Apple recently unveiled a new careers website, encouraging top talent to apply to positions in Apple corporate and retail stores around the world. As the world’s most valuable company with a $1 trillion market capitalization, Apple has the resources to produce a best-in-class career site designed to attract the most eligible talent. But Apple isn’t the only company that deserves a site to wow today’s top applicants.
It’s no surprise that Apple is putting more investment into their employment brand. With the economy at near full employment, there are more open jobs across the U.S. than there are qualified workers. And while Apple is a household name, they’re facing strong recruitment competition from other technology leaders like Tesla – especially when it comes to a rumored automotive project.
As more qualified candidates research company websites before applying to open roles, it’s never been more important to focus on developing a career site that convinces top applicants to apply to your brand.
Here are five quick tactics Apple made sure to incorporate into their career website that you can easily add to best reach (and excite) top applicants.
Lead with Your Culture
Most companies treat their career site as a simple listing of open roles without sharing much about what it’s like to be a part of the team. Today’s top applicants – who will always be in high demand – need to be sold on any next career move.
Apple’s redesigned career site opens with the headline, “Do more than you ever thought possible. Have more impact than you ever imagined.” This is designed to hook job seekers who are looking to do more than clock in and collect a paycheck. Immediately below, visitors can see a gallery of images showcasing various departments and roles across their company from entry-level retail employees to executives happily engaging in their day-to-day lives.
Under the gallery, there’s a link to “learn more about working at Apple,” that gives applicants a chance to learn more about how employees interact and impact the company. By including dynamic images and write-ups about various roles and departments, Apple is giving a more complete picture of the company culture, helping engaged applicants see what it’s like if they worked there.
What you can do:
- Update your career site to include team images across departments
- Showcase employees from entry level to executives to highlight your breadth of opportunities
- Ensure your full team is included to showcase your diversity – especially with women and minority team members
- Include a culture video that lets employees speak to a day in the life. Want inspiration? Check out the Hireology culture video!
Describe Your Mission, Values and Career Trajectory
Your career site should help potential applicants understand how they’ll grow as people and professionals at your organization. Help them see that they’ll be working toward something greater by walking them through your company’s mission, values, and history. This is best done on a separate “about the company” page. Apple showcases the potential employees have to impact future technologies and what makes their teams so engaged while highlighting impressive stats – like having 800 engineers working on new camera technologies.
While very few companies have this kind of scale, every company should have a mission statement and core values ready to share on their career site. Beyond this, collecting employee testimonials from those best exhibiting core values will provide specific examples of team members leading by example and exemplifying the company’s employment brand.
What you can do:
- Create an engaging “about us” section or page on the career site that includes your mission and core values
- Share examples of team members who best represent these values and tell their story
- Highlight great examples of growth potential – do you have any executives that started as an entry-level employee? Tell their story.
- Reach mission-driven candidates by highlighting your charitable efforts, community involvement or volunteer opportunities
Delight Candidates
It’s one thing to get all of the great details about your organization onto your career site – but you should also focus on making the overall experience delightful for applicants to browse, interact and (hopefully!) apply to your open roles. Throughout the Apple career site, large images and easy-to-read sections speak to applicants in plain language separated into digestible segments throughout the site.
Interested applicants can easily pick the right career path by selecting jobs in retail centers or at corporate through large buttons that visually showcase the differences, making it much easier to navigate than a scrolling list of hundreds of open roles across the company.
It’s also no surprise that the Apple career site looks great on mobile, elegantly sizing down to screens of any size. This continues to the application process, where jobseekers can easily browse, review and apply for open roles from any kind of device.
What you can do:
- Wow candidates with great images, video, and visuals – avoid using low-resolution media that may make you look outdated
- If your organization is large and decentrlaized, help candidates easily navigate between locations so they can quickly find the right role
- Make your site look great on mobile devices – especially as more candidates lack regular access to a traditional laptop or desktop PC
- Take your phone out and apply to an open role right now – if this is difficult (or not possible) you’re probably missing a ton of great talent
Highlight All Opportunities & Departments
One of the great things about Apple’s new career site is how the organization showcase stories from all across the company. Candidates can get a sense of the engineering work, medical research, environmental initiatives and what it’s like to work in a retail store during a new product unveiling. This presents a great opportunity for those who only think of Apple as a retailer or feel like they need to be a developer to work on the corporate side.
The same thing can be true for your company. If you run a dealership group, a lot of applicants might think you only have traditional sales openings. But highlighting other mission-critical teams like fixed ops, finance, and even newer sales roles like product specialists could appeal to applicants who would otherwise not consider a dealership career. This tactic is especially useful for retail automotive since only 1.25% of today’s job seekers would consider dealership roles today.
What you can do:
- Spotlight employees by telling their story – their history at the company, what they work on, and what motivates them
- Profile all departments to showcase your full breadth of opportunities at your company
- Focus on what makes your organization special – especially if you have a mentorship program or career development tracks
Make the Career Site into a Destination
Beyond the overall design and rich content, Apple’s career site redesign serves as the central hub for all applicants to learn about careers with the company. The career website is also easily to navigate to and from the Apple homepage by using the “Job Opportunities” link in the main site footer, making it incredibly simple for millions of people to find out about Apple’s employment brand.
Do you currently have a career site that goes beyond listing your current openings? By centralizing everything related to your employment brand, you’ll build your investment into attracting team members to your current (and future) job opportunities. Centralizing your employment brand efforts into a dedicated career page also means that any recruitment campaigns have a place to link to – whether you’re sharing news of open jobs on social media, through paid search campaigns, or your internal referral network. Beyond this, by getting details on your roles and company online, you’ll also build your SEO credibility to appear in more job-related search results, leading to less reliance on paid job boards or other third-party providers as your site acts like a magnet to attract top candidates to your site.
What you can do:
- Make sure your career site can be easily found from your customer homepage
- Always link back to your career site when you share open positions from social media, recruitment efforts or your referral program
- Highlight your employment brand to boost your SEO
What else can you add to your career site to make you stand out above the competition to today’s best candidates? Top companies are already seeing their career websites as investments back into their business to drive better candidates. By implementing these steps, you can begin to do so too.
For more tips to attract top talent at a team of near-full employment, read the Employment Brand Playbook.
