Your career site is dumb.
I don’t mean “dumb” as a pejorative to be needlessly critical of all the hard work you’ve put into it. I mean it in the literal sense — as in, not smart. Not by today’s technological standards, at least.
For as long as I can remember (which is longer than I care to admit), career sites have essentially been what I call “brochureware”: Pages and pages of happy faces and marketing jargon about “making a difference.” That’s all well and good, but this is the internet. There’s no reason to pick up a brochure, because everything can be personalized to exactly what a person wants, when they want it. So why are we building career sites to feel like one?
There also seems to be this broad misconception that a career site is a “front door" into an organization; a candidate wants to learn more about a company and apply for a job, and the very first thing they do is head over to your career site to decide if they want to apply. You know what they say about selling bridges in Brooklyn; if that sort of candidate experience sounds too good to be true, it’s because it comes from the George C. Parker school of talent acquisition (that is to say, complete hogwash).
The reality is that your career site is almost never going to be the front door into the candidate journey. Yes, I know you built hundreds of pages of content for the sole purpose of driving people to your site, but let’s be realistic here: you’re competing with giant job boards and search engine behemoths — the SEO your career site is driving simply can’t compete. Go ahead, try it! Google a job title and a location and see what comes up. Indeed. LinkedIn. Glassdoor. The native Google Jobs window.
But not you.
This matters because candidates — specifically, those applying for corporate roles — have been beaten down by repeated rejection and it’s created a general malaise where they just click on the top search results (probably Indeed) and go through the motions to fill out as many applications as they can in the shortest amount of time. They’re not going out of their way to find your career site and read the content you spent hours building, because corporate candidates simply don’t care about you unless you show that you care about them first.
So when I say career sites are dumb, here’s what I really mean:
- They’re usually built to be a front door that serves as the starting point for the candidate journey.
- They’re generic, passive, and bloated with content that most candidates will never see — or at least won’t see until after they’ve already applied.
Why are we doing this? It’s actually insane when you think about it. I see a huge opportunity for career site disruption because those two pillars upon which we’ve built career sites for generations are fundamentally wrong.
And I genuinely believe that AI will be the key to fixing them.
AI helps give corporate candidates exactly what they want, when they want it.
When we went about reimagining what career sites could (and should) be, we came to this conclusion: You don’t need 100+ static pages that people can navigate to. You honestly might not even need 10 — you just need a way to serve up the right content at the right time to the right candidate in a language they actually understand.
Simply.
Seamlessly.
Conversationally.
Enter the Conversational Career Site.
On the surface, our Conversational Career Site looks like any other career site. There’s a welcome page, a navigation menu that allows you to click around to a few key pages, and a chat widget. OK, so what’s the big deal? Well, how about this: The pages dynamically adapt and proactively serve up specific content based on what candidates ask in the chat.
“Tell me about your engineering roles.”
“How should I prepare for my interview with your CMO?”
“What is your work from home policy?”
“Send me info on your healthcare benefits.”
Done.
Our conversational AI processes these requests in real time and updates the page you’re on to feature any and all content across your site with info relevant to the query — blogs, videos, PDF guides, anything. And all of that is readable, watchable, and downloadable instantly. You're cutting out the clutter and passivity of traditional career sites and putting your candidates in the driver seat.
Everything they want to know about your career site — and everything you want them to know — is literally right at their fingertips, just a question away. And did I mention the AI can also speak and understand dozens of different languages? Lo acabo de hacer.
This is a career site truly built with the candidate in mind. It’s designed to deliver what they want at precisely the time they want it, not weeks before or weeks after when it’s not relevant anymore. And the best part about it: You still get to tell your employer brand story. When we say “less content” we’re not saying don’t tell those unique stories. Definitely do it! You just also need the right delivery mechanism to tell the right story at the right time.
Gone are the days of overstuffed career sites that deliver a blanket experience and endless content your candidates will never see.
AI helps speak hourly candidates’ language and deliver the right roles, fastest.
It’s easy to treat a career site as a glorified soap box; a megaphone to scream as much corporate jargon and feel-good fluff into as possible. And doing some of that is fine, of course. But shouldn’t we be getting to know the candidate? It’s their career, after-all.
When a candidate hits your career site, the question should be: “Who are you?” And then we figure out what job is best for them at our company.
Earlier I talked about candidates looking for corporate roles primarily seeking out career sites after applying and before interviewing, but the truth is actually the opposite for hourly candidates, who tend to view career sites more before applying so they can develop a better understanding of the small differences between roles and employers within that space. For example, a line cook role at a fast food restaurant is mostly the same across multiple employers, so a candidate could seek out more information on specific benefits to help them make a distinction.
AI helps here, too. When engaging in the chat on our Conversational Career Site, the AI assistant always starts by asking questions about you.
Name, email, phone number, sure. Start with the basics.
But also: What roles are you interested in? What skills do you have? What is important to you?
And just like the AI can serve up unique content, it can also seamlessly populate the most relevant job openings that the candidate can select and apply for right there in the chat. A critical thing here is that our conversational AI doesn’t force the candidate to apply on the employer’s terms. It won’t just blindly serve up roles for a “impact specialist” or something incredibly nebulous. Why would a person ever know what that means? Most career sites approach this stuff in an extremely inaccessible way. But with a conversational AI, you can get to know a candidate on their terms, in their language, in real time, and then deliver them the best jobs.
Screening and interview scheduling happens in this way, too.
In just one conversation, you’ve directed your candidate to the right role for them and helped them apply. Conversion [insert upward pointing arrow here].
AI helps you condense, converse, and convert.
Less site. More careers.
Less site. More conversations.
Conversational Career Sites are built on the basic ideas of getting out of the way and we’ll be here when you’re ready.
You’ll be able to get an understanding of your candidates and some of their likes and dislikes in a quick, intelligent way, then you’ll be able to follow them throughout the process and deliver the right content at the right time. Let the candidate come to you on their terms, through whatever door they please, and then access the content and jobs they need as easily as possible.
Technology has gotten a lot smarter recently. It’s time your career site did, too.
