Workthing's updated Corporate Careers Site Benchmarking Study found little improvement in the 25 FTSE 250 sample of corporate careers sites over the past 12 months...

• Scant information on company culture and poor job search and apply functionality remain the two most common failings of the careers sites reviewed
• The gap is widening between the best and worst sites
• Companies are still making the most elementary of errors, eg poor urls, no or hidden link off home page

Careers site Benchmarking study 2003 - key findings

Key finding	For example...	Improvement year-on-year
Poor navigation to the site	URL to the site not intuitive or memorable	Alliance & Leicester has improved its URL from aandl-ir.co.uk in 2002 to alliance-leicester-group, though it still stops short of being intuitive
Poor navigation within the site	Buried, barely visible or no links to the jobs or careers section from the homepage; or taking more than 3 clicks to get the candidates to the jobs	Cadbury Schweppes has made its Careers section a full button on its home page header bar, and it offers a drop down menu on the homepage from which candidates can go straight to jobs.
Little or no job search functionality	Posting job ads online, but giving candidates no chance to search for alternative roles; or not enabling candidates to search by location, salary and role	Prudential have now added a search function and online application; Severn Trent have added ability for candidates to search by location and company, and have added ability to apply by attaching CV
Little insight into company	Offering candidates little information on 'what it's like to work there'	Safeway have added a '24 hours in the life of a store' section, improving the information on what it's like to work there
Scant job ad info	Offering only job title and location, but little by way of what the job actually involves	Orange has doubled the vacancies listed, and lets candidates see a 'taster' of each job, and then decide if they want to click for more job description information - although they still do not state salary.
No contact info for company	Failing to provide 'offline communication' to candidates, ie only enabling candidates to contact company via email	GSK now offers global candidates a choice of tel nos to reach their country area recruitment office - previously, they offered US contact nos to candidates searching for UK jobs
Still targeting mostly graduates	Offering a whole section for graduate applicants, but not for other employee groups, eg experienced hires	Astra have added email alerts for all vacancies - in the past email alerts were just for graduate positions