Career Sites still play a central role in talent acquisition, but are they evolving quickly enough? With many employers still working in career site redevelopment cycles that take years rather than months, are they keeping pace with candidate expectations and rapid advances in technology?
My guest this week is Bas van de Haterd, who is returning to the show to give us his annual update on the career site research he has been running for the past 18 years. The latest edition looks at 100 data points across the careers sites of 550 large employers to determine the key trends and just how quickly career sites are evolving.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What does the career site landscape of 2025 look like?
• What’s new, what’s getting worse, what’s getting better
• Rethinking Job advert design
• Ghosting
• The role of corporate podcasts
• How Conversational AI is killing legacy chatbots
• The one thing employers can do to radically improve their results
• What does the future look like
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:30]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 672 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Career sites still play a central role in talent acquisition, but are they evolving quickly enough? With many employers still working in a career site redevelopment cycle that can take years rather than months, are they keeping pace with candidate expectations and rapid advances in technology? My guest this week is Dutch consultant Bas van de Haterd, who’s returning to the show to give us his annual update on the career site research he’s been running for the last 18 years. The latest edition looks at 100 data points across the career sites of 550 large employers to determine the key trends and just how quickly career sites are evolving. Hi Bas, and welcome back to the podcast.
Bas van de Haterd [00:02:23]:
Great to be here, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:25]:
Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do if people haven’t come across your work before?
Bas van de Haterd [00:02:33]:
My name is Bas van de Haterd. I am a Dutchman, as you might recall from my name, and I, among other things, do the biggest career sites research in the Netherlands. I organize events around that. I give speeches all over the world. I wrote a few books, one with Kevin Wheeler, which you interviewed us about last year. And I actually also started a new company called TA Audit Institute, but that’s only right now in the Netherlands, active, so that’s probably not the Most interesting thing to talk about yet.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
I’m sure it is, I’m sure it is, I’m sure it is. But let’s talk about the career site research because you recently published the. The latest report. Just give people a bit of a sense of, you know, long this has been going on for and sort of how in depth you do your research on this.
Bas van de Haterd [00:03:25]:
Yeah, this is actually the 18th year that we’re doing this, so you might say we’ve become mature. There’s 550 of the biggest employers in the Netherlands in here. So think shelf, think unilever, think major hospitals, etc. Etc. All the government. There’s over a hundred data points on everything on the site itself and the application process.
Matt Alder [00:03:51]:
So obviously over 18 years, career sites have evolved somewhat. What’s changed about what you’re looking for? What are the sort of the latest additions to the research in terms of the data points that you’re measuring?
Bas van de Haterd [00:04:02]:
Well, actually we’ve been taking more out of there than we’ve been putting in the last couple of years. So, for example, I don’t measure anything about social media anymore because social media just isn’t that important anymore in the candidate journey. Having your own channels, etc. Etc. Asking questions on social media, we don’t do that anymore. But for example, podcasts have become a part of the research in recent years. We’ve been measuring a lot more on actually the representation. So we’ve been looking on photos and how many minorities do you have on photos? And if you look at the things that we expect in a job ad, for example, is the job possible to do remote or not? And just those small things?
Matt Alder [00:04:55]:
Absolutely. So give us an overview of this year’s results. What was good, what was bad? What does the world of career sites look like at the moment?
Bas van de Haterd [00:05:04]:
Well, it’s really annoying to say, but not that much has changed. And career sites, of course, you renew them like every five, six years. In general, there’s small updates, so things are not that different. So when we look at the difference, I, for example, found that the number of chatbots on career sites actually dropped, but also the number of chatbots deemed really bad dropped. Mobile getting a little bit better, but you’d expect it to be really good by now. You expect everybody to have like a genuine mobile apply and expect. Don’t assume people have a CV on their phone. Still not the case. I’m still surprised how little effort is put into job ad design. It’s mainly still text, which I don’t get. You know, when’s the last time you bought, I don’t know, a vacuum cleaner without any photos of actually seeing it. It’s an ad. And I find that inconsistencies are getting worse. Like, why don’t you represent the same data the same way on different parts of your website? I have found that the number of multilingual websites are dropping. So more and more companies are saying, oh, let’s just do it in Dutch or let’s just do it in English, but let’s not give people the opportunity to choose. And weirdly enough, more ghosting than ever.
Matt Alder [00:06:43]:
Absolutely. Just, just give people a sense of how you measure ghosting or spot ghosting when you’re, when you’re sort of doing this research.
Bas van de Haterd [00:06:50]:
Oh, we’re simply doing a mystery application. So I hire students who do the work for me every summer. They apply to one job on the careers website with a really terrible resume in order to get rejected as fast as we possibly can. And we just measure, like, how fast, what’s the response time and do we get a response? What’s the quality of the response? So we also look at things like, did they write my name correct? Quality of response, but also did they tell me, you know, basically we are open wide for giving us a reason why we don’t qualify. Basically you really need some experience and you don’t have it.
Matt Alder [00:07:35]:
Absolutely. And by ghosting, do you mean that there was no reply at all?
Bas van de Haterd [00:07:40]:
There’s no reply at all.
Matt Alder [00:07:42]:
Wow. Not even an acknowledgment in the application or anything like that?
Bas van de Haterd [00:07:45]:
Well, the auto reply, there’s an auto reply like, oh, you’ve applied, but to actually have closure like you’re rejected, there’s no reply at all. That’s what ghosting means for me.
Matt Alder [00:07:58]:
So as ever with career sites, some kind of incremental change, obviously a few surprising things there. What was the most positive thing that you saw? Because I think career sites can be incredibly frustrating, as you will well know. What were the sort of the positive things that came out of the research this time?
Bas van de Haterd [00:08:14]:
The most positive, I think, is the diversity in photographs that had a really sharp drop for some reason a few years ago and we’re now back at decent levels. And what I call fully white career websites are now is now back to only a quarter. I still think it’s a quarter too much, but at least it’s back to where it was. And if you look at, for example, salary in job ads, it’s over 60% now, 64% in total.
Matt Alder [00:08:49]:
Wow. Is that driven by any kind of Legislation in the Netherlands or is that just companies moving in that direction?
Bas van de Haterd [00:08:56]:
That’s companies moving into that direction because we have the most tight labor market ever. And people like me who keep saying, put it in there and you’ll see an increase. I actually had a consulting gig two years ago or something and they were like, how do we improve the number of job applicants because we’ve got enough viewers, but they don’t apply. And I’m like, let’s start with putting your salary in there. They’re like, no, management will not do that. I’m like, thank you very much. Yeah, and what else can we do? I’m like, absolutely nothing. This consulting gig is over.
Matt Alder [00:09:59]:
You mentioned podcasts there. What sort of proportion of employers had podcasts? And what, what were Those podcasts?
Bas van de Haterd [00:10:11]:
About 22% link to a podcast. I’m not saying they’re not more that have it, but 22% have them on their careers websites. And of those 22%, it’s 18 have a podcast about what it’s like to work here, 37 have a vision on their industry, the market. 28% have a combination of those and 17% just linked to their product podcast.
Matt Alder [00:10:43]:
22%, that’s quite a significant number. I think it’s fantastic. But I’m a bit, I’m a bit wise that people are being that kind of forward thinking when it comes to audio.
Bas van de Haterd [00:10:53]:
No, once again, and here I can’t take any credit. We’ve got a guy called Marco Dallmayo who’s like one of the employer branding voices in the Netherlands and he’s such a big podcast believer that he introduced podcasts at Just E Takeaway where he was interim and all kinds of companies where he’s worked and he’s been talking on events. And then, you know, it has to do with one guy usually or a few of them taking the initiative, actually doing it, showing results, speaking on it at the events. And I actually know that one of our biggest employers was looking at doing unique podcast for specific jobs. So a podcast had jobs which were high volume, very often open, and they would simply do a podcast with people doing that job. Like, how cool is it to be? Well, I can’t mention the job without mentioning the employer, but how cool is it to be a train conductor? Or why are you a technical engineer or an electrical engineer on trains?
Matt Alder [00:12:06]:
Yeah, no, I think that that makes perfect sense. I’ve seen some great podcasts like that, you know, really sort of diving deep into the subject matter and, and appealing to people who want that job. So that’s fantastic to see. Picking up on the point about chatbots there, because I know this is something that surprised you, that the number of chatbots actually went down two bits to this. First question, why do you think that is? And then second question, is this just the calm before the conversational AI storm hits the world of career science?
Bas van de Haterd [00:12:39]:
Second question, first. Yes, I think it’s the calm before the storm. What I think happened here is that because the number of terrible chatbots dropped as well, I think that people started seeing what chatbots could actually do, felt ashamed about what theirs could do, and basically killed it. But then, because you can’t just change it, because then, you know, some of them will say it’s admitting that you made the wrong technological decision. I simply say, you’re learning. But a lot of these companies are afraid to step into it. You know, they were a first mover, now they have to kill it. Let’s not be a first mover again.
Matt Alder [00:13:26]:
They probably won an award for it or something, maybe.
Bas van de Haterd [00:13:30]:
I actually know that at one of my consultant clients, actually, I was asked to write a report why they should kill their chatbot because they had a really good functioning one. Then it came in and said, listen, we bought this chatbot technology, TA must use it. And then it didn’t work because it didn’t understand anything about ta and you know, it was terribly programmable and it didn’t understand synonyms and stuff like that. So. And there I know that specific company, they were like, well, there’s really great AI TA specific chatbots out there, but it just won’t let us buy it.
Matt Alder [00:14:12]:
Yeah, that’s probably a common issue. But, you know, it’s interesting that obviously that’s the. They’re the lines that people are thinking on in terms of how can we switch this to conversational AI rather than those kind of pre scripted chatbots that everyone was. Everyone was using. How else do you think AI might affect the kind of the progress of career sites?
Bas van de Haterd [00:14:32]:
Honestly, I don’t think for the foreseeable future, not that much. This might sound really weird, but I haven’t seen that much. I mean, maybe in the job search, like upload your resume and we’ll present to you the right jobs. Although the only company which has that in the Netherlands. And they, they, they actually use an American tool which is terrible for Dutch. So I live in a village called Sust and we have a similar village called Sust in Germany. So it refused to give me any Dutch jobs, even though literally their headquarters is five miles from my house.
Matt Alder [00:15:21]:
Nightmare.
Bas van de Haterd [00:15:22]:
And it would only give me jobs in Bavaria. And it didn’t recognize that my resume was in Dutch, even though it says it understood Dutch. So, you know, and I used a resume where I was a junior recruiter 15 years ago and at no point, and it only gave me intern jobs and junior jobs. I’m like, well, if I’ve been a junior recruiter for 15 years, you might want to give me something meatier.
Matt Alder [00:15:50]:
Yeah. So doing kind of doing more harm than. More harm than good. Really?
Bas van de Haterd [00:15:53]:
Yeah. So there’s an opportunity there right now. Not that much what I do think, but that’s. Is it career side or is it the other end? I think job ad writing tools will seriously increase the quality of job ads.
Matt Alder [00:16:10]:
Yeah, no, I completely, I completely agree. And do you think that, you know, one of the issues is that, you know, the way career sites are built, are planned? You know, you kind of mentioned this sort of five or six year cycle. Is that appropriate anymore? With technology moving so quickly, do we need to kind of rethink how career sites are overhauled and where they fit and what kind of happens with them?
Bas van de Haterd [00:16:34]:
I think actually the best and the most in the Netherlands, the biggest employers or the best employers on career sites in the Netherlands have done that a long time ago. They have yearly or by two or three updates a year, that’s. And then every five years they do a complete and total overhaul, but it’s not a fixed project anymore. So I think the employers who have a TA leader who takes this seriously and who basically just have a major problem attracting people, they fix this. Like I said, there are 550 of them in there and they all have a different history. Right. If you look at the career sites for Apple and Google or Facebook, they suck. They’re terrible. And yet they don’t have a problem finding people who want to work for them because they have an amazing employer, brand or people, at least people think they do.
Matt Alder [00:17:32]:
Yeah. It’s interesting for people who are kind of looking at their career site at the moment, what would you sort of. You mentioned a few of these already, but what would your top tips be for, you know, bringing their career site up to sort of 20, 25 standards?
Bas van de Haterd [00:17:48]:
It all, of course, depends on your budget. But there are two things which I think you should focus on. First of all, your ATS is part of your job site. Make sure it’s integrated well. Do not allow if you hit apply to go to a completely different vibe, a different website, etc. There’s no reason for that. Second of all, start at the job ad. Start by designing a job ad like a commercial ad for the vacuum cleaner or car or whatever. Use quotes, use data, use graphs, use photos, use more photos, use perhaps videos. Design the job ad like you want to seduce people. Put all your employer brand content in snackable ways in there. And with snackable. I mean I was actually at a meeting yesterday and those employer brand guy here in the Netherlands said yeah, we used to make employer brand videos of three minutes and right now if I suggest that we put it on 30 seconds, people from my clients say that long. So you need, you know, get with the program, put small 30 second TikTok like videos on your job ads and make sure, just make sure that it’s good on mobile too.
Matt Alder [00:19:14]:
So final question. Where can people find and read the.
Bas van de Haterd [00:19:18]:
Research the researchers previously shared in recruiting Brainfood? But there’s a link on DigitalWerve NL, which probably for the English speakers is a hell to navigate because it’s all in Dutch. Sorry about that guys. And if you just send me an email or LinkedIn message, I will simply send you the report.
Matt Alder [00:19:43]:
If you want to Bas, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bas van de Haterd [00:19:47]:
Always a pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:19:49]:
My thanks to Bas. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com or also on that site. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on 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.
