Career sites are often neglected in the race to attract talent. Historically, they’ve been disconnected from the rest of the recruitment process. But they are a critical tool to build recognition for your employer brand and attract candidates. They’re also a powerful channel to convert qualified candidates into applicants, as well as to develop your talent pool with passive candidates.

The problem is that many of today’s career sites are static pages that present static lists of open positions. Companies are losing candidates to the competition because they have a poor user experience or they’re unimpressed, so they move on. Worse yet, they might not find the career site in the first place because they’re spending time researching on Google before applying, and the site is not optimized for search.

If this sounds all too familiar and you want to improve your hiring, it’s time to upgrade your career site with intelligent functionality. These are the 5 essential elements you need to bake in.

Content Marketing and SEO

A candidate’s journey is similar to a buyer’s journey. Approximately 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. They start by doing some high-level research and want to educate themselves about the market, their specific role, and possibly your company and your product before they decide to apply.

This means it’s now critical to develop a content marketing strategy for your recruitment efforts. If you can answer questions your candidates are asking in search engines with great content about the market, your industry and their profession, you can attract them even before they think about applying for a job.

To ensure this high quality content gets exposure, you need to optimize your career site and individual job pages (on-page SEO), and build up your site’s authority (off-page SEO). 

On-page SEO is about optimizing specific page elements on your career site and individual job posts to improve organic search traffic. For instance, making sure your site ranks high for branded keywords (like “careers at Company Name” or “Job role at Company Name”) and ensuring you use the job posting schema to increase your chances of getting listed in Google for Jobs. 

Off-page career site SEO is about building up your site’s ranking. This goes hand-in-hand with quality content. Start by using a keyword search tool to determine the top job search process queries within your industry. Build your content strategy based on these keywords. Then publish this content regularly on your career site and consider working with third party sites for distribution.  

Getting SEO and content marketing right can help you optimize your job board spend and source more candidates organically since they are engaging with your career site first and foremost. We have seen companies using this strategy increase the number of organic search conversions by 40%.

A Personalized Candidate Experience 

Speaking of content, different people will relate to different content types. Imagine a marketing person lands on your career site and it’s 100% engineering-focused. This will push them away. You’d never build static landing pages for your product to target different audiences. Why should it be different for candidates?

Personalization is a powerful capability to improve the candidate experience. Modern career sites include an intelligent search function, which displays results based on a candidate’s previous searches. Some are equipped with behavioral profiling so you can build real-time interest profiles on visitors. This data can be reported on and used to further personalize the candidate experience on the website. 

Let’s say your candidate is based in the Netherlands and previously searched for marketing manager jobs. With an intelligent career site, you can display country-specific jobs and related blogs about what it’s like to be a remote employee in your marketing team. 

With personalization, you can engage active candidates upfront, show highly targeted jobs instantly, and help them find the right one. It gives you a powerful advantage over the competition, enabling you to convert active candidates more quickly.

Personalization is also helpful to convert passive candidates over time. If you know someone is not actively searching for jobs, you can display a personalized call to action and capture their info in your CRM system to continue engaging with them by email. 

To deliver this type of experience, you also need proper integrations.

Candidate Nurturing with ATS and CRM Integrations

Not everyone who lands on your career site will be ready to apply. Some people might be there to browse your content. Others might want to learn more about your company before starting an application. Integrating your career site with your ATS and candidate CRM enables you to set up talent communities with different interests and skills, and send targeted communications to different candidate segments. Think, for instance, of engaging applicants that abandon their application, and inviting passive candidates to join your talent pool. The overall goal is to engage passive and active candidates with different strategies to get them to convert. 

A Dynamic User Experience Across Devices

Personalization can wow candidates. Nurturing can help you convert potential hires over time.  But you have to make the candidate’s experience easy. According to the Human Capital Institute, 70% of candidates search for jobs on mobile devices. Yet, research by Attrax shows that only 20% of candidates have their CV stored on their phone. Your career site needs to work flawlessly across devices and your user experience needs to be optimized per device type. 

Is the candidate using a mobile device? Give them the option to apply through a chatbot and upload a resume later. Applying on a PC? Let them apply using LinkedIn or upload their resume from a cloud service like Dropbox. 

The key is to make your candidate journey as convenient as possible.

A Direct Line to Connect to the Recruiter

A winning career site is not just high tech. It’s also high touch. Make your career site interactive by giving interested candidates a way to engage with hiring managers or recruiters. Often, the best candidates just want to talk to someone. Featuring the hiring manager for the role can have a big impact. This lets candidates apply or get in touch in a seamless way.

Ready to Build a High-Converting Career Site? 

If your current career site can’t meet candidates where they are in their job search, can’t show them personalized content, and is seeing low conversion rates, consider using a tool like SmartRecruiters Attrax. 

SmartRecruiters Attrax gives you the ability to turn your career site into a content engine and recruitment marketing capability. It helps you build an intelligent career site that provides personalized candidate experiences, while ensuring your web page and job openings are automatically optimized for search. Attrax customers report up to 90% of hires engaging with their company through their career site. 

Join our webinar on March 30 to see it in action. Save your spot.

In today’s tight labor market, hiring has become a top issue for HR leaders and even CEOs. Career sites are a crucial tool in the fight for talent. ​​Traditional career sites used to be static web pages with a nice video and job listings, but that’s not good enough these days. I’ve seen countless examples of companies spending lots of money advertising open positions to find great candidates, but falling short when candidates visit career pages that are hard to navigate and boring. Month after month, this leads to low conversion rates while pressure continues to grow for hiring teams. 

A strong career site is the front door to a successful recruiting strategy. It’s where Hiring Success starts. The site creates a first impression, representing the company’s brand and culture, and giving candidates a sense of what it’s like to work there. The problem is that career sites have typically been an afterthought; sometimes they are delegated to an overworked website team who don’t prioritize recruiting needs, or companies deploy the basic career site functionality that comes with HCM software. That might work for the simple task of posting jobs, but it doesn’t help with breaking through on the search engines or getting candidates to push the apply button once they do arrive.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that SmartRecruiters has acquired Attrax. Attrax is a leader in career sites, and has worked with customers to improve candidate traffic and conversion, with some amazing results. They do this by providing simple to use but powerful site building tools that recruiting teams can use directly. The resulting sites have dynamic and personalized content, and jobs can be automatically indexed by major search engines to make them easier to find. And, when candidates are truly engaged from start to finish, return on investment becomes that much higher. In this war for talent, we’re ready to help our customers win! 

But for me, the possibilities get even more exciting when we integrate these powerful Attrax career sites with the SmartRecruiters applicant tracking system that TA teams use to run the recruiting process. Just think, we can use information stored in SmartRecruiters, such as job posting priorities, hiring budget, or even candidate profiles, and update the career site in real time. We can take the data that we are collecting at each step of the recruiting process, including what we learn in the marketing phase, and get a better understanding of what is working and what is not. We can streamline candidate interactions, creating 1-click experiences to express interest or apply or even schedule an interview. The possibilities are endless. The integration of Attrax and SmartRecruiters will allow for the first time true Intelligent Career Sites that are optimized based on activity taking place in the ATS. 

Today, the first impression of a candidate is usually not a handshake, it’s your career site. You have the opportunity to inspire curiosity and action. To showcase your employer brand, the impact of their potential role, and the social mission of your company. To create a connected experience from the first moment they meet you (“Hi”) to the moment you make a successful hire (“Hired”). I look forward to seeing what we can do together.

To learn more about SmartRecruiters Attrax, view our product page.