The diversity and inclusion content on your company career site needs to be easily accessible, substantive, and action-oriented. The best diversity and inclusion career site content gives insight through real employee experiences and backs up leadership messages and strategy with stories.

By researching 100 career sites and their associated diversity content, we found that there are typically eight things missing from company pages. 

Here is our best advice for creating diversity and inclusion career site content that will attract and convert candidates. 

The difference between diversity content on your career page and a diversity and inclusion website

There are often two places a company will house diversity and inclusion (D&I) content: on its career site aimed at educating candidates and on a separate D&I page that communicates to various audiences. 

Here’s the difference:

• The diversity and inclusion content on your career site needs to reflect the employee experience, be easy to find, and ultimately drive interested candidates to your company’s more robust diversity and inclusion page. Your career site content is likely owned by employer brand or a marketing team close to the candidate experience. 

• A company’s main diversity and inclusion page needs to communicate strategy, where an organization is on its D&I journey, and also be grounded in the lived experiences of its employees. This page is often owned by a diversity and inclusion team, or a marketing team responsible for communicating diversity messaging. 

Both pages need good content to educate, inspire, and encourage visitors to take action. 

The must-have diversity and inclusion content on your career site

Your career site needs to include diversity and inclusion content. When candidates are searching for jobs, they’re not only looking for a paycheck but a culture where they may belong. Research shows that candidates are looking at company websites to understand their approach to D&I before they even apply to an open role. 

This means your D&I content has to be easy to find. 

Here are the top three things your career site home page needs to include around D&I.

1. Easy navigation to your main D&I page 

In our research, we found that less than 30% of the Fortune 100’s Best Companies to Work For list had a drop-down menu item for diversity and inclusion on their career home page. When D&I is listed as a menu item in the page’s main navigation, it gives candidates an easy way to find what they’re looking for.

You can include “Diversity & Inclusion” as a main menu item, or add it as a sub option under your “Culture” or “Life at Company X” main menu item. 

From here, link off to your company’s main D&I page or to your careers-focused page if you have one. 

2. A section on D&I within the first scroll of your main careers page

Regardless of whether D&I is an item on your main page’s navigation, it also deserves a stand-alone content section on your career home page. And putting it at the bottom makes it seem like an after thought. Put your D&I content section within one to two scrolls on your home page, again making it easy for candidates to find.

This home page content should include things like real employees in photos, a short description of your company’s D&I strategy, and the impact of an inclusive culture at your organization. This short section should give candidates an easy way to explore more on your main D&I page. 

3. Employee stories

Outside of diversity-specific content, your career site should always include real employee stories on its home page. Including the experiences of a cross-section of your team members shows inclusion and belonging without it explicitly being about D&I. This content is table stakes for any career site. 

The five things to include on a diversity and inclusion website

Now that you have your main career site page covered, it’s time to move onto your page that is dedicated to D&I. 

While D&I can be a complex topic to navigate in an organization—and lots of stakeholders will have opinions on what the D&I message is—there are basic pieces of content that every D&I website needs in order to communicate effectively with candidates.

And, even if the D&I page has a variety of audiences, content that resonates with candidates will also be interesting to customers, investors, and partners. 

These are the five things every D&I website should include. 

1. Philosophy and strategy

What is your company’s philosophy on D&I? How is it being embedded in the organization? Where is the company trying to go in terms of expanding equity? All of these questions need answers.

Your D&I website should include messages and goals that are specific to your organization, telling visitors why you care about D&I and what you’re doing to make your workplace a good place to work for everyone.

2. Metrics and data to back up your philosophy 

A strategy or philosophy is only good when there is measurement. A good D&I website will show where you are now and where you intend to go. This can include the investments you’re making in D&I initiatives as well as the percentage of underrepresented groups who have been hired, promoted, and obtained leadership positions. 

Here’s what really matters though: don’t bury the data. So many organizations produce annual reports that include diversity metrics but they are lengthy PDF documents that require downloading and are hard to navigate.

Your average candidate is not downloading the report. They want the information somewhere easy to find.

3. Employee experiences and stories

Our research found that only 36% of the Best Companies to Work For list included real employees in D&I content on their website. While others used some real employee imagery, most of what exists on D&I websites is uninspiring to a future team member.

The best medium to share employee experiences around diversity and inclusion is through video, which gives you the space to uncover meaningful stories and show the diversity of your organization. The next best thing is to include quotes or short text stories from employees with a picture of that person.

What matters most though is avoiding platitudes. General testimonials of something like, “I can be myself here,” are nice to say but are hard to interpret when there isn’t a real story to follow it up. 

This D&I video from Colgate-Palmolive shows how you can incorporate both larger D&I messaging with actual stories that back it up.

4. Employee resource group information

A list of your employee resource groups (ERGs) and their logos is a great start. An even better way to communicate their contributions is to have ERG members tell the story of the group’s impact. 

We like this example from the PRIDE ERG at Labcorp of how employees are driving change and impacting the company at all levels. 

5. Awards and accolades

If you’ve won D&I-specific awards as an organization, this is the page to display them. And while the badges are nice to include, an even better way to communicate your accolades is with a short text story or quote from a real employee who has benefited from your organization’s commitment to their cause. 

Creating great diversity and inclusion content for your career site doesn’t need to be hard. Start with your people and their stories to help candidates see themselves at your company. 

If you’re looking for more inspiration with D&I content, get in touch. We’d love to share other examples with you.