How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program – Design Your Web Site to Address Student Concerns (Part 13 of 14)

The purpose of this series of CollegeRecruiter.com Blog entries is to define and describe the basic steps to create a successful college recruiting program. In the first entry, we defined success and laid out the steps to the program. In this thirteenth entry, we’ll discuss how to design your web site to address student concerns.

The importance of web sites to your college recruiting program was addressed in a previous part. Although they can be impersonal, students use them as an introduction and knowledge source for your company. This part deals with the usability and design of employment web sites in general, and then gives an example of how your web site can specifically address the needs of students searching for jobs and internships.
Clearly, a critical component of marketing your company lies in the structure and usability of your web site. In a white paper entitled Best Practices for Corporate Employment Web Sites and a series of published articles addressing these best practices, CollegeRecruiter.com offered the following web site features to ensure a competitive and candidate-friendly web site:

1. Easy access to job link from home page
2. Easy-to-find job postings
3. Easy-to-understand web pages
4. Privacy concerns are addressed
5. Email a friend
6. No login or registration required
7. Easy access to job postings
8. Job posting search engine should be simple
9. Job postings should speak to the candidate
10. Culture
11. Team members
12. Diversity
13. Feedback from the employer
14. Communications
15. Good manners

These best practices are the basis for corporate employment sites. To attract college students, your site needs to address specific student concerns. As such, it should have easy access to company information, a specific section for students, and a look at the corporate culture.
For example, Microsoft offers a company information section on its home page. Click About Microsoft and you see the following topics:

• Mission & Values
• Corporate Citizenship
• Company Information
• Executive & Directors
• Innovation
• Trustworthy Computing
• Investors Relations
• Careers
• For Journalists
• Legal Information

One of the company information links, Careers, has a link to Student Center. This topic features tabs labeled MBA, Undergraduate/Graduate, and Internships. Click Undergraduate/Graduate, and you’re taken to the main Microsoft college careers page. On that page, Corporate Culture is highlighted under the topic What Is Life Like @ Microsoft. The web site features plenty of opportunities for students to review Employee Profiles to get a feel for what real people have to say about the working environment.
The extensive Student Center and Company Information topics should serve to answer the frequently asked questions students are likely to pose. Certain sections have their own FAQs. For example, the Student Center section Internship links to Intern Program FAQs.