The Web has become the main interactive window for candidates. The company’s website is now the first place to be checked, this is common practice for candidates nowadays. In general, the recruitment section of corporate sites is by far the most visited one. So far, I haver never seen statistics below 60% of the traffic to the career section.

This fact has not been taken into account or under estimated by many players on the market.

1. Some job boards keep retaining candidates on their site by offering some simple and limited content to the job seekers. Why? I understand they prefer to keep the visitors on their site and that it creates some other products like company description, video, etc that they can sell. So more revenues opportunities
2. Some corporate groups and I would say HR in general do underestimate the power of their website and therefore don’t allocate enough resources, attention or simply budget to the recruitment section.

Together with ZN.be, I recently participated to the conception of the new UCB corporate website. I consider they really embraced a Web approach and have done a huge step in the right directions. You directly get a sense of UCB’s culture and human beings through videos of actual UCB staff describing their job, expectations and work environment. UCB is clearly showing its human face and this is exactly what job seekers are looking for. Individuals does not expect the very cold and static corporate site style anymore, they need to get a real and human picture of their potentially new environment.

UCB corporate site top banner

I think no other alternative proposed by any job board would deliver the same rich, honest and complete experience to the candidate. This is not only a way to increase the number of applications, this is also a natural filter that will better qualify the candidates through a better experience.

Having said that, the UCB career section still need some improvement especially in terms of the application funnel. The steps to apply, especially when you come from a job board or any other website are just too contsraining and it is most probable many candidates don’t even get to the first step of the application form.