Adapting Your Career Site Strategy for Employee Retention

Your career site isn’t just a valuable tool for attracting, engaging, and converting new, external talent; it’s a powerful resource for tapping into your internal talent network and strengthening employee retention. Just like an external candidate won’t apply if they don’t know you or the jobs your organization has available, an employee won’t be able to step into a new position or grow in their career if they don’t see a viable career pathway. And if they can’t see a way to grow within your organization, they will likely look outside of your organization for their next opportunity.

To give your internal team greater visibility into available opportunities and drive further engagement and retention, you need to establish or optimize your internal career site. The good news is, you already have a headstart in creating an internal career site that drives results. That foundation and streamlined process can be found by looking at your external career site.

External career site best practices, applied internally

You already know some proven best practices for external career sites. But what if you applied some of the same methodology to your internal career site? Not only will you create an experience that mirrors what external candidates experience, but you’ll also simplify the process for your TA team, create a stronger connection with internal team members, improve productivity, drive internal mobility, and strengthen employee retention. 

Here’s a breakdown of some proven best practices for external career sites that you can easily apply to your internal career site: 

1. Employer-branded content: Your external career site will likely include employee stories, culture spotlights, or other relevant content to attract candidates and give them a view into what it would be like to work with your organization. That same idea can be applied to your internal career site by showcasing employees who have made internal career moves, celebrating the team’s commitment to growth, and highlighting your company culture and values. People are social creatures by nature, so by emphasizing employee success stories and other highlights about your company culture and community, you will give employees a way to further connect with each other and with your organization.
   
2. Job opportunity visibility and personalization: If someone doesn’t know a job is available, they won’t apply. This is true regardless of whether they are external or internal candidates. When communicating job opportunities externally, a best practice is to leverage an omnichannel recruitment advertising strategy to extend your reach and attract more right-fit candidates with personalized content. While you won’t need to advertise externally to reach your internal candidates, you can mimic the experience by sharing personalized content and job alerts to ensure your employees know about new or recently vacated positions that may be a great fit for them.
   
3. Seamless application process: Keep your application process as simple and frictionless as possible. This sentiment is tried-and-true for external career sites and absolutely applies to internal career sites as well.
   
4. Automate communication: Your external career site likely leverages automation to provide job alerts, recommendations, and status updates to external candidates. This same experience can be applied to your internal team by sharing job alerts, career newsletters, status updates, and more. Not only will automation ensure a consistent and cohesive flow of information that helps candidates feel connected and engaged, but it also simplifies the communication process for your TA team, reducing their burden. It’s a win-win.

Tapping into the mirror effect for employee retention

By mirroring the candidate experience and recruitment processes used with external career sites, internally, your TA team will be able to more effectively tap into your internal talent network to fill positions quickly, improve employee engagement, and support stronger employee retention. When employees can discover opportunities as easily as external candidates, the message you send will be clear: their career growth matters and you value them.  

A streamlined internal career site reduces friction, builds transparency, and empowers employees to own their career journey. For talent teams, this equates to greater efficiency in recruitment, both externally and internally, and improved retention rates as employees can clearly see career pathways within the organization and won’t need to look elsewhere. 

At Symphony Talent, we believe the same innovation and personalization that attracts and converts top external talent should be the foundation for retaining and advancing the talent you already have.