Personalization Features Every Career Site Should Have

Before I came to Phenom People to join the marketing team, I was a full-time recruiter. Honestly, my thoughts on how to provide a personalized experience to candidates barely scratched the surface of what’s capable in today’s digital world.

After spending the last four months really getting to know our products, features, and the market – I’m absolutely sick of seeing other companies who say they provide “true personalization” for their clients. While look and feel of your career site is important, functionality and a candidate’s experience while exploring jobs and content is equally (if not more) important.

What’s worse? The companies who just can’t wrap their head around the fact that candidates are consumers. They crave experiences that are closely akin to shopping on Amazon, searching movies on Netflix, and navigating to their next destination on Waze.

If you are caught in the cross-fire and trying to decide how to improve and personalize your candidate experience, here are the features your career site should provide – plain and simple.

Intuitive job search Andrew O’Brien, our product manager, wrote a detailed article earlier this month about four different types of intuitive job search features we offer: incremental search, semantic search, location search, and faceted search.

At a minimum, your career site should offer a personalized search feature. Just like searching for a movie on Netflix, a candidate should be able to begin typing in their search query, and the search engine filters their text to return immediate results in the search bar – speeding up the search process. This should be enabled for searching job titles, locations, and even broader job categories.



Job recommendations based on browsing history Anytime you search or purchase products through Amazon, you are provided suggestions on related products that could be interesting based on what you’ve already seen. Career sites should be no different. Based on a candidate’s browsing history on your career site, they should be able to see relevant job recommendations.



Job recommendations based on social media profiles Just like browsing history, candidates should have the ability to sync their social media profiles with your career site – providing another level of personalization to their navigation and exploration of your company and opportunities. Based on the information in their social media profiles, such as work experience and location – candidates should be provided with relevant job recommendations.



Curated content has to go deeper Many career sites only offer content that is personalized off the page a candidate is visiting – completely ignoring their browsing history while navigating your career site. True personalization isn’t based off of what you want a candidate to see. True personalization is based off of what a candidate wants to see based on the signals they provide your career site throughout their navigation.

Plus, text-based content is great, but your career site should go deeper than just text. There should be an excellent mix of text, text plus images, and video – such as a-day-in-the-life from current employees and department managers. This also includes employee reviews from sites such as Glassdoor.



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Job descriptions don’t have to be just boring text Your job descriptions are one of the most important pieces of content you have on your career site. This is where candidates are seeking out the information that helps them determine whether or not they meet job requirements, and if the responsibilities match what they are looking to do in their next career move.

However, job descriptions don’t just have to be informative pages on your career site. This is an excellent place to further personalize the candidate experience by providing relevant job recommendations and content to help push a candidate along in their journey – hopefully ending in a completed application.



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Job cart to store saved jobs for future visits When shopping for products online, most sites offer the ability to save items in your shopping cart. Upon return to the site, those products are still sitting in your cart waiting for you to decide to make a purchase. Career sites should mimic this behavior by providing a job cart where candidates have the ability to save jobs they may be interested in applying to at a later date. Upon return to the career site, they can go into the job cart and begin the application process at their convenience.



Career site welcomes new and returning visitors At a minimum, your career site should welcome new visitors. For candidates that have visited your career site in the past, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be recognized and welcomed back as a returning visitor. This is a small way to enhance a candidate’s experience through personalization.



These are just some of the key ways to personalize your career site and candidate experience, and as you can see – they mirror a lot of the ecommerce methodologies that have made companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Waze so successful.