Imagine your candidates showing up to their interview totally unprepared – not at the top of their game – expecting you to look past the wrinkled clothes, poor resumes, and bad attitudes and hire them anyway.  It isn’t the first impression you hope for when you greet the candidate in the lobby.

First impressions matter – in person, on the phone and especially online.  Similar to how you are judging your candidates, your customers will make inferences about your capability as an organization based on the quality of your website, and candidates will make snap judgments about the attractiveness of working at your company within minutes of seeing your careers site.

In fact, everything you put out there in the social media space has the potential to play into someone’s impression of you as an individual, or as a company – twitter bios, tweets, blogs, websites, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pictures – all fair game.  And when it comes to securing new customers and attracting new talent to your organization, none of these are more salient than your corporate website.

The company I work for, SEI, is going through a complete website redesign.  I tell it like it is, so I’ll say that I have been hesitant in the past to show this website openly to potential clients.  While I’m completely confident our service offerings adapt to change with the demands of the market to meet the needs of our clients, our website remained static.  Even more importantly, a stale and out of date website has the ability to affect recruiting.  It’s tough to on one hand say you are a premier business and technology consulting firm, and on the other have your careers page asking candidates to fax resumes.  Best practices for website development have changed rapidly – content density matters, and the best websites have gotten increasingly more visual and interactive.  Did we lose candidates because of our website?  It’s too hard to know, but the risk alone has us engaging in a redesign.

How do you know if your website needs a redesign?  Basically, if you start to feel like your website doesn’t reflect your company’s employment brand, people, or culture without you sitting next to the reader, don’t wait.  You should assume that you only have one shot at the next candidate that goes to your page.

If you are okay with candidates that don’t reflect their true value in your interviews, then sit tight with your sub-par careers page, but if you expect your candidates to be their best during their interview, pitching their experience and value proposition to the firm, you should be making sure your company is doing the same.  If not, your competition will.

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People Will Make A First Impression From Your Website: Don’t F It Up! is a post from: HR Think Tank