Your company career site will be the first impression of your company for many talented, job hunting candidates. This is one reason it’s essential to optimize your career site and online employment applications.
Similar to how you evaluate a candidate on the basis of their resume, social media profiles, and digital footprint during the recruiting process, job seekers are judging your company based on your company career site and job posts. If the content they see during the job application process doesn’t catch their attention or get them excited about the company, you might be losing out on the top talent you need as they move on to an organization with a more attractive and informative site.
“You want to attract top talent and individuals with a high skill set so when the economy picks up again you’re ahead of the game,” Lisa Smith-Strother, global recruitment marketing manager at AstraZeneca, told The Wall Street Journal.
So how do you turn job hunting visitors to your website into interested applicants for your open positions?
Personalizing the recruitment process can be tough, especially in today’s economy where there are more applicants to manage in your hiring funnel than ever before for every open position. The field might be flooded with applicants, but connecting with all-star talent is more important than ever before. Thanks to the skills gap, a flooded field of applicants doesn’t necessarily translate to finding the right people you need to move your company forward.
“The key is to think about customers as individuals and to treat them that way, rather than just looking at a mass of statistics,” Richard Branson wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn.
This is the same whether the discussion revolves around customers or job seekers. You need to treat job seekers as individuals, instead of simple statistics for your applicant tracking system to sort through.
This is one reason to make candidate relationship management an integral part of your career site. A simple, automated response back to talented job hunting candidates, sent via your recruitment software platform, will go a long way towards making your company stand out from the pack.
Social media is an increasingly important part of our everyday lives, and social recruitment is helping companies find and connect with top talent. When it comes to recruiting the best job seekers available, social media is playing a much larger role than ever before. Therefore, even on your career site, your company ignores social recruitment at your own peril.
A recent study of college grads found that 77 percent expected a company to have a career site. A further 94 percent expected companies to have a presence on at least one social media channel. Therefore, to attract the top talent you need to move your company forward and continue innovating, social media has become a recruiting must-have.
Incorporate all social media channels in an easy-to-find location on your branded career site, so job hunting talent can easily find the social channels where they can connect further with and learn about your company. By leveraging social media recruitment and applicant tracking system capabilities provided by Simplicant, you can reach top prospects directly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Your company’s presence on these platforms makes it easy to quickly provide these prospective applicants with a window into your company culture and help convert them from curious prospects to interested applicants.
Make sure your company’s open positions are always clearly visible and easily accessible on your career site. If prospective employees are coming back to view your content or connect with your company, it is important they can easily see what job openings are available. Having a great, informative career site is important, but the site is only doing its job if it captures great applicants.
These applicants want to see what life is really like within your company walls before hitting the submit button on their employment applications. So use your career site to give interested applicants a window into your company. You have undoubtedly worked hard on establishing an attractive company culture to keep employee engagement high, so it’s time to show it off!
Your career site, where your company’s open jobs are posted, is the perfect outlet to inform potential applicants about your company, its mission statement, values, and culture. This will help you attract online applicants who are excited to work at your company, will fit into the culture, and are more likely to stick around.
Recruiting the top talent you need in your organization isn’t easy, and turning visitors to your career site into applicants for your open job posts doesn’t happen overnight. But if you focus on connecting personally and socially with your candidates, you might just inspire great job seekers to hit the submit button.
What are some ways you use your career site to convert visitors into applicants? Share in the comments!
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash