Decoding Careers Page series - What you can learn from Google

Today’s job seekers have high expectations. They want to understand a great deal about a company before they even consider applying for a role. Sure, they’re interested in things like salaries and benefits. But they’re also curious about “softer” elements such as company culture, workplace atmosphere, and team structures. If you fail to impress them, they’ll simply move on to the next opportunity.

Your company’s career page serves as the “front door” to your business for prospective employees, so it makes sense that you should invest time and energy in ensuring it serves you well.

The best company career pages should tell the “story” behind your business and inspire site visitors to embrace your mission, purpose, values, and goals. They should also give people a clear idea of what it would be like to work for you.

After visiting your careers page, prospective employees should be able to gauge whether they would be a good fit, have a sense of what kinds of jobs you have on offer and where, and which ones they’re qualified to apply for.

Spotlight on: Google

Google is renowned for consistently ranking among the “best places to work” in annual industry surveys. Now, these accolades and its status as an employer of choice may well be a result of its attractive employee benefits and winning company culture. But like any business, Google also has to make intentional and thoughtful use of available recruitment channels and tools to attract the best skills.

Its engaging, intuitive, UX-optimized, and ultra-responsive careers page is just one lever that Google uses effectively to do just that.

In this article, we’ll take a look at this technology powerhouse’s careers webpage and discuss how and why it should serve as a rich source of inspiration for businesses looking to optimize their own career pages.

An engaging and intuitive landing page

Visit Google’s career page, and you’ll be met with a clean, easy-to-navigate interface. At the top, you’ll immediately be invited to search for a job that interests you with the words: “Find your next job at Google.” Then, you’ll be prompted to enter your search by typing in a job title and location.

That’s the first key takeaway – get down to business straight away and make it quick and easy for people to take immediate action regarding what they want to do most – find out what job openings you have in their area of expertise and preferred geographic location.

Remember that career pages give you the opportunity to share a great amount of information about your business, but don’t make the mistake of forcing people to click through multiple times to find the basic information they’re looking for. Usually, what’s top of their minds is performing a basic job search.

Showcase popular jobs

If you scroll down, next you’ll see a “Spotlight” section. Here, Google profiles some of its most popular and exciting careers. In Google’s case, these include Cloud Engineering, Executive Leadership, Data Center Roles, and Staff Software Engineers. Under each heading, you can opt to click through to see and search for available jobs within that category and have the option of turning on a job alert for your search.

Profile the different teams that make up your business

Google prides itself in its commitment to teamwork and collaboration. So, it’s no surprise then that the next section focuses on the teams that make up the different areas of their business. And, in this spirit of appearing approachable and inclusive, Google asks its site visitors the question: “Want to be a Googler? Find your team.”

Outline your geographic footprint and global reach

The next section of Google’s careers landing page is used to showcase the company’s global presence. It hones in on a handful of office locations across the world, both large and small, and also gives you the opportunity to refine and narrow your office location search.

Invite candidates to “meet the team”

Prospective candidates are browsing the careers section of your website because they want to learn more about what your company is like and, more specifically, what it would be like working in one of your teams. They’re interested in understanding what they would be doing every day and who they would be doing it with. These areas of your website should therefore showcase recent photos of your employees performing their active roles. You can even embed tweets from existing team members to give prospective candidates a sense of the kind of people they are.

Google does this really well and even takes it a step further in the final section of their landing page by including a handful of discrete topics that give prospective employees a snapshot of some of the issues, initiatives, and processes they really care about.

Examples include:

• Google’s commitment to diversity in the workplace
• How they’re building their ability to make the company a great place to work for people with disabilities
• Internship opportunities for students

Once you’ve viewed Google’s career landing page, you have the opportunity to drill down into a host of other topics and browse a wealth of resources.

Website performance

We ran Google’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 most about Google's careers page

Tell human stories of inspiration, personal growth, and development

One thing we really enjoy about Google’s careers site is their focus on storytelling and their knack for bringing their brand to life through the voices of real employees. These anecdotes and testimonials are light on buzzwords and hyperbole and appear grounded and authentic.

Google makes clever use of photos, videos, and testimonials to share these inspiring stories. What’s more, they’ve created a dedicated “My path to Google” blog series. In this series, they regularly profile real-life stories from Googlers, interns, and alumni, highlighting how they got into Google, what their roles are like, and even tips on landing your perfect job with the company.

These snippets follow a Q&A-type structure and include questions and answers such as:

• What do you do at Google?
• What’s your typical workday like?
• What made you apply to Google?
• How did you get to your current role?
• What inspires you to log in every day?
• What was the interview process like for you?
• What resources did you use to prepare for the interview?
• Do you have any advice for aspiring Googlers?

By sharing information in this way, prospective candidates will already feel like they understand both the practical and emotional aspects of working at Google.

Help candidates put their best foot forward

One thing that stands out about Google’s career website is that they dedicate an entire page (and a Level 1 landing page tab) to a section entitled “How we hire.” This section outlines in detail how to go about applying for jobs with the company. It includes information such as:

• Hiring process – a step-by-step guide that ensures applicants understand how Google approaches the hiring process
• Interview tips – best practices, advice, and tips for interviewing at Google
• Resume tips – a few ideas to help candidates craft resumes that will stand out

This gives applicants the sense that the company has their best interests at heart, values their time, and truly wants their application efforts to end in success for both parties.

Ready to build your own Careers Page?

Today, the power lies very much in the hands of applicants. That means every business, regardless of its size or industry, needs to be doing more to not only keep the right people but attract them too.

Attracting and hiring the best candidates to join your business doesn’t just happen. You need to invest in the correct enabling recruitment tools and technologies. And the importance of building attractive and engaging careers web pages shouldn’t be underestimated.

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