While looking at some other vendors in the applicant tracking space it struck me how some are trying to be hip and up to date by the way their site language and content is delivered. Everyone knows now that talent acquisition managers and recruiters have to get clever at attracting GenY candidates and the sales pitch on the software vendors homepages should reflect this thinking. Looking at some leaders in the market like Taleo, Jobpartners and Stepstone Solutions, their delivery of the homepage is reasonably traditional and corporate but does convey the image of innovation and up todate with web2.0 and social recruiting.
Taleo has a young smiling face together with twitter and blog integration on their homepage. Stepstone solutions have a more corporate approach and a feature led flash display on their homepage with a good call to action. Jobpartners have a lively, colourful homepage with a tag cloud call to action, free trial of their business edition all overlaying a young guy doing a cartwheel. OK, so these sites are certainly well designed and get the message across.
This leaves some of the other vendors struggling to demonstrate the innovative thinking that (I’m sure) their products have; for example Kenexa has a very black site, with an itunes album style scroll system with which you navigate to a nice headline or industry report to get information – quite eye grabbing but unless you’re a games player it has limited appeal – and it won’t work in anything that doesn’t support flash so iphone users can forget about this site. Peopleclick are trying hard especially after the Authoria story and still have a bit of work to do but there is nothing social on their homepage at all (apart from a twitter link at the bottom). Their focus seems to be compliance and any hints at being able to attract GenY candidates are completely absent from their site – but I guess (hope) they must be talking about it to their customers.
I came across peoplexs.com today which is in the Netherlands, who according to their CIO have been developing their application since 1999. What was interesting here is their site is quite simple, all lower case and they have a whole section on social media that has 3 websites listed. Two of the three are…..yes you guessed it facebook and linkedin. Wow…it seems that all you have todo is put these two social media icons on your site and you’re there competing in the space everyone is trying to reach, or so it seems. They also have a little youtube video which shows how great the company is..complete with choppy editing and music from firestarter (The Prodigy…I bet that was expensive to license.) The whole experience brought a little smile to my face like when you are watching your child do something cute. Still at least its a proper nod to the the demographics the corporates are trying to attract the days.
