The 6 Things Amazing Careers Pages Accomplish

The first item on your employer brand to-do list is building a careers page. This is the anchor of your employer brand, but it can be boiled down to a handful of simple elements.

There are six basic things any career page should accomplish, even if you don’t hire that much.

1. Establish the employer brand tone

Applicants should immediately get a sense of your tone. Are you serious and determined or friendly and driven—some combination of the above? Use diction, images, and video to establish tone.

Some employers that do this well are:

• King’s Hawaiian: friendly, open, kind

• Square: optimistic, creative

• BlackRock: thoughtful, forward-thinking, driven

• Squarespace: polished, in-the-know

Pro tip: Clean and simple is appreciated by job seekers in search of their people

2. Link the candidate-facing brand to the consumer-facing brand 

There should be an obvious relationship between the consumer-facing brand and the candidate-facing brand. Visually linking the two is the most expedient way to do this. Use color, image, and illustration to remind job seekers who you are and where they might have encountered you before.  

King’s Hawaiian does this very well—that bright orange is unmistakable. On the other hand, Coca-Cola fails to take advantage of their globally recognizable brand, and instead produces an anonymous, unexciting career page drained of color.

3. Introduce prospective employees to potential colleagues

Show candidates who they might work with, including peers, managers, and leaders. Put a face to a name with photos and videos and let interested job seekers hear directly from your workforce. 

Kendra Scott does this particularly well with short videos of employees talking about their experience working with the company—what made them want to join and what they’ve accomplished in their roles.

Pro tip: Featuring real employees with their actual name in full conveys to candidates a sense of trust.

If you don’t have the resources to produce video, written blurbs can be just as effective. 

Bonus points if you can introduce candidates to your work environment by showing off your office space too. If yours isn’t sexy, there’s a solution for that. 

4. Provide basic information about company values and benefits

Make it clear the benefits and perks you offer, the kinds of community supports you provide, your mission and/or vision, and your stance on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. 

This can be as simple as a well-organized list, like Handshake does here:

Pro tip: creating a list of your employer’s best qualities is a must when communicating with candidates

Or, you can go deep. Squarespace dedicates an entire page on their careers microsite to their diversity and inclusion work.

Pro tip: the more examples you put out there of how you’re actually offering a diverse and inclusive culture, the more candidates will know that you aren’t just talking the talk.

5. Show visitors open positions and makes it easy to apply

Make it clear the open roles you have and how candidates can apply. 

If you’re actively hiring, consider putting a call to action at the very top of your careers page, like Harvest does:

Pro tip: make candidates feel needed and wanted by putting a call to action in a place people can actually see clearly.

6. Balance color, text, images, icons, and video 

Balancing your visuals makes for a good user experience. It means job seekers will more easily absorb and retain information. If they have to work too hard to learn who you are and what you offer, they’ll just bounce.

For example, Dave’s Killer Bread struggles to balance visuals and texts. Their careers page is mostly a dense wall of text that makes it difficult to parse information.

On the other hand, lululemon uses a combination of images, bold headers, CTAs, and accordion menus to organize a great deal of information.

Pro tip: Mixing it up visually stimulates the brain, and is an easy way to communicate to candidates your employer brand isn’t boring.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, VA, who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, employer branding, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

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