Treat Your Career Area As If It Were a Catalog
Career areas on corporate Web-sites are no longer a novelty. They are so important to waging the War for the Best Talent effectively that almost all employers now have them. And that's the rub. With so many of these areas now in operation, it's increasingly difficult to create a Career area that truly stands out.
There is actually no secret at all to creating a top notch Career area. Ironically, all you have to do is visit Amazon.com. They provide more information to sell a $40.00 book than most employers provide to sell a passive, high caliber prospect on taking a full time job with their organization. In other words, most Career areas fail to stand out because they provide so little information to help the employer stand out.
What kind of information should a top notch Career area include? Let's use Amazon's promotion of my 2007/8 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet to answer that question. The site isn't perfect, but it does provide some useful insights in the following areas:
Finding the information you want. When you visit Amazon, you're offered a drop down window at the top of the page (yes, we humans read from top to bottom) and a tool bar at the left hand margin (yes, the English language is read from left to right), both of which use an intuitive link-Books-to connect you directly with the information you want. Unlike with many Career areas, you don't have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the appropriate link; the link isn't so small you need a magnifying glass to read it, and the link, itself, avoids obfuscating or confusing terms (such as About Us or Our Company).
The title of the book and its ISBN. Once in the Book area, you can search for a specific publication directly from the first page. The results of your inquiry will always include both the book's full title (e.g., WEDDLE's 2007/8 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet: For Corporate and Third Party Recruiters, Job Seekers and Career Activists) and its industry tracking number or ISBN (e.g., 1928734421). Unlike with many Career areas, you don't have to register or build a customer profile to search for a book, and when the results of your search come back, you get a detailed description of the opportunity rather than just some unintelligible internal position title (e.g., Legal Secretary III, Intermediate Systems Analyst).
A picture of the book's cover. The most successful retail outlets recognize that different consumers shop in different ways. Some are motivated by text-based detail, while others respond to images. For that reason, Amazon.com includes a description and a picture of almost every book it sells. It indicates whether the book is a hardback or paperback, the size and number of its pages, the language in which it's written and even its weight. Unlike with many Career areas, you don't have to imagine what the product (i.e., the employer's workplace) looks like and you aren't left in the dark about the kind of physical experience it will provide.
What will happen when you place an order. Amazon.com always tells you exactly how many books it has on-hand and whether they are new or used. It will also tell you whether or not it stocks the book in its warehouse and how long it will take to arrive after you order it. Unlike with many Career areas, you can quickly determine its inventory of items (i.e., how many open positions it is posting in a particular career field), the status of each item (i.e., whether a posting is new or old), and exactly what to expect when you make a purchase (i.e., how long you will have to wait before you will receive what you want-an offer-or hear back from the vendor with information on your situation).
Supplemental descriptive information. In addition to all of the above, Amazon.com also provides more detailed information organized into logical sections to help the consumer make an informed decision buying decision and do so quickly. There are Book Description, About the Author, and Product Detail sections as well as prominent invitations to tell a friend about a book and/or write your own review of it. Unlike with many Career areas, Amazon.com tries to answer the questions of the buyer (i.e., the passive prospect who has choices) before they ask them, works to leverage the viral network of the buyer with every purchasing opportunity (i.e., within the content of each job posting), and creates an experience in which the buyer can actually contribute to the site and thus feel as if it's ownership is shared (i.e., with them).
The War for Talent is, in many respects, a sales challenge. We have to convince top performers who are almost always employed someplace else to do the one thing nobody wants to do: change. We have to sell them on switching from the devil they know-their current employer, boss and commute-to the devil they don't know-your employer, a new boss and a different commute. As Amazon.com has proven, the best way to close such a deal is with a catalog full of well organized and compelling information that makes it easy for the customer to find what they want and decide that they want it.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Who is Peter Weddle? Peter Weddle is a recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator. Described by The Washington Post as "... a man filled with ingenious ideas," he has earned an international reputation, pioneering concepts in Human Resource leadership and employment. He has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com. Today, he writes two newsletters that are distributed worldwide and oversees WEDDLE's LLC, a print publisher specializing in the field of human resources. WEDDLE's annual Guides and Directory to job boards are recognized for their accuracy and helpfulness, leading the American Staffing Association to call Weddle the "Zagat of the online employment industry."
© Copyright 2008 WEDDLE's LLC.
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