Rather consistently I read that one of the startup’s main priorities is to make smart hires. To ensure that that the open positions are filled with people who are a culture and skill fit. Yet most startup’s websites don’t seem to agree. They’re designed with unordered HTML lists, a color theme, and state the responsibilities of positions. But they do very little to convey anything about the most important thing about the startup itself, the team.

Your Team & Jobs page is your startup’s most important product. It’s how a startup’s culture, vision, and environment is communicated to potential hires. It’s the most important “sale” a startup can make when acquiring talent. When your startup is up against other employers such as Apple, Twitter, Facebook, it’s important to have a great first impression. 

Kickstarter and Square have upgraded their jobs and team pages recently. 

Kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/team

Kickstarter’s team page features a horizontally scrolling video of the entire team. It doesn’t just show you who works at Kickstarter but it also gives you a sense of their personality. If you idle the page you’ll notice the team interacting with each other. A brief description sits below this video listing all the team members. From this page you understand that ‘team’ culture at Kickstarter is a top priority. 

Square https://squareup.com/careers

The Square career page is divided into 3 main function of Square: Creative, Engineering, and Business. Each function has a video of an employee telling the Square story and each page is highly targeted at the specific function. Visit the engineering page and you feel like a developer built the page. It’s simple, and puts technology in the forefront. When you the creative function you immediately get excited. Schematics, blueprints, web apps, oh an iOS app and they all need to be built - by you.

Taking a look at the Square office photos they don’t just showcase the office building, they show the culture. Above you see a high bar with stools and monitors displaying statistics. The high bar represents a value in collaborative work, the statistic monitors how Square measures goals and their effectiveness. 

How does your team and jobs page measure up? Share it in the comments!