I have a confession to make: When I first started in HR tech almost 10 years ago, I contributed (unwittingly) to perpetuating a problem. What problem? That the career site was the center of the recruiting universe and talent acquisition teams needed to act like marketers.
Back then, I believed that TA organizations could copy and paste the tactics used by successful marketing teams — and apply those same “best practices” to recruiting. We argued ad nauseam that recruiters should spend less time recruiting and more time doing the things that would magnetically attract more candidates.
Why spend all of your time (and money) on LinkedIn or Indeed or ZipRecruiter chasing purple squirrels? Instead, invest in building your brand through the one channel you own: your career site. Don’t just post and pray. Instead, position your company as an employer of choice — and magically bring those passive purple squirrels to you. Don’t wait for candidates to find you. Instead, whip up dozens (eventually hundreds) of landing pages for specific job families or skills so you (not Indeed) can rank first in Google.
Oh, and once you’ve done all that, make sure to drop lead generation forms everywhere on your 100+ page career site, so you can build talent communities and pipelines, and market to them with sophisticated drip email campaigns.
It was a nice idea. But it’s actually not that effective. Here’s why:
- Your career site simply can’t beat Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, or the very long-tail of niche job boards at SEO. SEO is part and parcel to their business model. They send signals to Google you can’t send. You’ll never beat them for generic “software engineer in Denver” search queries. (Give it a shot — and pat yourself on the back if you’re in the top 20 organic results.) You might beat them for “software engineer jobs at [insert your company].” But you’d probably do that anyway, because Google is smart and understands search context. All in all, the days of more pages and more content equals higher SEO are gone.
- Candidates aren’t consumers — and recruiting isn’t remotely the same as buying a car or a cardigan.Your career site is not Amazon. If you sell shoes, you want to drive as many people as possible to buy those shoes. But if you’re marketing a job (even an evergreen req), your capacity is limited – and too many candidates actually distracts your team. Job seekers rarely passively “shop” for jobs. They don’t add jobs to “carts.” And they typically aren’t interested in hearing from you after they’ve accepted a new job. Jobs aren’t products — and no one’s going to browse your career site like they might Amazon or Target or Walmart. They don’t want more pages and more stuff to browse. They want to find the thing they’re looking for (typically, a job) — and they want to do it fast and apply easily.
- Recruiters aren’t marketers — and they shouldn’t be focusing on marketing work. They barely have enough time for their actual jobs, let alone learning how to build complex campaigns, manage talent communities, or spin up landing pages. Sure, you could hire a marketing team within your recruiting team (I’ve seen some companies do this exceptionally well). But most TA orgs aren’t getting approval for those kinds of resources. And if job seekers found what they needed on your career site – via smarter AI – would they need to be nurtured ongoing, forever? Instead of recruiters doing the content matching, the job matching and the nurturing, what if your career site did that marketing?
Now, I’m not arguing that recruitment marketing as a discipline is useless or that companies should forget about their career sites. Quite the contrary. I am arguing that the discipline can be better used – and in the case of career sites specifically, less today truly can be (a lot) more.
The death — and rebirth — of the career site “platform”.
Unfortunately, the ideas above have tricked this industry into believing more is more.
Hiring software engineers in Tacoma? Better spin up a landing page. Want to tell the story of how your company supports working parents or people with disabilities? Better spin up a new page or microsite. Have a really cool tuition reimbursement program? Yep, you guessed it — time for a new page.
And god forbid your business goes through a rebrand — or, worse, you decide to switch career site vendors. Now, that 100+ page career site you built needs to be… well, re-built.
It’s time to stop the madness — and erase everything we know about career sites. Instead, let’s imagine a different world.
What if instead of dozens of pages, you only needed a few — and those pages dynamically adapted to each visitor? Imagine if someone arrived at your career site and, in just a few clicks, could find everything they needed — all through a simple, experience via conversational AI. Content about your DE&I initiatives? Check. Jobs automatically personalized to their geo-location or resume? Check. Updates on their job application status? Check.
What if your career site could speak dozens of languages — making every visitor feel welcome? Sure, the actual career site could be translated into those languages, too. But why stop there? Imagine if you didn’t have to anticipate every possible language your visitors might speak, and instead the career site experience just adapted on the fly? Like this ⬇️.
What if when qualified candidates landed on your career site, the entire experience was engineered for conversion? Nothing’s worse than spending millions in employer branding, recruitment marketing, and job advertising… only to see 3% of those dollars convert into applicants. Imagine if your career site experience was so simple, so frictionless, and so intuitive that you could 10x your conversion — and maybe even instantly schedule those candidates for an interview after they apply, saving your recruiting team a ton of time.
What if you didn’t need a form for everything — and, instead, your career site could help lead candidates down the right path, at the right time? People don’t like forms. They especially don’t like forms if those forms feel interruptive or poorly timed (raise your hand if you love website pop-ups…). Imagine if candidates could join your talent community, right in the flow of a conversation — no forms or interruptions required.
What if this career site was so easy to build and maintain, it gave your team hours back in their day to focus on the truly important stuff? No one understands the time spent managing (and over-managing) a website like a marketer (...me). Great recruiters, recruitment marketers, and employer brand professionals shouldn’t spend their day making minor, manual updates in some clunky back-end WYSIWYG career site editor that’s supposed to be “drag and drop simple” but never is. Imagine if maintaining your career site didn’t require any maintenance at all — and never cost thousands for the tiniest change orders.
It’s the dawn of the conversational career site.
Recruiting teams and TA leaders: Consider this my mea culpa.
I believed what I said back then. And I still very much believe in well-crafted employee value propositions and employer brands. I still think authentic employer brands built around real, purposeful values — and real employee stories — matter. I do think great recruitment marketers and recruitment marketing agencies play a critical role in helping drive candidate flow and demand.
But I’ve also seen the light on career sites. None of those things above require big, bulky, hard-to-manage career site platforms. Career sites shouldn’t take forever to build (and even more time to update and maintain). They shouldn’t blow your budget. And they shouldn’t create a burden for your team.
They should be beautiful and branded. They should make it easy for candidates to find exactly what they need, right when they need it. They should use AI to put anything someone might need, right at their fingertips, all through a dynamic, intuitive, conversational experience.
Ultimately, they should make the whole dang experience beautifully simple.
And while making things simple can be hard work, we see a future where your career site does most of that hard work for you — not the other way around.
