Don’t Lose Them At Your Career Site

Your career site is the first place candidates go when their interest is piqued, and it’s the hub for getting candidates into your recruitment pipeline. And yet, many organizations still take a “set it and forget it” approach to their career site.

Is your career site working to keep candidates engaged while moving them into your recruitment process? While there are many ways to make your career site a great candidate attraction platform, there are also key best practices to follow. If you are experiencing candidate drop-off, consider the following tried-and-true tactics:

1. Promote your culture front and center
Culture, mission and values resonate with candidates, particularly those who are not yet fully active in their job search. Passive candidates who are just beginning to look around will be swayed to another organization if they feel a better culture fit.

Your own employees are your greatest ambassadors. Let them shine on your career site and allow them to “tell your story” in a unique and compelling way. Create a bank of testimonials and refresh them on a regular basis. Develop videos as your budget allows and give them a prominent place on the page.

2. Make your jobs easily searchable
Most candidates want to see what jobs are available before they do anything else on your site. Readily available, easy-to-navigate job search functionality is a core component of high-performing career sites. It allows candidates to quickly find jobs that are most relevant to them, based on search criteria of their choosing. 
As online job application continues to evolve as the industry standard, candidates also expect to be able to search by job category, location, keyword or any number of factors. With the right technology (a recruitment marketing platform like our ACTIVATE™, for example), you can feature need-to-fill jobs, highlight certain job categories and offer interactive map search functionality to make the process as easy as possible.

Check out some of the career sites we’ve created.

3. Make connecting as easy as possible
A strong focus on talent communities is an important evolution of your career site. If a candidate is not able to find an immediate job to apply for, the talent network option is vital to keeping the relationship active. Candidates can sign up for job alerts or to receive additional communications from you, while your recruiters can mine the database for individuals that fit new needs.

You can also use your site to let candidates and recruiters connect with each other. For example, you can implement share technology to allow candidates to post your jobs on social media channels, or your recruiters can use their platforms to promote jobs or email them to candidates.

4. Align your career site, corporate site and social media channels
Candidates will naturally flow between your career site and your corporate site. They are looking for information about your organization, as well as validating their interest in you as a potential employer. Make sure that they can easily switch between the two sites without having to “backspace” their way to and from your career page. Unnecessary pop-ups and overly convoluted navigation will frustrate candidates and discourage them from applying.

In fact, do this: go to your company’s corporate site and look for the “Careers” link. It is prominently displayed in menu navigation? Is it barely legible and buried at the bottom as a page footer? Can you even find it? If it’s difficult or time-consuming for you, imagine how candidates will feel. (Hint: annoyed).

One last point: you will also need to integrate and align messaging with social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and others. Make branding consistent and create links back to your career site from all of your candidate-facing platforms. Integrating a career site with multiple social media sites in a seamless, employee-branded experience creates a powerful presence and also accelerates momentum as an employer of choice.

Competition for talent is fierce, and it’s only going to get tougher as talent shortages persist. You work hard to find and attract talent; don’t lose them at your site. Fortunately, a few simple improvements will go a long way in cultivating and acquiring the talent your organization needs.

• Highlights from HR Tech 2018
• Getting good with Google for Jobs