Corporate Recruiting Site Shootout

This week in my HR Technology class we conducted the extremely subjective and un-scientific First Annual Corporate Recruiting Site shootout.

The contestants were:

Hyatt Hotels - Explore Hyatt

ConAgra Foods - Careers

Kraft - Jobs

Neiman Marcus - Careers

The class was split up into groups of three or four, and asked to find, then evaluate the company's job site on several criteria:

1. Ease of use

2. Ability to find information on company values and culture

3. Presence of real employee testimonials

4. Interactivity and 'connection'

5. Overall experience

Each group took about 20 minutes or so to find, then dive in to their assigned company to get a feel for the job site and make some observations.  Each group then presented their company's site to the class, highlighting the good and bad points they found.

Some key observations:

Three of the four sites presented the prospective candidate some difficulty in either finding open jobs, navigating various aspects of the site, or learning about the company culture.

Two of the sites presented fairly serious errors, some 'Page not found' or some instability in the browser as a result of way too much Flash content trying to execute.

One of the sites revealed a jarring distinction from a fairly well-done and slick 'corporate info' section, to a stark, ugly 'Applicant Tracking System' front page.  Honestly, if not for one tiny logo on the page, the 'job search' page could have been from any random company.

Of the four corporate sites reviewed, ConAgra Foods was the clear winner.  The navigation was clean, the information was easily found, there was content in all the key areas, job families, employee testimonials, etc.  In addition, other aspects of the ConAgra site were informative and entertaining, likely inceasing the time spent by prospects with the site.

The job seach process was simple and error free.

Great job ConAgra Foods.

Perhaps companies should do more 'real user' testing of their corporate job sites, I would imagine the folks from Hyatt, Neiman Marcus, and Kraft may be surprised to find out what real candidates may think.