When I spoke with Emma at Sky this week she mentioned they are updating their careers website. They started off with some benchmarking of their site against “competitor” sites and the key feedback was that they need to create a simple site, with straightforward navigation and no one more than two clicks to apply for a job (if you know in advance which job you want to apply for). The other feedback they had is that people complain they can’t find it from the main corporate homepage (a common complaint for careers sites).
They are approaching the redesign in two phases. The first is updating everything and ensuring all the basic information is there. The second phase is looking at interactive element; these might be case studies, day in your life stories, employee profiles, employee videos, etc. They need to allow the themes from any new campaigns to be brought through to the career site. As Sky are carbon neutral they also want to link in the corporate social responsibility element.
Finally they are going to ensure it’s properly search engine optimised as they want to rank highly on the organic search results where possible. They’ll also be looking at paid for advertising (Google Adwords) for graduate or specific large campaigns.
I know that Peter Gold at HireStrategies has given Emma some input and that he is working on a report for corporates on building career sites. He’s recently given McDonalds a free website review on his blog. Peter also pointed me to a good blog post about search engine optimisation which might be useful for anyone in the same position as Sky.
