Career site optimization is one of the main priorities for recruiters in 2018. Is your career site conversion rate low? Is your career site missing interesting and engaging content? Do your career site visitors leave the page immediately? Do the candidates abandon your job application form before they hit “submit”? Are you struggling to get more job applicants from your career site?
Yes?
...don't worry, I can help!
There are plenty of opportunities and easy solutions to fix these problems, and get more high-quality job applicants on your career site.
Your career page isn’t just a place to post your jobs – it is a place to attract high-quality applicants and sell them your job opportunities.
It is the best place to showcase your company's Employee Value Propositions, and use all of your Employer Branding ideas.
Candidates don’t apply immediately after hearing about a job. Instead, 59% look up the company’s website. Sixty six percent want to know about your company’s culture and values, 54% about perks and benefits, and 50% about mission and vision.
That being said, you need to put a little bit more effort into optimizing your career site in order to get more high-quality applicants and improve your recruiting success.
Today’s market is extremely competitive, and finding the right job candidates is not easy. If you are in an industry with many hard-to-fill roles, career site optimization is a must!
Not convinced? Check out these stats:
91 percent of job seekers find poorly managed or designed online properties damaging to an employer brand.75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying for a job.
38% of respondents who were once fired or laid off had left negative reviews of former employers on a review site, social media, or with a personal or professional contact.
52% of candidates seek out a company's sites and social media to learn more about an employer before applying for a job.
Convinced?
Luckily, there are many things you can do to improve your career site. Tactics that I am about to share with you are proven to generate more high-quality job applicants on career sites.
Here at TalentLyft, we have users that, after they have optimized their career sites, have increased their career page conversion rates by up to 50%.
To learn more about optimizing your career site, get our free eBook for career site optimization.
So here’s my list of some of my favorite career site optimization tips that can help you attract more high-quality job applicants:
Optimize your job openings and job descriptions to target only job candidates that are good fit for your job opening and company's culture. Job descriptions should be clear and detailed, and they should describe roles and characteristics of your ideal candidate or your candidate persona.
Make sure that your job description includes keywords that job seekers are using to find job desirable job openings. This way, you are more likely to be found on search engines.
This strategy, I can promise you, will get you more job applicants on your career site.
Data-driven recruiting and HR Analytics are becoming a must-have recruiting strategy. To be able to understand what is working and not working well with your website, you need to be able to track and measure its performance.
Making changes to your website, and not being able to track the results, is pointless.
Some of the career site metrics that we provide and encourage our user to use include:
Knowing these numbers can give you great insights about what can you do to improve your career site optimization.
If you have many job openings, make the job seekers' lives easiers, and add a search bar to your career site.
Ease the job search process by allowing job seekers to use keywords to find jobs they are interested in.
Companies with a flexible application process have a much higher conversion rate than the ones that don't let the applicants choose different ways to apply.
For example, you can let the applicants apply with their social media profiles such as Facebook, or only by uploading their resumes.
Before starting to use TalentLyft, some of our users were struggling with high application form abandon rates because of their lack of user-friendliness.
I would encourage you all to shorten your pre screening application forms. Include only the questions that are absolutely necessary. Losing some high quality job applicants because of this reason is a huge waste!
This is a great way of attracting your career site visitors and potential job candidates. What could be a better way of communicating your company's culture other than letting your own employees talk about it?
Tell people about your team members. Tell them why do you appreciate them. Tell them about the characteristics that make them perfect employees.This way, job seekers will be able to identify themselves if they are a good fit or not.
By doing this, you are basically letting them decide if they are your candidate personas.
This is how one of our existing clients does it. Kudos to Porto Montenegro!
Create an eBook or a guide with a content useful for job seekers and your website visitors. For example, you can write about interview tips, best practices for job search, difference between corporations and startups or small business, or tips for changing career paths.
Offer this content to your career page visitors. This is a great way to start building relationships and providing an exceptional candidate experience.
Is your team currently working on a cool project? Do you have some interesting facts about your company's latest achievements? Are there any hot trends in the industry?
Share this information with your career site visitors by writing a blog. Let your current employees from different departments (developers, marketers, HR professionals...) write about something interesting.
These blogs don't have to be long or frequent, yet they are a great way of attracting high-quality job applicants.
If you want an example of a perfect career page and team blogging, please check out Intercom’s career site for engineers.
Add a simple contact form to your career site. Make it as easy for candidates to contact you as possible.
For the ones that are used to fast responses, offer a chat. This is a great way to answer questions immediately and not losing high quality applicants because of untimely response to their questions.
Sometimes, candidates may not see a good fit for themselves on your career site. However, they may know someone who does. Let them share your job opening, and get in front of the eyes of more people from the relevant industry.
By adding a code to your website, you can track your website visitors and target them with highly-personalized job ads.
For example, you can target the website visitors that have started filling out your application form, never finished, left, and forgot about the job.
If you are having problems with engaging and converting candidates, try some of these tips. I can guarantee you that, with a little bit extra effort, you can make your recruiting and hiring strategy more efficient.
Need help optimizing your career site?
To optimize your career site, you don't need any coding or marketing knowledge. With TalentLyft, you can create a beautiful and attractive career site by yourself.
To see how, schedule a demo with our team, and we will be happy to show you.
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