Decoding Careers Page series - What you can learn from Facebook

We all know the saying “first impressions matter.” This couldn’t be more pertinent to today's businesses seeking to attract the best candidates to join their companies. If you’re hoping to entice qualified candidates to apply for roles in your business, you’d do well to pay special attention to your company’s career page.

Often, your career page serves as the first point of contact between you and prospective employees. So, it makes sense to invest the necessary time and resources in making sure it works for you!

When contemplating how to optimize your career page, it’s a good idea to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes. Remember, today, applicants care about more than just getting a good salary and plenty of leave! The younger generations of millennials and Gen-Z are on the lookout for organizations that demonstrate a commitment to supporting the communities they operate. Many also care deeply about the environment and actively seek out employers that abide by environmentally sustainable business practices. Perhaps even more importantly, they value flexibility and fun.

Great career pages will share all this kind of information and more.

After taking a short tour of your careers page, prospective employees should have a gut feel about whether they are a good cultural fit for your organization.

Spotlight on: Facebook

Facebook consistently ranks in annual surveys as one of the “best places to work.” We’ve all heard about Facebook’s legendary company culture and cool office spaces that feature amazing relaxation areas and even places to skate and DJ from. 

But like any top employer, Facebook has taken care to ensure that they leverage their career page as a strategic tool to entice and inspire new talent to join their ranks.

Let’s take a closer look at their career pages to find out what we can learn.

A clean and engaging interface

Log on to Facebook's career page, and you’ll be met with a clean interface with plenty of white space and little clutter. 

First, you’ll see a box that features the words:

“Discover who we are, what we do, and why we do it. When we build for the world, we bring our talents, experiences, and passions with us. Through our unique stories, we help bring the world closer together.”

That’s a bold opening statement for a career page! It tells us that Facebook is so invested in and proud of their culture, mission, purpose, and values that they put it front and center for all prospective candidates to see the moment they land on the site. It sends a clear message that they don’t see these concepts as “fluff” or hyped-up “HR-speak.” 

They’re part of Facebook’s DNA.

This mindset and approach are underscored by the accompanying visuals: a mother nursing an infant … an employee cycling … a lady taking time out to do a bit of yoga in a meeting room. The company does well to humanize their brand and paint an appealing picture of what “life at Facebook” might indeed look like.

Job search – made quick and easy

Lower in the first frame, you’ll be invited to search for a job that interests you or to “view all jobs.” As an experiment, we entered the search term “software engineer.”  We were immediately served up with 1,700+ results, with the option to filter the search by area of work, location, category, app or service, and employment and job type.

Having greeted prospective applicants with a mission statement, Facebook immediately facilitates the obvious next step for site visitors: finding out what job openings they have in their area of expertise and other specific criteria.

Facebook is clearly mindful that people have short attention spans. They don’t want to be forced to click through multiple times when what they really want to do is perform a basic job search.

Showcase corporate social responsibility

We mentioned in our introduction that many of today’s job seekers hold corporate and environmental issues close to their hearts. Facebook heeds this fact! If you scroll down the page, next you’ll see a section entitled:

“The work we do impacts the world, and the future.”

This is followed by:

“We work on things we’re incredibly passionate about, that align with our values and purpose, and that have a positive impact on the world. It's who we are. It's why we build.”

Click on the link, and you’ll be taken to a page that’s bursting with feel-good stories about how Facebook and its people are giving back to their communities – everything from their legal team mobilizing for racial justice to how they’re supporting needy Muslim communities during COVID-19.

Spotlight on technology innovation

As a technology powerhouse, it’s not surprising that Facebook chooses to devote the next section of its careers landing page to “all-things innovation.” You can browse through sections on topics ranging from connectivity and artificial intelligence to augmented and virtual reality. 

Click to “learn more” about any of these topics, and you’ll be met with an inspiring case study narrated by one of Facebook’s employees or an interview with a subject matter expert about how the company is using these technological advancements to do great things.

Website performance

We ran Facebook’s careers page through HubSpot’s free Website Grader tool to get an objective assessment of what the page’s key strong points are as well as areas that could do with improvement. Here’s a summary of the findings:

What we love about Facebook’s career page

Approachability and cutting-edge technology innovation.

Among the many things we love about Facebook’s career page is how they strike a delicate balance between two diverse themes: Approachability and cutting-edge technology innovation.

On the one hand, Facebook has directed effort into putting a “human face” on their brand. They achieve this through their straightforward use of language and relaxed tone of voice. If you look closely at the photographs they use, the scenarios and scenes they capture seem authentic rather than something that’s been staged in a photoshoot. This makes the company appear effortlessly approachable. 

On the other hand, Facebook also doesn’t miss the opportunity to capitalize on their status as a technology pioneer and they make sure that site visitors don’t forget it! They showcase their technological innovation creatively and bring it to life through the power of storytelling. 

Readers can quickly establish a link between their technical aptitude and its ability to deliver positive outcomes in the lives of everyday people. Consider this example on their landing page where they focus on artificial intelligence (AI):

We use AI to help people get information that’s important to them in a more seamless way. For example, automatically captioning photos helps people with visual impairments experience the world and connect with those they care about.

A day in the life…

Another section of Facebook’s careers landing page that we like is “A day in the life.” It’s used to showcase what it’s really like to work for the company from the perspective of real employees. It hones in on a handful of people's stories from across the world. 

There’s a mix of written and video testimonials from a diverse range of cultures and backgrounds. Check out this example as a source of inspiration if you’re considering creating similar pages for your own career website.

Put your inspiration into practice  

We trust that this analysis of Facebook’s career pages has given you some inspiration about how you can take your own to the next level.

Of course, not every business has the established reputation and deep pockets of Facebook. But that doesn’t mean you can’t devote time and effort to making sure your career page is as engaging and appealing as possible to prospective applicants!

Take time to browse through Facebook’s career page and reflect on the insights we’ve shared. Also, why not check out this similar article in which we analyze Google’s career pages in a similar manner.