Post by David Brussin; edited for the Human Capital Market by Jeffery Giesener
Is your Talent Acquisition Department wanting to recruit on social portals like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to drive new candidate traffic and gain new applies and hires.
It is important for every candidate-facing enterprise to seek out new prospects and drive additional traffic via all available web, social and mobile channels. Yet too many talent acquisition departments still neglect some basic strategies that could maximize conversion rates from the candidate traffic they already have.
The following 5 strategies — when implemented correctly — will not only lead to increased conversion rates but will also help drive companies toward an important cultural transformation where candidates will learn why they should work for your company.
Some Perspective
Talent Acquisition is becoming less about channels and more about touch points. HR Marketing is moving beyond multichannel to become “multi-touch point,” and coping with this shift is a serious challenge for Talent Pros and Hiring Managers.
Fortunately, the Career site remains a place where many candidate conversations are initiated, and completed, even if they begin elsewhere. A strong yet nimble Career site — one that can efficiently leverage large amounts of candidate data — will put your recruiting brand in a better position to effectively respond to the emerging demands of multipoint HR Marketing. Without such a focus around a converting career site, your business will miss out on the highly skilled talent which is currently lurking and exploring your career page. If that is the case you will also lose ground to more agile competitors.
- Understand Your Candidate
Self Select Content
By tracking anonymous candidate behavior on the Career site, talent acquisition departments can display campaigns, content, offers and experiences tailored to a candidates browsing habits. Watch what they search for and what they look at, not just what they apply for. This is powerful use of data and when candidates return you can simplify the recruiting process by providing job information that is highly relevant to the candidate. The result: higher apply and hire conversions. The second result is a better quality candidate where jobs fill faster.
- Make Career Pages Relevant
Career sites should adjust candidate marketing content in real time to reflect current events or other recruiting factors, such as customer location, job interest, niche skill etc. Content that is tailored to different key segments (for example, notifying engineering talent that you have specific jobs open in a specific area in the featured jobs area of your Career site tied to these behaviors increase apply and hiring conversion.
Relevance includes adjusting site content to reflect where a candidate comes from. For example, were they directed from Facebook or an email newsletter? Make sure the messaging that brought them to the site is reflected in the site experience and inform that site experience with what analytics show about that traffic segment. For example, data may indicate that the browsing and apply habits of candidates from Facebook are different from those who land on your career site via email.
- Use Offline Learning to Inform Online Action
Many multichannel retailers have accumulated a lot of knowledge about their customers. For example, managers of brick and mortar stores know that there are local brand preferences. Headquarters may track brand preference by region or state. So use that data to geo-target online traffic.
If Texas shoppers prefer Wranglers to Levis, highlight Wranglers to online traffic from Texas. The results will be improved conversion rates and higher average order values.
Similar opportunities exist in sourcing candidates. If you are in the Hospitality industry and you have a bartender visiting your Career pages why not immediately show bartender positions in their location. Why force them to hunt for them. Saving clicks dramatically increases applies and hires.
- Consistency Is Key
Traffic that comes from outside channels like social media will convert better if consistent messaging is maintained throughout the candidate hiring cycle. Messaging that initially drives traffic to your Career site (such as “Twitter followers learn about our Summer Internships”) should be reflected not just on the social landing page but also on each career page that the visitor sees until they apply.
This doesn’t mean a site makeover. Instead, the message simply needs to echo the messaging that caught the candidate’s attention in the first place.
- Test, Test, Test
To know if a site is truly compelling, HR Brands must constantly test it to ensure that content is presented in a manner that resonates with candidates to produce optimum results. HR Departments should test for sticking points and optimize the choice of messaging, design of buttons, display of apply buttons above the fold, layout and ease of filling out of forms, display of positive reinforcements like trust seals, SSL Certificates Keys and privacy assurances. Even a small improvement at each stage of the process will pay big apply and hire dividends.
Smart HR marketers will establish a culture of testing. A culture of testing in which decisions are data-driven (not emotionally driven) is the best posture from which to meet changing candidate challenges.
Looking Forward
I would love to be able to wrap up by saying, “do the above and you’re done.” But that’s not how site conversion works today. Nor is it about how candidate engagement and conversation works. The rapidly evolving world of multipoint marketing means that HR Brands must constantly tweak the experience that their Career site delivers to each visitor segment based on everything they know about that segment. That knowledge includes data drawn from all referring channels — something a Career site should provide if the proper technology is in place to tap it.
To learn more about data-driven HR Marketing and developing Career Sites that optimize candidate conversion while lowering overall recruiting costs give me a ping by email at jeff@sourcemob.com or ring me up at 952-417-6955.
Don’t forget to sign up for one of our many Webinars at www.sourcemob.com/events
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
jeff@sourcemob.com
952-417-6955