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How to approach your career site project

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Stories Inc. has created culture content for countless career site projects. Whether you’re considering a career site relaunch, a career site refresh, or you’re starting completely from scratch, we’ve done it all. Here, we help you think through the best ways to tackle your career site project and your career site content.

What your career site project needs

Ultimately, a career site is a hub, housing all kinds of information about what it’s like to work at your company. Your job is to fill the hub with real insights into the employee experience. Then, your content needs to resonate with the right candidates so they take an action like apply, or sign up for your talent community. At the very least, your career site should leave a memorable impression about your company with its visitor. Sometimes people aren’t ready to apply right now and that’s OK. The point is for the right candidates to remember you when the time is right, or refer your company to others.

In order for the magic to happen, candidates need to be served the right information at the right time. To achieve this, you need to understand two essential things: who your candidate is, and where they are in their candidate journey.

Who your candidate is

Intern, executive, mid-level salesperson, technologist: who are you targeting? The more specific you can get, the better personas you can create. Then, your content will best resonate with your target audience.

Where they are in their candidate journey

Your content must resonate with candidates as they advance through the different stages of the candidate journey:

  • awareness of your company
  • consideration phases: application, interviews
  • conversion: offer, acceptance

The content you use to communicate and convert candidates to the next stage in their journey is critical.

Employee stories at each stage of the journey

At every stage, employee stories are the most effective recruitment marketing content. They give real insight into culture, prove who you say you are, and they’re memorable. They’re a recruitment marketing content secret weapon, and they’re closers.

For you, we developed the employee story content personalization pyramid. This is a way to think about the compelling personalized content needed throughout your career site and at every stage of the candidate journey. As you can see, the story content becomes more specific as you drill down.

Career site content at a glance

For a complete career site content overhaul, you should aim to have content that addresses each category in the pyramid.

Universal culture content

This content speaks to the common employee experience, regardless of a team member’s tenure or functional expertise.

Talent category content

This content speaks directly to someone who shares a common background. This could be different talent pipelines you’re building like interns, women in technology, or veterans.

Broader team content

What’s it like to work on the sales team? How about on the inside sales team? Specifics go a long way. The important thing to remember isn’t to show what a team member or job category does. It’s about showing why someone would want to do that job at your company.

Persona content

What is it like to be a woman systems engineer in cybersecurity, interested in career growth? Persona content appeals to a very specific person and uses a combination of pyramid perspectives to target candidates with similar experiences and attributes.

Example: BAE Systems, Inc.

Here’s a real life example. We worked with BAE Systems, Inc. to create content for their new career site. Fueled by engaging employee stories, the right information reaches the right candidates at the right time.

We conducted 56 employee interviews, capturing stories, videos and images of real employees at work. From this wealth of content, we produced 18 videos and delivered content libraries of hundreds of photos and stories that populate the career site.

Video topics and titles

The content is featured in all four content ranges, from broader company and cultural information, to specific career content, to niche points of interest, to persona content. 

The variety and range of content on the career site allows BAE Systems to serve candidates seeking to learn about topics like diversity and culture, as well as more specifically target site visitors such as veterans or college graduates.

Placing content on your career site

Strategically place content where it most makes sense for the candidate along their journey.

For example, universal content should be featured on the home page and in other general pages about culture. That’s for everyone.

Then, you should create pages that speak specifically to candidates in talent categories like university students, or veterans. If diversity and inclusion is important to your organization, create a broader page about your commitment. But, you should also have areas about specific ERGs catering to specific groups. Here, you will talk what your company does to support specific groups of people who share a common experience.

Additionally, this applies to landing pages for teams and divisions, or specific careers like sales and technology. Create pages and content for key hiring areas. Of course, you should populate your job descriptions with stories about that job.

For more examples in addition to BAE Systems, see our case studies featuring career site content projects for Interactions, a mid-sized AI company, and Sonoco, a global manufacturer.

Need help with your career site project?

Contact us to get started. Send us a note, or book a 15 minute call right on our calendar.