Careers Sites continue to be a much-neglected aspect of recruitment marketing. The fact that they receive so little attention has always been a pet hate of mine. Careers Sites are critical. They are also being required to do more heavy lifting than ever before, with the ever-increasing levels of interest employers are getting in their open jobs, ongoing talent shortages in specific markets and the need to showcase effective, authentic employer brands.
So what can employers do to make their careers sites fit for purpose? My guest this week is Bas Van de Haterd, a consultant and leading global expert on careers site. Bas publishes some annual research in this area and has some hugely valuable insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ How the market has developed
▪ What makes a good careers site
▪ The importance of total experience
▪ Why you shouldn’t let your ATS dictate your application experience
▪ Careers Site Systems and middleware
▪ Who is doing this well?
▪ What to focus on first
▪ The future of careers sites
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Phenom, the global leader in talent experience management. A single platform solution that’s built on artificial intelligence, Phenom delivers personalization, automation and accuracy throughout the entire talent life cycle. As a result, employers improve their talent acquisition and talent management efforts by helping candidates and employees find the right job. Recruiters identify and engage the right talent and management, optimize HR strategy, process and spend. Visit phenom.com and Phenom is spelt P H E N o M to learn how you can transform the talent experience today.
Matt Alder [00:01:06]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 322 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Career sites continue to be a much neglected aspect of recruitment marketing. The fact they receive so little attention has always been a pet hate of mine. Career sites are critical. They’re also being required to do more heavy lifting than ever before with the ever increasing levels of interest employers are getting in their open jobs, ongoing talent shortages in specific markets, and the need to showcase effective, authentic employer brands. So what can employers do to make their career sites fit for purpose? My guest this week is Bas Van de Haterd, a consultant and leading global expert on career sites. Bas publishes some annual research in this area and has some hugely valuable insights to share. Hi Bas, and welcome back to the podcast.
Bas van de Haterd [00:02:11]:
Hi Matt, and always a pleasure to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
And always a pleasure to have you. For the people who may not know you, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bas van de Haterd [00:02:22]:
Well, my name is Bas Van der Haterd and I’m a Dutch consultant on actually mainly on improving recruitment. And I focus on two things. The one is corporate career sites and the other one is digital assessment tools. Because if you actually are really good at the first thing, corporate career sites, you usually have way too many qualified applicants and you need a better way to get the really good qualified applicants in there. But we talked about those things for a couple of podcasts already. So let’s focus on the career sites today. Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:57]:
Absolutely. So yeah, I think this is the fourth time you’ve been on the podcast actually, and the last couple of times we’ve been talking about assessment and assessment technology and some of the the testing that you were doing with the newer things that were coming through. But we haven’t actually had a conversation with you about career sites for four years now. So I suppose the first question to ask you is what’s changed what’s changed with career sites in the last four years?
Bas van de Haterd [00:03:25]:
Well, I think the main thing I’ve seen changing is. Well, let’s start with. I’m mainly looking at Dutch career sites and this year I also looked at some of the British and the US career sites. Sorry, I can’t look at the German and the French because I just don’t speak those languages good enough. But. And I see that the Dutch career sites are really ahead of a lot of the international ones. And what I’ve seen change in the Dutch career sites mainly is the mobile experience. It’s been upgraded so much, Matt, and I’m really surprised at how non mobile accessible a lot of the international ones are, to be honest.
Matt Alder [00:04:11]:
It’s probably worth talking a little bit about the research that you do because you do some sort of very scientific research every year into the best Dutch career sites. That’s what you’ve sort of been looking at in terms of other countries. So tell us about your research and the methodology and also tell us what does a good career site look like?
Bas van de Haterd [00:04:29]:
Well, the methodology is that I look in non Covid times. I changed it a bit this year at all the major employers in the Netherlands. That’s like 500, 600. This year I looked at about 50 because I. Well, like many, I needed to save some money and it takes time to review them all. So we look at all of them and we look at just over 100 data points. That means is content there? Is it accessible? We look at job descriptions, what’s in there, how are they designed? We look at the application process and we actually apply at all of these companies and look to be rejected. Are we rejected? How are we rejected? What was. No, was it, sorry, you’re just not good enough? Or did they actually show that they read a resume? And we also ask a question on Facebook and see if it gets answered. All those kinds of things. Basically everything that every research says a candidate wants and we put it all in there. So over 100 data points. What does good look like? Well, it starts with, of course it needs to be designed decently, but what you see is good is a total experience. And the one thing I’ve seen improving so much over the last couple of years, Matt, is the total experience. That means it’s not just really great videos, it’s not just a really beautiful design, which I see in the UK quite often. It’s designed perfectly until you click on a job description. And then all of a sudden it’s the ATS which takes over, which has no design, no usability. And there’s a major difference. In the Netherlands, I see those vacancies, beautifully designed in a way that is inviting to read them, has a good flow in it. And then you can actually also go to the application process, which the fun thing is we’ve seen the number of registrations, basically the teleo and stuff like that, drop dramatically over the last couple of years. And right now there’s actually no company in the Netherlands which even expects to be nominated if they’re still using teleo. They literally tell me, you know, our application process is so bad that I assume I can’t be nominated until I get this out. Right.
Matt Alder [00:07:14]:
And what are you seeing in the UK and US sites? Are you still seeing those mistakes being, being made?
Bas van de Haterd [00:07:21]:
There’s a difference between the UK and the US in the. Let’s start with a positive. I’ve seen in the US awesome examples of graduate recruitment which I have not seen in the Netherlands or anywhere in the world, which is. So they’ve got all these internships. You can look for what you’re looking, basically the type of internship and they will show you when you finish this. In America they have, for example, summer internships. When you finish this summer internship, you will have learned X, Y and Z. So they’re really focusing on why should somebody do an internship for free? Usually for, for us, where is it offered, which offices, what are you going to learn during this? And you could actually at some websites search for I want to develop my leadership skills or my analytical skills. And they would show you the internships which focus on helping you develop those skills, which is just amazing. I got to tell you, the Americans are so much ahead of us in graduate recruitment. Yet if you look at their professional recruitment or high volume recruitment, usually it’s really beautiful. There are great pictures, excellent videos. But the application process, which starts actually at the job description, is usually really bad. The process itself is completely terrible. I mean, going through field after field after field, basically completely rewriting your resume in their ATS and then having to upload the resume afterwards anyway. Yeah, it’s. It’s just ridiculous, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:09:05]:
It drives me mad as well. It’s still a very, very common issue that the, the application process is dictated to by the ats and the ATS seems like it’s come from a another era. Just so difficult to, so difficult to fill out.
Bas van de Haterd [00:09:19]:
And it doesn’t have to be. Matt, sorry to interrupt you.
Matt Alder [00:09:22]:
You just, you took the words out of. It doesn’t have to be this way. So what would Be your advice to those companies who feel that they’re chained to their ATS and they have no choice in terms of the process or the experience that they’re offering on their career site.
Bas van de Haterd [00:09:40]:
Well, there are two things. It depends on your ats, to be honest. If you’re using Teleo, there are some middleware you can put in there. Actually, TextKernel built a tool which makes Teleo work for the candidate. I mean, it’s ridiculous that you have to spend a lot of money on a piece of middleware to make your ATS work for the candidate, but they’ve actually built this tool and I’ve seen it used in Switzerland and I think in Austria, where you simply upload your resume and text kernel will give you back a nicely designed field like, okay, this is what we got out of your resume. Is it what you, you know, did we extract all the information? Right, yeah, apply and they have build it so that their software is going through the enormous annoying process of Telayo. They will build you, they will make your registration go, they will give you a password, they will actually there’s apparently a way in Taleo to not have to verify your email address and they build that in. So there’s a piece of middleware if you’re using Teleo, I’m not sure, probably workday as well. If you’re using one of the other ats, usually you just implemented it poorly. There is almost always an API. You can get your developer to build it the right way. And I’ve seen this happen so many times. And maybe we have really awesome agencies, although I know a few of them have awesome agencies in the UK as well. But so you, you can build it, you just have to ask it. I mean, I literally at some point with one of my clients changed from the iframe to the API based form simply to make sure that we got. We didn’t ask all irrelevant information. We didn’t need anyway because the standardized form said we need like 15 fields. And I’m like, well, nobody ever looks at 12 of them. We want your name, we want your email address and we want your resume. Why do I need more than that? So it’s also about the way you implement your ats. And to be honest, it’s always possible. Either you have an agency who can help you with it, or you should maybe change your agencies or you should hire somebody who knows what they’re doing and can tell your agency how they can do it.
Matt Alder [00:12:26]:
I mean, absolutely. I think that’s the. I suppose that’s the frustrating thing about it is a, it’s a very, very common problem. It delivers a terrible candidate experience which is going to, you know, seriously affect not just the employer’s employer brand, but, but also the results they’re getting from their, from their talent acquisition activities, their talent acquisition strategy.
Bas van de Haterd [00:12:48]:
I’ve actually seen people who got the registration form out of their organizations see a 30% increase of number of applications being finished. That’s 30% of your applicants you’re throwing away. Imagine going to your cost per hire and thinking, I can lower this by 30%.
Matt Alder [00:13:12]:
So it’s a problem that can be, problem that can be solved with technology or different implementations. You mentioned text kernel. There’s also companies like attrax who run career site systems that deal with these kind of issues. So the solution is out there and it’s certainly something that employers need to think about when it comes to career sites. But I suppose my next question around what good looks like is let’s talk about content for a minute. So we’ve talked about the experience. What are you seeing in terms of. And you mentioned what some of the US companies are doing in early careers. What are you seeing that’s good in terms of career site content or what should good career site content.
Bas van de Haterd [00:13:56]:
Well, it should be bite sized and I’m not even. The thing is, Matt, 80 to 90% of all your traffic comes on your job description, your vacancy itself. So basically people don’t even see the content. Research from Jerry Crispin at Career Crossroads shows that a lot of the people only start looking at your employer branding content after they’ve been invited to an interview. Because recruiters are good at ghosting, just like candidates. So. But they do look at your job and your job description. So the content should be bite sized and presented at the job, at the job description. To give you what I think is a really cool example which, which was I saw for one of the first times this year really integrated. And we’re not talking about a massive company here, we’re talking about their name is Van Heer Shoes, which is a shoe discounter, a low end, not even that big shoe discounter. Right. And they’ve built beautiful job descriptions, vacancies where they actually now have a circle diagram with types of work in there with percentages of your time you will be spending on a part of the job. So they’re like 25% of your time you’re actually selling shoes, 30% of your time you’re actually restocking the shelves. And right now they added that 5% of your time you’re spending enforcing Covid regulation regulations. I mean that’s quality content about the job. Also in their job description then they really personalize them and I love that they’re like, are you ready to work six feet from Chantal and Marcel? You know, things like that. So every job has actually a reference to the names of your future colleagues in them. That’s really cool.
Matt Alder [00:15:57]:
Give us some more names of companies who are doing this really well. We’ve sort of dwelled a bit on things that aren’t so good. But what other employers have you seen who’ve got great career sites that people should take a look at?
Bas van de Haterd [00:16:08]:
Well, the winner of my award this year is bol.com which is the Dutch Amazon. They also have an international career site so everybody can see them. They also have an awesome vacancy design, really smooth going application process and they’re actually expanding on employer branding content. And what I love for their employer branding content is the different types of content they provide. So they are not fully video, although they have videos. They’ve got a podcasting series on the future of digital retail. They’ve got photos, they got 360 degree, 360 angle photos of all the locations you might be going to work. They got written stories, they got blogs. So they give, they deliver content in every form that somebody might like it. Another awesome website is the ns which is the Dutch Railways. They won my award last year and the Railways are actually one of the biggest retail employers as well. And one of the things they have, for example, is calculate your own salary because it depends on your age and the number of hours you’re willing to work. You put those two in there. It’s all restricted anyway. So any teen, any student can actually calculate how many, how much money am I going to make every month if I’m going to take a certain job instead of having to put it down in full time equivalents and people have to recalculate it themselves, etc. So those are two really good examples. Another really nice example of vacancy design and the salary calculator is for example, Albert Hein, the Dutch biggest supermarket chain.
Matt Alder [00:18:03]:
There’ll be lots of people listening who are very unhappy with their career site. But maybe in a position where they just don’t know where to start in terms of, in terms of making it better. They might have budget constraints or resource constraints. What would your advice be to people who want to improve their career site? Where should they put their focus first?
Bas van de Haterd [00:18:27]:
Well, it depends of course on a lot of factors Matt, I mean it’s, I know this sounds really the consulting in me but consulted in me but it’s if you’re hiring for volume you’ll have different aspects and if you’re hiring for those still coveted data or data scientists or IT people. But the one thing I would always start is write decent job descriptions, start writing decent job descriptions, look at them again and again, then think, you know, how can I present these? How can I use some visual effects that people actually want to read them? And the other thing, but this is if you’re bound with budget a lot harder. The mobile experience. Because I have yet to see a website where less than 50% of all your traffic is mobile. If you’re redesigning something, start mobile first design. And we’ve seen some excellent developments there as well over the past few years. I mean those websites and especially the jobs. Because if you’re on a mobile you’re not even going to look at much employee branding content. You’re going to look at the job descriptions, you want to read it. But as you know on a job, you know, if you’re writing 650, 750 words, that’s should be your average job description length. It can still look like a book on a mobile. So if you design it really nice when you got bite sized data on it, it’s really cool. And we’ve now seen a new design introduced by Ascend, which is one of our energy companies, which has a swiping design so you can instead of scrolling through them and having to open the different aspects of your job like your job requirements and your responsibilities, they with them you can swipe through them. So they build it block size, bite size. You have one perfectly fitting section of job requirements. You swipe left, you get responsibilities, you swipe left, you get renumeration, you swipe left, you get the application process, you swipe left and you push up and push apply.
Matt Alder [00:20:50]:
Final question, as we said, it’s, it’s four years since you and me last had a conversation about career sites. What does the future look like if we have this conversation again in 4 years time? What are we, what are we going to be talking about? What can you see happening in the next few years when it comes to career sites?
Bas van de Haterd [00:21:08]:
Well, I think I’ve actually seen a glimpse of the future and it’s not working perfectly yet, but it’s really looking good. I’ve seen an interactive interface. So not a career site itself. I mean there’s a career site behind it, but a sort of a chatbot where you can do anything in it. So you don’t have to leave their chatbot, sort of chatbot to actually apply. So you have a conversational interface where the bot asks you, you know, what type of job are you looking for? Employer branding content, or are you looking to learn more about our company? Or are you actually looking, looking for a job? What type of jobs are you looking for? And you can actually go to the entire application process within the chatbot as well. So within the bot, they ask you at some point do you have your resume ready if it’s relevant for the job. And that’s the other thing, application processes, that’s adjusted by the job description by the job itself. So this is also a retail organization and they figured, you know, a resume tells me nothing about you when you are going to apply for a job. Selling our jeans, which is basically what they do, jeans or sweaters. So we don’t need a resume. Now if you want to be a recruiter at our main office, we want a resume. So the chatbot asks you, do you have your resume ready? Yeah. Do you want to upload it? No. Should we send you an email that you can later send it to us and we’ll attach it automatically at the back end? So interactive interfaces, I think might start working. And this is because you see in China, WeChat, you know, everything goes through there and application adjusted processes. So make the process fitting for the job you’re hiring for. I think those are two things I now see starting which are going to be much, much bigger in the next couple of years.
Matt Alder [00:23:15]:
Bas, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bas van de Haterd [00:23:17]:
Matt, always Pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:23:19]:
My thanks to Bas. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for for recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
