Standout Jobs

Almost every company has a “job section” on their website. We often call this a “recruiting site” or “career site”.

Almost every company’s recruiting site sucks.

At KnowHR they’ve listed their Top 10 Best Recruiting Websites. There are some great ones there. And you see some obvious patterns when you start to look at them:

• More content. All of these career sites are wrapping their job listings in a ton of interesting content.
• More personality. The companies’ brands are heavily represented from their career sites. Even if you’re not familiar with the companies, you can get a very good sense of what they’re all about.
• More emphasis on the people. It’s all about the people. Job seekers want to know who they’ll be working with (not just who they’ll be working for), and they want to get a feel for the culture and team.
• More reaching out. Most of these recruiting sites are focused on the right person: the job seeker. They’re reaching out to the job seeker with taglines like, “See yourself here.” It’s easy to title your job site something like “Jobs” or “Work at Company X” but it’s much harder to build a branded feel and campaign around reaching out to job seekers and making them feel like they want to apply.

KnowHR’s list includes sites like Pixar, Google, Target, Whole Foods Market and others.

The only disappointing thing about the list is that every company on it is big. There are examples of smaller companies producing great career sites - like Etsy and Meebo - but they’re few and far between. And harder for people to find when compiling lists of this sort. Still, KnowHR’s list is a good place to start for anyone thinking seriously about how to brand themselves more favorably to prospective candidates and how to promote one’s culture to the outside world.