Are you taking shortcuts in your recruiting strategy by limiting your talent acquisition efforts to just a handful of resources?

Your organization may be missing out on many opportunities to connect with the best candidates. As a result, it would take longer to fill critical open positions and may end up costing a lot when you factor in the opportunity costs of not filling these positions in a timely manner.

According to a recent survey, many new job seekers believe a company’s career site is an important factor in their search. So, if you were a company that did not utilize this resource effectively, potential candidates may take one look at your organization and turn the other way, causing you to possibly lose out on great candidates.

Creating and then branding your career site is an essential element of your hiring strategy. It is where candidates can learn more about your business, read about the position details, or be directed to the appropriate sources should they have questions.

What are the essential things a career site needs to have in order to be effective? Let’s take a look at a few.

Company Culture
The career site for your company is not just a place where qualified employees come to apply for open positions. This site is also a place where potential hires can learn more about corporate culture and the workplace environment. Here is a perfect opportunity to impart just what it feels like to work at your company. Finding the right fit between the personality of a candidate and the “personality” of a company is essential in employee retention.

Successful companies understand this concept, which is why they use their career pages to brand themselves as employers. At Google, for example, the career page doesn’t just visually fit with the rest of the Google style, it also gives prospective candidates a good feel for the company culture.

A company should use its careers site in a similar way to attract the right candidates. Think about the message you want to project and tailor your careers site to attract your perfect hire. Make it easy for candidates to see exactly what your company has to offer and make it clear on how they can go about becoming a part of your team. If your candidate might need more information on the company, make it easily accessible for them to reach from where they are on the careers site. Odds are, if your branded careers pages have the right content, the right people will be moved to apply.

Multimedia materials
In the past, many career sites did not include multimedia materials such as audio or video. However, we now live in a completely visual culture, where we view and judge organizations and what they do by our first impressions. How can you ensure you are making the best one? Embrace multimedia.

Many company career sites now have the option to include video or audio into their already existing pages. This allows a candidate to get a real feel for the organization, whether you are mentioning what it is like to work at the company, testimonials or even how to go through the hiring process. It puts a face to the organization, making you appear more personable and attractive from the candidate’s perspective.

Communication function
What do 40 percent of candidates have in common? They all heard nothing back once an application was submitted. Though a disappointing statistic, it is not uncommon for a candidate to receive no formal acknowledgement of their submission. However, your company career site can be an avenue for easy communication between recruiter and applicant.

For instance, listing the appropriate point of contact or phone number can help address any questions the candidate may have. Additionally, providing a direct and seamless path to and back from your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest pages can encourage candidates to engage with you through one of these platforms. As a result, communication between candidates and the company or recruiter is greatly improved, addressing major concern for most candidates.

Newer company resources
Many traditional recruitment platforms available today were not created with the new social environment and usability in mind. Next gen recruitment platforms such as Simplicant understand the importance of career sites to brand your company — and combine these with intuitive applicant tracking and workflow to keep candidates engaged during the process.

In the past, many company career sites required creating an account or signing up for the career site service. However, since the traditional functionality offered by the signed-up accounts is not very useful, most candidates hardly ever reuse the account and typically consider it a waste of time. In addition, there are often problems with logging back in and remembering the credentials. Many newer companies forgo this step and make signup an option or offer social signin, which makes it easy for the applicant and streamlines the process.

With Simplicant, organizations can keep applicants in the loop encouraging them to continue investing their time in the company or quickly move on in their own job search.

What do you think? What are some other ways to brand your company career site?

About Sajjad Masud
Sajjad Masud is Co-founder & CEO of Simplicant, a cloud-based recruiting platform transforming the talent acquisition market and making enterprise-level recruiting technology accessible to companies of all sizes. Simplicant's collaborative platform includes social recruiting and redefined candidate relationship management to help organizations optimize their cost and time per hire.

This article was originally published on September 25, 2012 at http://blog.simplicant.com/how-to-brand-your-company-career-site at Simplicant - www.simplicant.com