If you’re like most companies, you spend a fair amount of time and money designing and deploying your corporate career site. You define your employer brand, develop employee testimonials, work with design professionals and create a home for job seekers to discover what an awesome place you have to work.
And then you forget about it.
That’s a problem. Because from here on out, every dollar and minute you spend on recruiting ends up here on your career site. And your career site’s efficiency at both inspiring and converting visitors to applicants pretty much determines the ROI for your entire recruiting budget. If your visitor to applicant conversion rate is 1% (a common conversion rate), there’s huge room for improvement. Bump it by 1 percentage point, and you’ve doubled the ROI for your talent acquisition budget.
So we’ve put together five common problems that undermine your corporate career sites. See if any apply to you.
Elusive Corporate Career Site Jobs
You would think this is a no brainer, but recruiting organizations fall so in love with their supporting content that they bury the jobs. According to the Talent Board’s candidate experience survey, Jobs are the most desirable content on your corporate career site. Yet a large portion of companies bury jobs under layers of benefits, mission information, community service content and more. The fact is that your jobs are what drive people to your corporate career site. If visitors don’t find jobs quickly, they’re gone. The rest of your amazing content, like benefits, testimonials, break room videos and the like, should be presented “around” your job content. It’s information that is important only after someone has found a job that they want.
Invisible Search
Almost as important as jobs content is a killer way to find the jobs. In some ways, the most effective corporate career site would be a logo a tagline and a big search box (Think about it – that’s what the most effect search engine company does) That’s how important job search capability is. Search should be the most prominent element on you corporate career site. And it should be near-Google quality. With the prevalence of mobile traffic, the days of browsing for jobs by category are done. Glassdoor surveys reveal that 90% of candidates intend to browse for jobs this year on a mobile device. If your search doesn’t get them directly to the job that’s right for them, good luck. Keep in mind that, intuitively, passive candidates are the most likely to be browsing on mobile and are most likely to abandon your site if they can’t get to your jobs quickly.
Weak Corporate Career Site Mobile Capability
As stated above, the numbers of mobile candidates searching your jobs is significant. And it’s growing each year. And while you may have taken some steps to make sure that your pages render on mobile devices, don’t mistake that for optimizing your site for mobile job seekers. The fact is that mobile is about more than a screen size. It is about altering the flow of information and the method by which candidates apply to take advantage of their device. As stated, search becomes more important, longer pages are preferable over multiple clicks to different pages, type needs to be larger with more visuals and less text, and buttons need to be large and prominent.
Difficult Applications
It’s time for organizations to rethink the application process. There is no need to gather large amounts of data on job seekers before they are actually selected as candidates for a job. If you are only converting a few percent of your overall site traffic to applicants, you can dramatically increase that number by shortening your applications to gather only the most relevant information up front and using parsing technology that can extract experience and qualifications from a resume or social profile like LinkedIn or Indeed.com. When, and only when, a job seeker becomes a candidate, you can send them a link to a full application. And keep in mind, it’s not the most qualified candidates that gut it out with a long, frustrating application. The most qualified, currently employed applicants are the first to bail out.
As you look at your career sites, you should build your site design around these foundational elements. Then, sprinkle in your compelling content about benefits, mission, social responsibility, upward mobility and the like. Because if all these elements are in place, you will enjoy a huge increase in both the quantity and quality of applicants for each open job.
Then the mission becomes measuring the results week in and week out, to truly understand how job seekers navigate your site and what their experience is going through your hiring process. This allows you to identify problems and continuously improve your candidate experience.
