Hiring isn’t getting any easier. Today’s talent acquisition teams must do everything they can to attract candidates, convince them to apply, and keep them engaged until they show up on the job. In a competitive marketplace for talent, a strong employer brand is an essential component in your talent acquisition strategy – and that includes your career site.

Here at SmartRecruiters, we have a team of employer branding experts who work on our SmartRecruiters Attrax career site product. I sat down with Warren Davidson, Client Services Director, to get the scoop on how companies can improve their employer brands on their career sites. 

“You can have the most beautiful employer brand in the world, but if your career site is dreadful, it’s going to undermine your employer brand,” Warren said. As an expert in career sites and with deep experience in marketing, Warren believes in a candidate-centric approach. The candidate, after all, is your prospective customer. “Your employer brand is intrinsically linked to the candidate experience,” he explained. Warren identified the key aspects of ideal candidate experience.

Personalized, Contextually Relevant Content

“First, they should land on a job that’s relevant to them,” Warren said. “And then they should see a piece of content that reassures them that the company is DEI-friendly, or has great benefits.” He recommends content that brings the workplace to life, such as employee stories that focus on topics relevant to candidates of all kinds, whether they’re parents or from diverse backgrounds. The SmartRecruiters Attrax system uses automation to ensure relevance and personalization. “Relevant, personalized content drives better quality candidates,” he said. “It should also improve your hiring velocity.” 

Organic Traffic from Google

Google visibility is a key piece of the candidate experience that many companies miss. Google is one of the most popular places to look for jobs – and it’s free to get your jobs listed there. By adding structured data to your career website, job seekers automatically find your listings when they search. If your career site is hidden behind the wrong URL and lacks structured data, you end up paying aggregators to get listed on Google. Organic traffic from search engines to an SEO-optimized career site and job listings is a gift that keeps on giving.

Easy Application Process

Many companies lose candidates to a difficult application process. “If they get presented with a login screen, application rates drop off right there,” Warren said. A one-page application with a resume/CV upload from the cloud increases the number of applications. For jobs that are particularly hard to fill, “we have some customers who don’t even ask for a CV anymore,” he said. Candidates can indicate their experience by answering a series of pre-configured questions, which is effective for many types of roles. 

The Power of Branded Experiences

These elements add up to a big impact. “If you have Google visibility, personalization on your career site, deliver contextually relevant content, and a good application process, the ultimate upshot is that when a candidate hits the website, they feel like they belong to your organization. They can see themselves working there,” Warren said. That relevancy drives self-selection, and the ease of the application process prevents the right candidates from dropping out.

Sounds amazing, right? I took a look at some of the results from SmartRecruiters Attrax implementations. All of them had stats such as:

• Increased career site traffic
• Increased candidate engagement (more pages viewed)
• Increased number of applications
• Decrease in abandoned applications
• Increased organic traffic from Google
• Increased traffic to employer brand content
• Decrease in the source of hire  from job boards and recruitment agencies
• Increase in the source of hire from organic career site visits

The Art of What’s Possible on a Career Site

Like a lot of things companies struggle with, legacy technology holds them back from addressing the needs of the current marketplace. Updating a career site may require the work of an agency or IT team. The application process required by the current ATS may be turning candidates away. Warren said, “When it comes to career sites, a lot of companies don’t know what’s possible.”

What is possible? An SEO-optimized career site that delivers personalized, relevant jobs and content to candidates, integrates seamlessly with an ATS, and can be updated by anyone, not just website specialists. Not only is a career site a place where the visual and creative aspects of your employer brand can shine, but also it’s a place where your employer brand comes to life by facilitating a stellar candidate experience.

Even if you live under a rock, in the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by a desert wasteland, you still know that recruiting is now a mobile game.

The average person will spend over four hours on their devices each day. If you assume the recommended eight hours of sleep, this means that 25 percent of a peron’s waking day is spent on a mobile device. The majority of this time is eaten up by browsing social media (over two hours, according to Statista) and firing off an endless stream of texts (almost a half hour each day).

That said, people do use their mobile devices for more practical tasks as well, including searching for jobs. A 2014 study performed by Censuswide, and funded by Indeed.com, found that 65 percent of people were using mobile devices while looking for new jobs. This number grew as high as 77 percent in younger age brackets.

This is a staggering majority that cannot be overlooked by recruiters. Mobile recruiting, while still a relatively new trend, is a vital branch that needs to be incorporated into any company’s hiring strategy.

Unfortunately, the infancy of this trend means that recruiters are still forming their understanding of the best practices when approaching mobile users with career opportunities. To help facilitate that learning, here are three mistakes that organizations need to avoid when approaching mobile recruitment.

Check out SmartRecruiters mobile recruiting here!

1. Failing To Adapt Job Posts To The Mobile Environment

Convenience is one of the most common reasons cited for job seekers turning to mobile. The same Censuswide, Indeed.com survey found that convenience was the number one motivator for mobile job searchers. That convenience is severely damaged when recruiters fail to adapt their job posts to the mobile environment. With smaller screens and touch navigation, mobile users have vastly different browsing behaviors from desktop applicants.

Your mobile recruitment posts need to provide the necessary information to entice applicants and ensure that they understand the position, its duties, and the requirements. But, too much information is overwhelming for mobile users that are staring at a much smaller screen. Not to mention, these individuals have notoriously short attention spans.

UPS has been a leader in online recruiting for nearly two decades. Realizing that browsing social media and watching videos are two of the most common mobile activities, they made sure to target Facebook and Twitter users with job posts and incorporate videos, instead of large blocks of text, in their job descriptions. This allowed them to reduce hiring costs from $600-700 to just $60-70.

2. Lacking A Mobile Career Portal

Alongside their social media and video-enabled mobile recruitment, UPS also leverages a mobile app designed to be a communication channel between the company and applicants. Both sides find value from this addition to mobile recruiting. Applicants can ask questions and receive additional information vital to their hiring.

UPS, on the other hand, can use these initial conversations to more accurately target the right employees for interviews. This has had a dramatic impact on improving their interview-hire ratio to 2:1.

In short, offering some mobile career portal, or app, that enhances your mobile recruitment is a huge advantage. This is especially true with younger applicants in the millennial generation because these job seekers are so mobile-centric.

3. Forgetting to Track Results

Data has become an invaluable and unavoidable tool in today’s always-connected world. We’re producing data at absolutely wonky rates. In one report from 2017, there was a total of 2.7 Zettabytes of data in the “digital universe.” Translated into gigabytes, let’s say it is a lot of zeroes, with more being added every second.

If you ask your marketing department how much they use data to inform decisions, they’ll likely talk your ear off. So, why not incorporate data into your mobile recruitment strategies? If you aren’t continually testing your job postings, in terms of message and channel, then how will you determine what’s working? Mobile users search differently, which means they may be using different keywords than expected to find job posts.

Google’s People Analytics team (a Google-ized name for their HR department) used data from their past interviews to determine what questions and practices in their hiring process yielded high-performing employees. They found that specific tactics, which they long presumed were effective, actually added no value to the equation. Thus, they removed them from their hiring tactics.

So…

These mistakes can be crippling to mobile recruiting, but they are very avoidable. By spending more time analyzing your mobile recruitment efforts and creating hiring experiences that are designed for the mobile user, you’ll see more, qualified applicants entering your onboarding process.

As an employer, it can be hard to strike a balance. You want to present yourself as a great place to work to attract the best potential candidates, but you won’t always have lots of time to dedicate to the task.

Even if you already know how to write the perfect job ad, it needs to be presented as part of a strong, cohesive wider strategy of employer branding. How you introduce your company to potential hires should be a key part of your corporate communication plan.

It’s important to be proactive about communicating with interested candidates, and a very simple way to do this is through your company career page. Read on about why it’s important to have one, how much effort you need to put into it, and you can make the most of it to find the most talented people for your team!

What is the value of a career site?

Currently, job seekers can afford to be pretty optimistic about the jobs market, but companies now have to actively compete to attract the best talent. It’s not uncommon for those in high-demand fields – IT professionals are probably the best example – to be in the luxurious position of having their pick of the best job offers.

Web-savvy candidates are making more informed career decisions than ever before. They’re no longer just looking for a livelihood. They’re asking themselves questions like: ‘Is this a company where I would be happy to spend the next few years?’ ‘Do I share their objectives, ideas and vision?’ ‘Can I realise my personal goals here?’. Candidates can avail of a plethora of online resources to find out exactly what they need to know about the companies that interest them.

Through clever use of employer branding, companies can actively present themselves as they wish to be seen, instead of leaving candidates to do their own investigations. This saves the candidates time, and gives companies a golden opportunity to put their best foot forward.

One effective step towards great employer branding is to have a dedicated career page. The goal is to provide potential new employees with an authentic picture of the company and to make clear what you stand for.

A really good career site isn’t just about providing vacancy information – it’s even worthwhile for smaller companies that don’t have any jobs openings at the moment. Its purpose is to convey a sense of what it would be like to work for the company, and it doesn’t take a big investment to make this possible!

Of course, people who eventually apply will need to have the right skills and experience to be considered, but the primary goal of the career page is to encourage those who share the company’s vision and are motivated by the organisation’s goals to apply in the first place.

How to best structure your career site

Before you begin to build your career site, you should ask yourself some basic questions. Who are we looking for? Who is our target audience and what is important to them? Are they seeking job security or adventure? Do they place more value on flexible working hours or higher salaries?

It’s possible that you’ll end up with diverse target groups that need to be addressed differently. For example, career sites now often have sections specifically for tech candidates. At its most basic, the career site is an element of corporate communications that should be in line with the company’s presence on all channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and of course your company’s website.

The Basics

• Present your company’s vision and mission

What do we stand for? Where will our journey lead us? What values do we represent?

• Show off the office culture

What differentiates us from other companies? What makes us special? What kind of atmosphere do we have here? At this point, the motto is: “show, don’t tell”. Use photos, videos or your Instagram feed instead of bombarding people with reams of text.

• Brag about employee benefits

What do we have to offer? Are there flexible working hours, a company car, catering, gym memberships, internal or external training opportunities, etc.?

• Provide any pertinent company information

Who is the contact for applicants? Where is the office? Are there any other offices, and if so, where are they located? Who are the founders or managers? Has there been any relevant press coverage?

If you don’t have any current vacancies, you should briefly express that unsolicited applications are always welcome.

Nice-to-Haves

• FAQs

For those with time and resources who regularly advertise new positions, applicant FAQs can be worthwhile. There you can provide answers to common questions that potential candidates regularly ask. You can display information about who to contact for queries that arise, explain how the application process works, and what you want to see in the ideal application.

• Live Content

Live content is the icing on the career page cake. This content provides an insight into day-to-day work and the current state of play at the company. For example, Zalando has built a specific job portal for tech candidates which centres around a dedicated blog. The team reports there on their work, provides information on open source projects, offers tips and posts photos of team events.

However, not everyone has the opportunity to maintain a dedicated HR blog. A less time-consuming alternative is an integrated Instagram feed which provides an authentic insight into daily life at the company, and sticks to the aforementioned motto: show, don’t tell. However, if time and manpower are too tight to maintain such channels, they aren’t crucial. If you have the basics covered, you can leave them out.

A little goes a long way

Even just a little effort can really make a huge difference to creating an exciting, evocative career page. Ultimately, its most important goal is to get across an authentic picture of the company and the culture, in a way that suits the means at your disposal. Don’t forget to extend the influence of your company page through using supportive platforms like Kununu or Jobspotting so that you can reach great candidates wherever they’re hanging out online. Creating a fantastic career site doesn’t need a large budget, just a little careful planning, a few hours work, and a willingness to share a little info about your company!

Article republished from Jobspotting and updated Nov 14, 2017.

This week we introduce Mobile Career Sites for all customers. With 50% of internet traffic soon coming from mobile devices, it’s rather important to give people an easy access to jobs from a tiny mobile screen.

 
How does it work?
 
Your default SmartRecruiters Careers Page: www.smartrecruiters.com/companyname now has a mobile style sheet so that when someone accesses it via a mobile device it automatically adjusts itself to display your job list and individual job descriptions in a nice and easy format.
 

 
To see your new Mobile Career site in action, pull your iphone, android or any phone and go to www.smartrecruiters.com/yourcompany. You can also check out other examples such as www.smartrecruiters.com/photobucket or www.smartrecruiters.com/gooddata.
 
How can I leverage it?
 
If you already use your SmartRecruiters page as a Career Website and have it linked from your own website, then you have nothing else to do. It will work automatically. If your company has a mobile website, then make sure to use www.smartrecruiters.com/companyname as your link to Mobile Careers
 
Other Topics

 
• Apply with LinkedIn: We fixed some issues with confusing language in the LinkedIn functionality

 
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Using this widget, you can display all your open positions or you can filter the positions by department and/or locations and embed multiple job widgets on different places on your website. Example: if you have a corporate website and a San Francisco specific sub-site, you can configure one job widget to display openings in all locations and another one to display positions in San Francisco and embed these to the respective sites. Utilizing jobs widget to share your jobs on your site, blog, or other sites just got really easy!
 
By default, the widget is set up to display all locations. You can grab the code, as is, and embed it to your main website. Note that the job widget will display ALL your jobs, irrespective of when you embed the code. So if you now have job openings in a new location, this configuration will automatically display jobs in the new location – no need to re-configure and embed the widget again.
 

For the San Francisco-specific job list, you can specific “San Francisco; SF” in the Location filter and grab and embed the code.
 

This week’s bug fix

• Some users were experiencing difficulties while editing and re-posting their jobs. They were unable to get to the next step and their hiring team selections were being reset to only include the team member who originally created the job. This issue has now been resolved. You should be able to edit and re-post all your jobs.

 
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The post Weekly release: Enhanced Job Widget & Improved Job Ad Editing first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.]]> https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/weekly-release-seo-optimization-of-job-ads-and-career-sites/ Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:54:42 +0000 http://www.smartrecruiters.com/static/blog/?p=1457 SEO optimization of your job ads and your career site: This week we worked on making your job ads more searchable so that Google lists your job ads higher in search results. So how did we achieve this? This included cleaning up the job ad URL to display your company name and job name, instead […]