How to Optimise Your Careers Site for Graduate Users
Is your website optimised to provide a positive graduate-user experience? Gen Z graduates want to find information quickly and easily, so it’s important your site is clean, useful, and easy to navigate.
Here are some specific focus areas to help you optimise your careers site for graduates.
1. Focus on creating better content
You want to make sure your content is engaging enough to attract and generate interest when graduates visit your site. This is true whether you’re a well-known brand or not.
Think about the words, images and videos on your pages.
- What are you saying and is it enough?
- Are you clearly communicating your graduate value proposition so graduates feel motivated to apply?
- Are you using real employees in your visuals?
Graduates find your web words and video content most valuable. Mix things up with blogs and consider using short, sharp videos with former program participants (*most valuable), leaders who regularly hire graduates, and even your recruiters sharing top tips about the process.
2. Keep it clean
This is website design 101 and referred to as ‘white space’. You don’t want to greet graduates with walls and walls and walls of text, or clashes of colour that make copy hard to read. They won’t stick around, we promise.
Your website also needs to be easy for users to navigate. Each page should have one clear call to action – that is, what do users need to do when they are finished reading the page? Where should they go next? Tell them. Clearly.
Here’s an example from our home page footer – the button “Create a free account” is our clear call to action telling graduates what they need to do next:
3. Use engaging headings
Headings serve a few important purposes –
- Headings break up the text on your page, making content easier to read.
- Headings help boost your SEO / Google search result. That is, when the right search terms are used in your headings, Google finds it easier to rank your page higher when students search for opportunities.
Job hunters will generally search for a specific type of job, experience level and industry. You certainly don’t want your headings to lack personality, but you could look at something like – “What it’s like to work as a Graduate Finance Officer?” with a video interview or story from a former grad as the content.
Take note of this article’s layout to see how we’ve used headings.
4. Make sure your careers site is mobile optimised
What looks good on desktop must look good on mobile. But it also means quick loading times (reduced image sizes, embedded video links) and responsive design that doesn’t provide a negative user experience.
With 89% of job seekers using mobile for their job searching, and not surprisingly, millennials spending an average of 223 minutes per day on mobile devices – websites must be mobile responsive.
How to know if your graduate careers site is mobile responsive?
Simply pull up your site in a desktop browser and on your mobile and compare the two experiences. It should feel seamless.
5. Make it easy for graduates to contact you
Contact could be via your social media channels or it could be via email. Don’t hide this information from potential applicants.
We suggest including your social media icons and links in your site footer so they’re on every page (check out our footer to see how). But, it’s also best practice to direct users to your conversation channels specifically from a Contact Us page, too.
Getting it all right
Outsourcing your careers site development? Not everyone is an expert in marketing and appealing to younger Gen Y/Z audiences, so it’s important you provide a detailed brief that describes your desired user experience.
If you’d like an insight into our user experience priorities, check out the run through of our updates to the latest version of our website, GC5.
Just remember - the millennial generations are fast consumers of information and believe the brand you present online is a reflection of the organisation so, if your website is clunky, visually awkward, outdated, overwhelming / underwhelming, or lacking clear information and directions, you’re essentially telling them not to bother!
Want more advice for optimising your candidate experience?
Seventy-one per cent of Australian university students use GradConnection to find and apply for graduate and internship opportunities. Which means there are a number of candidates landing on your careers site from your GradConnection employer profile page.
We can help you put a strategy together, so your next graduate recruitment campaign is a consistent and seamless experience across all your marketing channels.
Get in touch with Dan via [email protected] to learn more.