Businesses are great at using their websites to promote their products and services and often take time to consider the customer journey.

But what about people who are looking at your website in search of job opportunities? Have you considered the candidate journey on your website?

What does candidate journey mean?

The candidate journey is all about the navigation and technical capabilities used for the job/career pages and company information that a candidate would be looking for.

In our latest research, only 4% of businesses had a good or excellent candidate journey that met young people’s expectations for the use of technology, functionality and ease of use.

What we found

Here’s some examples of what our young peer researchers found when assessing the job/career sections on company websites…

• Links that go round in a loop – once you click a link you end up back at the same information you started at
• Broken links – some even took you to missing pages or pages of code
• Foreign group website – some large organisations link their job/careers section to the main group website and in one instance we ended up on a French website
• Different industry website – another organisation that was linked to the group website was associated with a completely different industry. Our peer researcher was looking for jobs in the automotive industry but ended up on a bank website.

All of these examples would lead to a discerning job seeker to bounce out (e.g. leave the website).

For senior management, the wider issue this may cause is reputational risk, as young people may be closely associated with customers and employees.

Our peer researchers spent up to 20 minutes on each website to complete the assessment.

This was generous considering that most people spend less than a minute on websites.

A study by Nielson Norman Group, stated: “Users often leave web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer. To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”

As most businesses we researched focussed their web presence on promoting their products and services it left the job/careers page either hidden or missing altogether.

When you consider that 80% of young people will go direct to a business website regardless of where they first saw the job advertised, its important for a business not to bury or miss out on having a defined candidate journey and promote themselves as an employer too.

Young people who are born with phones in their hands have an expectation of online capabilities. They shop and game online but when it comes to applying for job opportunities it doesn’t match the experience for the use of technology and functionality.

For instance, if a job/careers page is not mobile friendly then it is likely that a young person will not to apply if they cannot access it on a phone.

“Children browse the internet by the age of 5 using parents phones and children own their first mobile phone by the age of 7.” (iNews)

Here’s a task for you:

• Put yourself in the candidates shoes and review your own website
• Ask yourself if your website represents your company the way you would want
• Identify who owns the job section on the website (read our previous blog: Who owns the job section on a company website?)

For more information about candidate journey see our youth employment accessibility research report.

Register for our next training workshops here or get in touch  if you would like us to assess your website.