Creating a Career Site That Converts

“It was really important for us to find a full-service partner that could help us get our career site off the ground.”

Eileen Caffey, Sr. Director of Talent Solutions, Bethesda Health Group

Recently, NAS hosted a webinar where we discussed how we partnered with Bethesda Health Group to drive a 400% increase in their organic traffic by implementing several key recruitment strategies, including:

• Creating fresh career site content and design
• Developing engaging job family content
• Delivering a better job search and candidate experience
• And implementing a talent network and CRM for outreach

Challenges in Healthcare Hiring

Talent acquisition in the healthcare industry presents more challenges than most fields. Healthcare marketing recruiters are under a lot of pressure to ensure the talent they are bringing in will provide the best care possible to all patients. In addition, healthcare organizations are often understaffed, which means talent acquisition teams must attract the best candidates as quickly as possible. Luckily, NAS has the solutions you need to get candidates for those hard-to-fill jobs. Let’s take a look at the strategies we implemented for Bethesda Health Group.

Bethesda’s Challenge

When talking about what attracted their team to NAS, Eileen Caffey, the Talent Acquisition Leader at Bethesda Health Group, said “It was really important for us to find a full-service partner that could help us get our career site off the ground.” Before partnering with NAS, Bethesda had its career site content on their marketing site, and the pages received limited search engine exposure. Their jobs were hidden behind their ATS, which resulted in low candidate traffic and fewer applications than needed to fill critical roles.

NAS’ Solutions

By implementing three main strategies, Bethesda Health Group saw major improvements in their traffic and application numbers. Here’s what we did:

#1 Created Candidate-Focused Career Site Content

Your career site is the heart of your candidate attraction strategy. It needs visual impact, simple navigation and mobile-friendly design. Most of all, it needs to showcase your organization and clearly show what sets you apart from every other employer out there. We wrote and designed a branded multi-page career site that included pages about culture and benefits, as well as job family pages for Bethesda’s most frequently hired roles.

#2 Improved Candidate Experience with a New Recruitment Marketing Platform

A career site powered by ACTIVATE was the next step to improving Bethesda’s recruitment marketing strategy. ACTIVATE is NAS’ recruitment marketing platform that delivers enhanced site performance and increased candidate usability. During our discussion with Eileen, she mentioned, “What we really liked about the ACTIVATE platform is that a lot of the functionality was already built-in, so we didn’t have to recreate the wheel, which was really helpful.” After writing new career site content and creating a fresh design, we implemented the ACTIVATE functionality, including an interactive map, search jobs links across the site and featured jobs. The platform also includes events, job alerts and a talent network/CRM.

#3 Utilized SEO to Increase Organic Traffic to Job Postings

As previously mentioned, before launching their new career site, Bethesda’s job postings were previously hidden behind their ATS firewall, which made it nearly impossible for them to appear on search engines. Eileen said candidates used to be “dumped into the ATS” from their previous career site and “be on their own.” By bringing their jobs out from behind their ATS firewall, it has made it “much easier for people to find what they’re looking for and most importantly, has driven organic traffic through SEO.”

Bethesda’s Results

Bethesda experienced a significant boost in candidate visits and completed applications with the new career site platform. With just organic traffic, our results within the first nine months have been impressive, exceeding the client’s expectations and having a positive impact on hiring objectives. Eileen said, “On our previous website, we would average 1,200 to 1,500 a month and now we’re seeing 5,000-6,000 visits per month.” Bethesda also saw a 400% increase in organic traffic, which has resulted in 300-400 completed applications per month.

Want to improve your career site, but not sure where to start?

NAS has the expertise and the solutions to help you reach your hiring goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can enhance your career site!

Let’s Talk! 

• Getting warmer! Using heat mapping to evaluate your career site.