Career Sections is one of the most powerful features of Oracle Talent Acquisition cloud service (formerly known as Taleo). Career Sections are nothing but portals where open jobs are listed, allowing candidates to apply for jobs or refer friends to jobs (similar to the Candidate Gateway concept in PeopleSoft Recruitment module). Career Sections can be designed for internal and external candidates, as well as other participants in the recruitment process like staffing agencies. The flexibility of this feature lies in the fact that customers can design an unlimited number of career sections to cater to specific business scenarios. For eg. customers can have career sections for graduate and professional hires, for career fairs, recruitment events, for internal applications, for different subsidiaries etc.
Career Sections primarily control two aspects of the candidate experience:
(1) Steps in the application process: This is called as "Application Flow" in Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud terminology. The Application Flow controls the fields that need to be filled by a candidate during the application process. Every career site offers the capability to have up to 4 application flows: (a) Flow shown to candidates while applying for a job (b) Flow shown to candidates while referring friends to a job (c) Flow shown to candidates while depositing resume or creating a general profile (d) Flow shown to candidates while referring a friend's general profile
Different steps can be attached in the application flow for each of the above business cases. It is to be noted that the Application Flow is highly configurable and has a huge impact on the overall candidate experience. It is possible for us to design a lengthy application process or keep it simple by collecting critical information that will be helpful for screening candidates. Oracle Talent Acquisition cloud also provides the flexibility to break down the application process, where data from the candidate can be collected at different points in time during the selection process. For eg. it is possible to design an initial application form that collects basic candidate data and a supplementary form that collects additional data, which is sent out only to candidates who have cleared interviews. This level of flexibility provided by the product can be used to carefully tailor the overall candidate experience.
Given below are 2 examples of contrasting application flows that can be designed. The first example shows a short application flow which has only 3 steps, while the second application flow has 10 steps collecting most of the information upfront from candidates.
While designing your application flow, consider the industry, competitive situation of your organisation and characteristics of your potential candidate pool to come up with the optimum application process. For eg. if you are in the technology space competing for millenial talent, it would be prudent to keep the application process short and collect only the most critical information upfront. On the other hand if you are targeting blue collar workers in a region with limited internet connectivity, collecting most information upfront will be a better strategy.
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| Example of a short application flow |
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| Example of a long application flow |
(2) Corporate branding of the career site: Each career section can have specific corporate branding applied. The branding feature can control the header, footer, background, colour, fonts, styles of different elements on the career section like buttons, hover effects etc. Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud offers the ability for customers to upload branding files with customer specific cascading style sheets (CSS). In a number of implementations, career site branding is an area that is not given the time and importance it should be. The custom branding capabilities offered by the product is immense and can be utilised to provide a superior candidate experience. Given below are some selected examples of career sites running on Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud, with excellent custom branding:
- Standard Chartered Graduate career site
- Unilever career site
- University of Otago career site
- Red Bull career site (Red Bull has put in lot of thought into their careers page branding, it is phenomenal and I will be blogging on this later on: http://jobs.redbull.com/int/en)
- Hong Leong Bank (using Faceted Search functionality)
Additional Points:
- The standard career section URL will be starting with zonename.taleo.net. Oracle offers a service (called Vanity URL service) which can be used to display a customer specific domain name in the career section URL, so as to eliminate reference to taleo.net
- Career Sections also offer the capability to generate filtered URLs based on fields within the Oracle Taleo Acquisition suite. This eliminates the need to have multiple career sites for different locations or business units. For eg. let us take a requirement where you need to show jobs specific to a location, business unit or even job family to candidates. Instead of creating separate career sections for each of these categories, Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud has the capability to generate filtered URLs for these parameters from the same career site.
Oracle Taleo Taleo Recruiting
