Feeling limited by your ATS? Create outstanding career sites that WOW!
Career sites are key to an exceptional candidate experience. But, what if your ATS doesn’t offer slick and modern career sites? Time to look beyond the ATS and create career sites that truly WOW!
Of all the components that make up the candidate experience jigsaw, career sites have the widest impact. Make a funnel with the volume of candidate interactions, and career sites will always come up on top.
From visitors to an organization’s corporate website to passive candidates to actual job applicants — career sites are truly the lounge room of an organization’s talent acquisition experience.
Excite and engage those who enter the lounge and chances are that you will capture the imagination of your candidates.
This makes having career sites that provide exceptional and wholesome candidate experience a top priority for most talent acquisition organizations.
But, what if the applicant tracking system doesn’t provide slick and modern career sites? Is it the end of the road for the organization’s candidate experience journey?
Understanding career sites
Let’s start by understanding career sites in the context of an applicant tracking system. A career site is a job board exclusively owned by the organization, unlike external public job boards or social media websites. The job board attached to an organization’s corporate website or the internal job posting site are prime examples of career sites.
Career sites within an applicant tracking system have two key features:
(a) Transactional: The ability to list job openings that are created in the ATS, along with the option for candidates to search and apply for jobs. This is the core feature of career sites provided by applicant tracking systems. Even with jobs that are posted on external job boards like Monster or Indeed, the job application usually happens within career sites provided by the ATS.
(b) UI and Branding: The look and feel of career sites should be aligned with the corporate branding guidelines of the organization. The user interface and experience are also critical in delivering exceptional candidate experience. Different applicant tracking systems provide different capabilities of customizing the UI and branding of career sites, which can often lead to a below-par candidate experience.
Most applicant tracking systems are designed with the recruiter in mind. Thus, career sites provide rich transaction features.
But, for the candidate, it is the user experience that matters. The candidate is not worried if the ATS comes with a resume parser or if it can automatically identify the best fit amongst the applicants. For a candidate, the career site should be slick, engaging, modern, and simple. Period.
Most organizations grapple with the challenge of applicant tracking systems that provide outstanding job posting and candidate sourcing capabilities, but career sites with below-par user interface experience. A key question to be tackled is; Should one give up the quest for a superior candidate experience in favor of core transactional capabilities of the ATS?
Working around constraints — A real-life example
Red Bull has done an exceptional job of crafting a phenomenal candidate experience layer on top of it’s ATS. Take a look at Red Bull’s corporate career site — https://jobs.redbull.com/
The career site is a natural extension of the corporate website and carries the tone of the organization effectively. It provides a seamless, slick, and highly engaging experience. One can browse for jobs within this site and a host of other related content, including similar jobs, video testimonials, and job application FAQs. These result in an exciting and sticky experience for the candidate — much differentiated from that of a traditional ATS.
What has Red Bull done here?
Red Bull has cleverly separated job discovery from the job application experience. They have de-coupled the job discovery experience from the ATS and built it as an extension to their corporate website with the same design language.
Job discovery, which is at the front end of the job application process, provides immense opportunities for organizations to engage candidates. This is often a neglected area as most applicant tracking systems look at career sites merely as a means of listing job postings.
Job discovery goes beyond that. It is the bait that can hook candidates to the organization, by providing relevant and exciting content. This can include testimonials of employees, details of the job application process, videos on life at work, skill assessments, and more. By building the job discovery process as an extension of the corporate website, Red Bull has been able to drive a rich candidate experience.
Where does the ATS come in to play, then?
In the case of Red Bull, the job application process still happens within the ATS. Clicking on the “Apply Now” button on any job opening takes the candidate to the ATS to complete the application. This two-step approach has enabled Red Bull to develop a highly engaging candidate experience in the front-end of the job discovery process, while still utilizing the core candidate sourcing capabilities of the ATS.
The key lesson —Workaround. Don’t compromise candidate experience.
The Red Bull example gives a valuable lesson to organizations feeling limited by the career site capabilities of applicant tracking systems. Candidates deserve exceptional experience, every single time. The ATS should not stand as a hurdle to that.
If the career sites of the ATS don’t provide great candidate experience, consider separating the job discovery experience from it. Build the job discovery process as an extension of the corporate website and develop custom content relevant to the organization. That will give organizations the flexibility to develop a highly engaging candidate experience while still using the ATS for it’s core job application capabilities.
I have worked with organizations that have built even the application process on the corporate website, especially when a limited set of data was captured from the candidate. A seamless and connected candidate experience was prioritized over everything else.
Exceptional candidate experience should be the norm and any recruitment initiative should keep it as a key priority. System and process constraints should not compromise the quest for candidate experience. Embrace elegant alternate approaches to keep candidate experience first!
