The corporate careers site has now been with us for 20 years. In that time mobile devices and social media have revolutionised the way we experience the internet, and many employers have significantly changed the way they think about recruitment and employer branding. Despite this careers sites have changed very little in the same period, design trends have indeed moved on but fundamentality the functionality and user experience of the vast majority of careers sites has remained unchanged for two decades.
I’ve recently researched and published a whitepaper on the future of career sites and wanted to explore the topic further on this week’s podcast. With that in mind, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome Ben Gledhill back to the show. Ben is currently Head of Resourcing for Yodel and has a growing reputation as a Talent Acquisition leader who likes to think differently. Ben has been involved in a number of careers site projects and has some great insights to share.
In the interview we discuss:
• The recruitment marketing challenges that Talent Acquisition professionals face
• The essential digital experience similarities between recruiting and e-commerce
• The role of technology and growing importance of Careers Site Platforms
• Producing compelling content and why it doesn’t have to cost a fortune
• Getting business buy-in for Careers Site transformation
Ben also shares his vision for the future of corporate Careers Sites.
Download The Future Of Careers Site Whitepaper
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Just before we start the show this week, a quick announcement to tell you that I’ve just published a free white paper on the future of corporate career sites. The very first digital marketing project I worked on was building a careers website back in 1999, and I’ve always been frustrated that the level of sophistication of careers websites hasn’t moved on much since then, particularly when you consider the advances made in other areas of talent acquisition. The white paper is based on extensive research, looks at the important role of careers websites, examines what’s been holding them back, and walks through a new model which is finally helping them to evolve. You can access the white paper instantly, no need to register or surrender your email address@www.careerswebsiteguide.com future. That’s www.careerswebsiteguide.Com future.
Matt Alder [00:01:16]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome episode 128 of the recruiting Future podcast. As you just heard in the opening message, I’ve recently published a white paper on the future of career sites. To mark the occasion, this week’s podcast is all about corporate career sites and I’m delighted to welcome Ben Gledhill back to the show. Ben is currently Head of Resourcing at Yodle and has a growing reputation as a talent acquisition leader who likes to think differently. Ben’s been involved in a number of careersight projects and has some great insights to share.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Hi Ben and welcome back to the podcast.
Ben Gledhill [00:01:58]:
Hi Matt, great to be back for the second time. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
Absolutely. Well, a pleasure to have you on the show again. For those of you who don’t know you, could you introduce yourself and also those who may not have heard from you since the last podcast, tell us what you’ve been up to since then.
Ben Gledhill [00:02:14]:
Cool. No worries. So I’m currently the Head of Resourcing at Yodle, carrying out very much what is a transmission transformational role here, looking at everything from people, process and technology. Some of you might know, a couple of years ago I was Head of Recruitment at sofology with the lovely Neil the Sloth. And previous to my role here at Yodel, I was employer branding and Candidate Experience Manager at Manchester Metropolitan University, which was a fantastic role and working in academia and really kind of proving to people that even organizations like universities, which necessarily, necessarily haven’t really been focused on employee branding and kind of the experience really getting the why out there when it Comes to employment, why it’s important for organizations like that to focus on employee branding.
Matt Alder [00:03:08]:
So we’re going to sort of talk about career sites, the current state of career sites and the future of career sites on this week’s show. Before we do though, it might be good just to take a step back and get a little bit of context. So you know, you obviously worked in a few organizations over the last last few years. What, what do you think the main challenges are that in house recruiters are, are facing at the moment, particularly when it comes to recruitment marketing?
Ben Gledhill [00:03:36]:
Sure, that’s, I think that’s a really, really interesting question to kind of kick the debate off. I mean, I think the first one is a lot of people that I speak to at conferences, networking events and whatnot. And there’s always been this kind of monumental battle with our brothers and sisters in marketing in terms of okay, we’ lot of money on our consumer or our customer website. But when it comes to the careers website, we might have a hyperlink at the end of the page or you might have to scroll down to the bottom and there’s something saying here are vacancies. So it’s really kind of promoting and kind of gaining credibility as to why we need a very clean, very candidate focused standalone careers websites. I think as I’ve said on my previous podcast, very much now in today’s world, you know, candidates are customers and customers are candidates. So we need to have that kind of, that same, that same kind of mantra. I think the second one is always going to be budget. You know, good careers websites aren’t necessarily cheap and I think if you are going to build a good one, you do need a good team behind that. But I think the third one is still, in my opinion, I don’t think there are scores of organizations that have nailed what I would call a good careers website. You know, I could probably name ten a penny organizations that still have websites that aren’t mobile optimized or orientated. You still have to go to the third or the fourth page to find a search button and a lot of them are just plain ugly. So yeah, so I think there’s a, certainly a long, long way to go to kind of nail in the kind of the holy grail, if you want to use that phrase.
Matt Alder [00:05:24]:
Yeah, and I mean that’s certainly the, the research that I’ve, the research that I’ve done recently kind of really backs that up and a lot of in house recruitment professionals are actually very unhappy with the career site that they, that they have. I Mean, obviously you sort of highlighted a few of the challenges there. But why, why do you think career sites seem to be so kind of behind the curve when we look at, you know, other, other ways that people sort of do transactions on the web? Why, why are career sites seemingly so backward?
Ben Gledhill [00:05:56]:
I think it’s because, without criticizing the industry too much, I think we’re now starting to come to the realization that recruitment in a roundabout way, as the process isn’t too different from any other transaction that you will be carrying out on the Internet. And yes, I know it’s about a career, there’s behaviors, emotions there. But if you are wanting a digital experience, you will want the same digital experience as when you go on, say boohoo or ASOS or Veri or Amazon or whatever. And we’re still treating careers websites from the same kind of principles as we were kind of 10 or 20 years ago now you’ve still got a poor user experience. The search functions don’t really kind of work that well. And how many companies can truly say, we’ve spoken to our audiences, we’ve spoken to our candidates and we only have content on there that they really want to see or as probably what goes on? Do we presume this is information that people want to see? So I think the whole thinking behind careers websites, we’re still thinking of them as recruitment only platforms rather than kind of looking at what works well in E commerce from that whole kind of user experience perspective.
Matt Alder [00:07:22]:
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Can you sort of perhaps talk us through, you know, let’s think for a second that, you know, if you were designing, you know, the perfect careers website, which I think you probably are at the moment anyway, but if you were designing the perfect careers website, you know, what, how would you go about it? What would be on it? What would it have to do? What would it have to feel like? How would it work?
Ben Gledhill [00:07:46]:
Very insightful. We are designing your careers website. I think for me the first one is with anything to do with recruitment marketing, what is your careers website for? Is it a very simple standalone call to action whereby you just have a list of vacancies they go through to your ATS or your CRM or is it a content rich platform? Is there a lot of interaction on there? Are you going to have gamification? Are you going to have links to various different other bits and pieces and I guess another one that people probably need to think, you know, how much are you going to let your employer brand or your EVP come through? Is it going to Be heavily branded. What do you want the website to say? Because I think, you know, it’s very easy just to say, well, Airbnb have an amazing website. Let’s copy those guys. Or LV have won lots of awards, you know, kind of let’s copy those guys and really actually kind of sit down and say, you know, what does our careers website want? Are we just wanting to hire people? Are we wanting to make people sticky to our brand? Is it going to be that just that very transactional kind of bus stop mentality? Or are we wanting people to visit our careers website site to, as I said, read a blog, look at videos, you know, visit a visit every week compared to every month or quarter when people have vacancies or whatnot.
Matt Alder [00:09:17]:
And what about the technology that sits behind these platforms? I mean, obviously, traditionally, people have kind of extended their ATS to power the, you know, power the job search on a career site. Do you think that that is a.
Matt Alder [00:09:32]:
Good way to go, or should people.
Matt Alder [00:09:33]:
Be looking at alternatives?
Ben Gledhill [00:09:35]:
No, definitely. I mean, I think as somebody who used to be a massive skeptic of technology, but is kind of bitten the bullet and kind of accepted it rather than fighting it, I think you really need to look at some of the solutions out there. So I know we’re going to be partnering with a provider that has almost like an engine behind the front end that can really propel the front end to the users. You can look at metrics, you can very quickly change the skin of your front end. It can link to various social platforms. But there are others out there, for example, CRM. So it’s not just a case of having a careers website. I think companies now need to look a little bit deeper at their tech stack in the same way that a software house would look and kind of say, what does our tech does that look like? Is it just a front end? Is it a front end powered by an engine such as Talent Brew or Farma or some other bits and pieces like that? Does the ATS link directly in? Is it a CRM? I think as time goes on, we need to start not just looking at one element. We need to be looking at that whole technology stack, that whole kind of concept in terms of what can technology do and how can it really help us?
Matt Alder [00:10:55]:
Now, I know that one of the things that you’re passionate about is content. And I saw you do a brilliant, I saw you do a brilliant presentation last year about how you, some of the ways you go about generating content for a lot of sort of people doing recruitment Marketing within organizations, content can seem like something that’s going to be very expensive and very difficult to do. Can you sort of tell everyone about, you know, your approach to content and how you’ve got over some of those, some of those issues?
Ben Gledhill [00:11:26]:
Yeah, definitely. So anybody who kind of knows me knows I like to do things I don’t like. I don’t. When I say on the cheap or with a budget, it’s literally just because you haven’t got access to the bigger kind of PLC or blue chip allocations of spend that some organizations have. You know, we live in a world now whereby there are so many kind of tools and gadgets and gizmos out there that there is no reason why you cannot not only create but share. Really good looking and really insightful recruitment, content marketing. And it’s something that I’ve just fallen into, to be honest with you. And like everything, recruitment’s always been a couple of years kind of catching up. So if you look at things like planning, you know, so what, what do I want to share? How do I share? You know, there were tools like buzzuma, answerthepublic Persona app where you can find kind of ideas and clues what to do. The, the mobile phone, you know a people always ask me what’s the best content tool you have? And I always say it’s my iPhone 7. Because people now don’t really want the whole Oscar nominated false corporate video. They want genuine, they want authentic and they want transparent. And if you look at the way that social media networks are changing now in regards to focusing on personal and one to one content sharing rather than organizational on the likes of Facebook, you’re going to get a lot more by creating a short video using an iPhone, speaking to candidates, hiring managers, the actual people that you’re wanting to sell. And don’t get me wrong, it’s great if you have the big budgets, but there’s no reason why you can film a short video, put a little bit of a front and an end on it, share it on something like Twitter and LinkedIn and actually measure how your call to action works. Because it is really, really simple and it have to be that expensive.
Matt Alder [00:13:35]:
Now I know that one of the big problems that lots of people have with career sites isn’t necessarily understanding that they need to redel that what they have doesn’t work and they need to redevelop it. It’s getting the buy in from, from the business to, to do that in the first place or get the budget to do that. What, what advice would you give to people who, you know, know that they need to do something drastic with their career site, but they might be struggling internally to, you know, to build the case for that.
Ben Gledhill [00:14:05]:
Yeah, I think from my experience, obviously I’ve gone through this process a couple of times, I think as HR or recruitment professionals or even talent acquisition professionals, who knows what name we’re calling ourselves this week. It’s really about kind of getting the buy in at the C level or the exec level by making that population realize how important employer branding and one of the arms and legs of that, which is of course your careers website, how important it is in terms of looking at commercial. So I always kind of say to people that if you have an ability to sell an effective employer brand through employer branding, you’ll get a much more kind of better quality of hire in terms of people that are suited to your organization because they’re suited, they’ll perform better. And if they perform better, you’re probably going to get high levels of productivity and profitability. So. But within a few words, you now told the chief financial officer or whoever is looking after that budget that we need to invest because if we invest, we can attract better people that are more aligned to our organization culture and values. Hence there’ll be that financial commercial element to the organization. And I think as well, from a marketing perspective, the way that I kind of see things developing now is that because the lines of very blurred in regards to I bought a product in a shop, I went for an interview, I had a bad experience on the other and it affected the other transaction operator, if that makes sense. Branding now is getting very merged, so it’ll look a little bit odd if you invest millions in a really cool trendy consumer site. But your careers website looks like something from 1992. So it’s really important to make sure that all your elements of your brand aligned.
Matt Alder [00:16:08]:
So final question. You know, we’ve talked about career sites, we’ve talked about what they, they should look like and the process that, you know, you’re kind of going through now to, you know, create your new one. If we were to look out into the future, say sort of two, three, even five years, what do we think.
Matt Alder [00:16:25]:
The career sites of the future would look like?
Matt Alder [00:16:27]:
Are there any sort of interesting trends or technologies that catching your eye that you think might, might play a part in that?
Ben Gledhill [00:16:35]:
I mean, I think you’d be a fool not to maybe not be able to predict the future with Google. But I see Google playing a bigger part and obviously that will have an effect on your careers website, ensuring that it’s fit for things like Google for jobs. It’s in the search engines, the other bits and pieces like that. So I think that’s the main one. I think Google, like any other consumer website, will have a bigger say in how we design them. I think. Secondly, I think more mobile is still going to be key. I think you’ll probably see more technology around messaging. So being able to apply for a role via a text message and other bits and pieces like that, I think you’re really going to see a wider acceptance of usage of messaging, not necessarily chatbot messaging, although chatbots, if you correctly can be very successful. But people will want an answer there and then. So if you go onto a careers website, the vacancy is advertising Manchester. Somebody will want a 2 to 10 second answer whether the role can be based in London, because guess what, that’s what happens when they use a consumer website as well. So I think you’re just going to see a big realignment to the consumer way of working in terms of speed, efficiency of applic and actually comms in terms of I want to speak to somebody now and I hate to say, but if I don’t, I’m probably going to look elsewhere.
Matt Alder [00:18:09]:
Ben, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ben Gledhill [00:18:11]:
Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:18:13]:
My thanks to Ben Gledhill. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
