5 Questions to ask Yourself About Your Career Site
Posted by JasonBy Jason Buss.
All of these people are all waiting patiently to be recruited - and to apply for a job at your company. They would apply, except the process takes too long and 99% of the time it results in an auto generated response and nothing else.
OK, maybe they are watching a football game, but you get the point.
As a follow-up to last week’s recruiting blog poll results, here are 5 considerations and questions to ask yourself when assessing the effectiveness of your corporate career site.
- How does your career site rank with search engines? As more job seekers continue to turn to search engines to launch a search, or to search for specific content related to their career, you need to assess your search engine rankings and evaluate what percent of your traffic is generated through the various search engines. The .jobs domain has resulted in very few success stories, primarily due to the overuse of the domain solely as a re-director.
- What is the overall value of the content in the site? Take a look at the traffic to the pages in your site, and you may be surprised at where candidates and leads spend their time. Typically, it’s not on pages talking about great benefits programs…
- Is your site engaging, with a clear “call to action”? Check out my “Top 5″ for creating an engaging career site for some ideas. In addition, consider the call to action every step of the way, on every page.
- Is your site designed from a candidates point of view? While we all deem our recruiting process as important, nobody will win with a 10% applicant conversion rate. If you frustrate online visitors with an inside-out viewpoint, they will leave. Don’t lose your goldmine to competitors or recruiting firms.
- Is it easy for candidates to apply for a specific job? Can they apply with a 1 click upload of their Resume, or quickly enter their basic contact information as a lead? If your site requires a multiple page, multiple step process with registration, you are leaving yourself open to competitors or recruiting organizations to win.
While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to career sites, creating an engaging experience resulting in high quality applicants is a shared vision amongst recruiting organizations worldwide. As a general observation, we are losing miserably as a profession in a web 2.0 world. Let’s start thinking about what it will take to get to 3.0.
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July 8th, 2008 at 1:59 am
I’m in the business of looking at Careers sites from a user’s point of view. Most of the sites I look at fail in most of these areas.
Very few take SEO seriously. I can often write a blog post about a company’s jobs and outrank them for their job related search terms.
I think the most glaring issue, though, is lack of valuable content. The job descriptions are usually junk, and there’s little else in regards to job related information.
I think engagement is based on the lack of valuable content. A call to action isn’t worthwhile unless it’s immersed within the information on the site.
Many sites seem to be designed to make sure that they interface with the ATS. There is little thought about how a candidate approaches searching the site for jobs. If they’re failing at this and SEO, then they’re really screwed. Often people will just go back to Google to find the Careers section. When that doesn’t work, they quit searching. It’s obvious that a candidate will look for jobs on the Contact page, right? NO!
I think easy application is where companies generally do the best. Requiring people to sign up for account to apply is usually the worst of it.
Overall, I’d guess that most companies are failing in at least 3 of these categories; however the companies who excel in one category, usually excel in all 5. There’s an elite group of companies that are blowing away the competition with their online recruiting presence, and the rest are a complete mess.
Great questions Jason.
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Willy,
Thanks for the comments, and additional information. You bring up great points - and from a user’s point of view is the key.
Jason
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:45 am
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