is a place for them. 

Collaborate with the leadership in your company, work with marketing, and go through the list. 

If you don’t have enough content for a specific point—do as much as you can to show what your company deems as important and make a note to work on the rest. 

As ever good luck, and reach out with any questions.

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By Mariya Hristova

Mariya is a talent acquisition professional turned HR leader with experience in large corporates and start-ups. She has 10+ years of experience recruiting all over the world across many different industries, specialising in market entries, expansion, or scaling projects. She is of the firm belief that great candidate and empoyee experiences are not just a luxury, but a must. Currently she is the People Lead at Focaldata.