The HRville guide to...

Sooner or later, those of us with oversight of recruitment will be asked to ‘refresh’ our career sites. ‘Ah,’ people will say stroking their chins. ‘Are we talking evolution or revolution?’ Others will nod sagely, pretending they know what this means in terms of actual decisions.

Anyway, here are our top tips to improving your site. Hope they help!

Buckle up

However well you plan, and however tightly you budget, any project like this will involve some unpleasant surprises.

Best be prepared. If the tech itself doesn’t hiccup, then the copywriter will be ill for a week, the ATS won’t back in to the new design without extra effort, or the Marketing Department will change the brand two weeks before launch without telling anyone.

Assume the worst, and build in loads of contingency.

Plan for years, not months

Plenty of sites buckle under the pressure of tomorrow.

Remember that your site will be asked to function wonderfully (probably) for a few years, so consider future needs as well as today’s. New locations? New job roles? A more complicated graduate application journey?

Ask your internal futurologists (Head of Strategy, perhaps?) where the business is going, and make sure your architecture and content is changeable. (A content management system (CMS) should be behind most of your pages.)

Oh, and assume smartphones and tablets will be the main channels through which people get to your site next year.

Profile your users

Think about your users, and the kind of information they’re going to want to find. Think up typical user profiles and map your architecture accordingly. Better still, get a ‘UX’ (user experience) expert to do it for you.

Don’t base it around a single creative concept

See Point 2. Whilst the creative team might want everything to be based around a single idea that gives everything an aesthetic coherence, this‘ll probably prove to be too restrictive in a year’s time when the creatives have moved on to their next project.

Be creative by all means, but don’t knit yourself a straitjacket.

Use ‘leasable real estate’

A handy design agency term that refers to space – particularly on the home page – that you can adapt according to your needs at any given time.

For example, you might need a banner that talks about IT vacancies when you have them, and when you don’t, the space can be taken up by something else. All preferably delivered by a CMS you can use, rather than a third party or IT function that’s unlikely to be available at short notice when you need it.

Make it different

It doesn’t need to be so different that it’s silly or unusable, but bear in mind that your site should give you a competitive advantage, either in terms of functionality or the way in which it articulates your key recruitment propositions.

Don’t let the UX people confine you to ‘best practice’ if that means there’s precious little distinction between your site and your competitors.  This is still the Race for Talent – you’ll only win it by being faster and smarter than the rest of the field.

Use video

People expect video nowadays. Think about allocating some budget to producing decent ones. It doesn’t need to be filmed in your office, and it doesn’t need to be long. But try to have the content inspired by your employer brand, at least by your key employer value proposition/s.

Talking Heads are an 80s pop group

The days when video meant a shonky film of some graduates shot in your canteen with an echoing soundtrack are gone. ‘Talking Heads’ – single shots of single people filmed from the chest up – are passé now. If budgets are tight do less, but do it better.

Think before you gamify

People seem to think that online is all about gamification now. It isn’t. Don’t ‘gamify’ just for the point of it. Sometimes you’re better investing in writing or photography, or a striking infographic. The youth of today can understand stuff without you having to infantilise it or explain it in such a way that the complication obscures the meaning.

Remember it’s a sales tool

Ultimately, all the decisions you’ll make along the way should be informed by the one thought: ‘Will changing our site in this way help us attract better or more candidates for the right price?’

Don’t forget this most important tip when you’re standing amidst the Marketing bullies, the creative egos and the tech evangelists.

About the author

Andrew Baird

Andrew is the CEO of HRville. He is also Employer Brand Director of Blackbridge Communications, Editorial Director of Professionals in Law and an associate of The Smarty Train. Previously, he was the MD of TCS Advertising.