Identifying Assets to Support and Enhance the Career Site

Use leading practices as a base to deliver a fantastic user experience that effectively directs qualified applicants to apply, supports your strategic recruiting goals, and reflects your unique brand.

The goal is to optimize site conversion, and minimize site drop-off, in two critical areas:

• Job Applies: individuals who click the Apply Now button
• Talent Community Membership: individuals who sign up for job alerts

• Use high contrast text, for example, black text on a white background.
• Choose an easy-to-read font. Sans-serif fonts (for example, Arial, Verdana) are generally considered more legible on web than serif fonts (for example, Times New Roman).
• See a list of recommended fonts for the web here: http://accessibility.psu.edu/fontfacehtml/
• Use fonts consistently across all pages.
• 14-16 points is our recommendation for body text to be best read on desktop and mobile.

• Use short, easy-to-understand words and phrases.
• Avoid jargon.

• Get to the point as quickly as possible. Use half the word count or less than conventional writing.
• Content should be skimmable because web users don't read a lot. Studies show that in a best-case scenario, we only read 28% of the text on a web page.
• Break up lengthy content. Headings and subheadings should stand out from the text.
• When chunking information into blocks, focus the bulk of the content on the most important information, and position it near the top of the page.
• Use bulleted or numbered lists when possible.
• Use relevant visuals to break up lengthy content.

• Supports page content
• Highlights your company brand and values; well-chosen images strengthen your message
• Avoids stock photos

• Images with a strong focal point capture user attention.
• Use a consistently placed focal point for image sliders.
• Use a diverse selection of imagery to keep users engaged.
• Consider diversity in background/foreground, location, and subject matter.

• The "Safe Zone" per component will vary by the height/width of how it has been configured to display on desktops, tablets, and mobiles.
• Identify the "Safe Zone" by viewing the finalized dimensions of your component on each device type.

• Allows for flexibility for additional cropping and overlaying elements in the layout
• Allows images to be easily modified in a variety of components and layouts

• When using the Large Image component, consider optimizing the image for mobile and adding the component twice, once for desktop/tablet and once for mobile.
• This is especially useful if there is text on the image.

• The customer is responsible for delivering images that conform to the guidelines. Please see Image Recommendations in Setting Up and Maintaining SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting.
• Images are typically provided by granting access to an image library, login to a photo site (similar to photobucket.com), or a zip file of images.
• A minimum of 15-20 high resolution employment brand images is required.
• The following media types can be used in Career Site Builder: GIF, ICO, JPG, JPEG, PNG, SVG. Note that Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images render correctly regardless of display or layout size. For this reason, a single SVG image of your corporate logo can be used for both desktop and mobile layouts of the career site. If an SVG image needs to be resized, you can use an application, such as https://www.iloveimg.com/resize-image/resize-svg.
• All Career Site Builder images should be oriented as landscape, not portrait.
• Include alt text for each image to improve the accessibility of the site. See the Accessibility section above.
• For background images, choose subtle patterns and colors.
• Text on images is a dated web practice and is not recommended.
• Image sliders are not a recommended practice.

• The maximum file size for images is 500KB.
• Optimizing images is highly recommended as it decreases load speed, improving the performance of the site. We recommend aiming for a file size closer to 100KB.
• Your media resource should export the selected images specifically for the web.
• An image program such as Photoshop can be used, or free image compressors are available on the Web, such as FastStone Photo Resizer.
• If you need assistance delivering Web-ready images, SAP’s web design team can prepare your images files. The time will need to be billed.

Images uploaded in Career Site Builder are hosted on the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN), which uses servers around the world to reduce page loading times.

Depending on the component, to add an image to the page, click Select Image or +Add, typically from the Styles tab.

You can choose to add an image from a list of images you’ve previously added.

1. Click Upload Image.

2. Click Select Image.

3. Browse and select the image to use. Click Add.

4. Click the back arrow.

5. Click Edit Alt Text, enter text, and click Save.

6. Click the back arrow and click Select.

When adding an image, select the desired Image Position (as shown at the right). This feature allows a "focal point" for an image to always be visible no matter what browser and device type is used by the candidate. For example, a person in the image will always be centered on every device.

If the image is not displaying as desired on all devices, you can add multiple components with images of different sizes to display on each device type.

If the site requires videos or Flash, SAP needs a link to the location where the videos or Flash are hosted online. A direct path must be provided; for example, a link to YouTube is often used for video assets. SAP does not host video or Flash on their servers.

Other video tips:

• Turn off auto play.
• Keep the videos short. Between 30 to 60 seconds is recommended.
• Include a title and brief description for the video.

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid ("organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.

If knowing your audience’s intent is one side of the SEO coin, delivering it in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other. Search engines scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query. They do this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet via a process known as "crawling and indexing," and then ordering it by how well it matches the query ("ranking").

Search engine optimization is a core piece of SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. We follow SEO leading practices as we implement career sites and work with our customers to get their jobs in front of interested and qualified candidates.

Capabilities include:

• Crawler friendly – For most applicant tracking systems (ATS), search engine crawlers can’t follow links to get to the jobs, so their jobs don’t show up in search engine results. SAP SuccessFactors solves this problem by importing jobs from the ATS and publishing them on a search engine-friendly site.
• Daily sitemap updates – One of the tools search engines use to know what content is available on a site is the sitemap, with links to every page. When SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting runs its nightly maintenance, sitemaps are updated with any changes to the job collection or landing pages.
• Refine SEO settings in Career Site Builder – By default, CSB generates a Top Jobs page that lists links to search results pages based on the most frequently searched terms. This setting can be disabled to better control how jobs are presented on your career site. You can also demote specific terms to display at the end of the result set, prevent search engines from indexing jobs with certain terms entirely, and control whether search engines index user-generated search page links.
• Category pages – Building SEO value for a page takes time – more time than most job postings allow for. When we build customer career sites, we consider their hiring priorities and job collection to build category pages based on popular search terms. We include these search terms, or keywords, in strategic places both on page and in the HTML metadata. While jobs on each page come and go, by building category pages to host them, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting creates lasting SEO value.
• Relevant meta data – Search engines, job boards, and job aggregators all use different pieces of the metadata in the HTML code of a job or page. We recommend unique metadata information for each page of the site. We automatically insert relevant metadata into title tags to ensure our traffic sources have what they need to make our jobs and pages search-friendly.
• Including "job" at the end of job titles – When candidates search for jobs, they usually include the word "jobs" in their search term. Including "job" in the page title and in the URL helps identify the page as a job to the search engines, and as these jobs are posted to pages, they create relevant, dynamic content to improve the SEO value of pages.

• URL structure – One of the places search engines look to determine what type of keywords to associate with a page is the web address, or URL. Most pages in an ATS are filled with numbers, symbols, and unrelated text.

  For example: jobDetails.do?functionName=getJobDetail&jobPostId=140552&localeCode=en-us

• When we create pages, we include the name of the page in the URL to improve SEO.

  For example: careers.SuccessFactors.com/go/Boston-Sales-Jobs/242462/

• "Similar jobs" links on job pages – As search engine crawlers read the bottom of each job page, they come across links to related job categories. Like the segments at the bottom of the page, these links also increase the relevance of keywords and provide more links for search engines.
• Responsive career site – Search engines rank sites not only based on content but also on how appropriate the site is for the device they are performing the search on. Utilizing a responsive career site improves rankings for all search results across websites.

• Job Distribution – By distributing jobs to major job boards with links to the customer’s career site, these inbound links improve the relevance and importance of the jobs. The more popular and trafficked job boards and aggregators will help improve your customers' rankings, especially when they drive significant traffic from those sources.

• Design career-site content to reduce drop-off and increase Job Applies and Talent Community sign-ups by using legible, consistent fonts (recommended 14–16pt body text), high-contrast text, simple language, and minimal jargon.
• Make content skimmable and visually relevant: Web users read little on-page text, so keep copy concise, use headings and lists, place the most important information near the top, and add relevant, brand-aligned visuals (avoid stock photos and text-on-image, consider diverse imagery with a clear focal point and "safe zone" for responsive layouts).
• Use media and SEO leading practices: Prepare web-ready images (landscape, ≤500KB—aim ~100KB, include alt text; SVG works well for logos), avoid autoplay and keep videos short (30–60 seconds), and strengthen SEO with crawler-friendly pages, updated sitemaps, category pages built around keywords, unique metadata/title tags, clean keyword-rich URLs, and responsive design to improve organic search visibility.