How to create a Career Page to attract the best talent – part 2

In part one we have presented the structure of the ‘work with us’ section. In the second part we confront the different ways of managing the CVs.

Each day you receive tens of CVs (those for actual job offers and those from spontaneous applications) and you have to look through them, catalogue them and then manage them. The simple task of cataloguing and managing a CV is an activity that, if managed manually, takes a lot of time and that is prone to errors.

We can identify 3 ways of managing a CV, that impact very differently on candidates experience.

1) E-mail:

A lot of companies have the possibility to receive CVs only via an email address, with the consequence that both types of CVs, those for actual job offers and also those from spontaneous applications, are sent to the same address. This way the CVs needs to be sorted manually (it is not uncommon to receive more than 200 applications for an open position). In this way the formats and sizes of the CVs attached are not controllable and it will be difficult to understand for what position the candidates applied for. In addition to the CVs received, unless they are archived in a precise way (which takes a lot of time) it will hardly be usable afterwards because it will be difficult to search for an exact keyword or some standard information and to compare them, you’ll have to analyze them one by one at a time. Who usually uses this solution tends to (with a lot of effort) keep some order using a support system like keeping files on excel.

2) Simple registration forms:

Another solution that is often used and inserted in the “work with us” section, is a simple registration form, but without a database that collects the information automatically. Usually the information collected gets send to a company email address: in this case the candidate experience is more important than the management of the CV from the company’s side, it is an almost similar situation as that of the first solution from the company side.

3) Recruiting software:

The third solution is to use recruiting software like In-recruiting, an Applicant Tracking System ATS, in a technical jargon, specialized in managing the entire recruitment process. A complete recruiting software enables one to create a “work with us” page quickly, optimizing the job openings and spontaneous application sections to complete a form, in a way that the candidates are captured in a structured database, owned by your company and which makes searching for them faster. The CVs are organized and immediately searchable, in case subsequent searches are needed, thanks to the possibility of searching for the candidates in the database and also in the text of the CV in an automatic way. In addition, the recruiting software doesn’t only occupy the function of management and archiving of CVs, but supports the company in the whole recruitment process and the selecting of staff, from the publication of the job opening to the onboarding.
The integration of recruiting softwares on a company’s websites should be as simple as possible. For example, In-recruiting can be integrated without IT skills: it is sufficient to copy only a few lines of the code on the company’s website and in a few minutes, it will make a vacancies list and spontaneous application form; the fields of the form can be modified at any moment internally of In-recruiting.

Until a few years ago, the use of these software was reserved to big multinational companies due to high costs (to activate, to configure and maintain) and it was complicated to use. The SME did not have this possibility and often did not succeed in optimizing the management of the CVs and thus to attract the best candidates.
In the last few years there has been an incredible technological revolution that has brought by really fast development in terms of a solution on the cloud for recruiting at a cost that is sustainable and suitable for any size of company.

Today many more companies benefit from Free Trial (another advantage of the cloud) and have decided to use this after seeing the fast advantages in managing the process in respect to managing things manually, it is a real reduction of time and cost, it identifies the successful candidates in the quickest time and it is easy to manage.
To create a career page and to manage it following some guidelines is the first step in developing a solid Employer Brand. Our advice is to stabilize the principal guidelines and to start to implement them, progressively correcting the route over time (obviously if you need advice, don’t hesitate to drop us a line).