Candidate Engagement Starts Right at Your Career Pages

…HR ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob.com

Last week I made parallels from the eCommerce world on the subject of Talent Communities and communication strategies. This blog post got a lot of comments and positive reactions.

So I thought I would continue this thread and discuss what I believe is another gap in many company’s efforts to acquire candidates. To do so lets again revisit the world of eCommerce and look at how a Etailers build their buying conversion strategy.

Building buying conversion all starts with a solid grounding in website analytics. The key is knowing the behavior of your visitors, your bounce rate, time on site, page pathways and movement of consumers through the shopping cart and checkout pages into buying conversion. Any movement that isn’t tracked is a defection possibility and will result in an obvious loss of revenue. In our case a candidate defection and loss of hire.

Why not look at this for yourself. Simply go to Amazon.com who is famous for their one-click-to-buy technology, Zappos.com and their mastery of merchandising using site navigation. Ebay.com for their original deal making and so on. Frankly each of the top 500 Internet Etailers have figured out their own unique selling position to maximize site conversion. Why not check the sites you are buying from and ask yourself what attracts you to buy?

Now Decide What Is Remarkable About Your Career Page(s)?

My hope is that you are not linking your candidate experience from your corporate home page directly into your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) pages.

If you are ask yourself why are you doing that? What kind of cultural candidate experience does that strategy provide to your candidates. How do they know about your organization and why would they want to work their?

If you are continuing to ask why ERE.net has indicated if you do you will face 40-60% defection from candidates when you don’t give them a compelling experience to get to know your company and apply.

Check out these links:

http://bit.ly/16ay0QB

(notice the imagery and social career network widget on the left; all above the page fold)

and another

http://bit.ly/18AqoBd

(now I would suggest improving this page by adding people images, videos, endorsements, recommendations and testimonials both from employees and candidates).

Notice how each of these Career Pages does a good job of enticing the candidate to learn more about the company and the reason to join. All of this is proven analytically to lead to more applies while also reducing candidate defection.

Candidate Engagement Starts Right at Your Career Pages

To make sure candidates STOP and take notice on your career pages notice that there is culture information, student solutions/career fair information, benefits, onboarding information and of course job information. But unfortunately in many cases including the two career pages above these career pages are not mobile enabled nor can you apply through mobile without the pain of pinching and zooming. The result probably another 30% defection bringing the total defection rate up to close to 40-90%. Ouch…

Is your career pages, job search; job description and mobile apply available for your candidates. If not yet then when are you planning to move there?

Making your Career Pages and Applies Mobile Enabled

If you are not putting thought into career page engagement and making your candidate process mobile enabled including mobile apply directly into your ATS than you are not netting the number of candidates you could be. And the cost to your Talent Acquisition will be staggering. Again ERE.net indicates you could be loosing 40-90% of your mobile candidates. Did you know that the average mobile traffic on SourceMob clients is 17percent today and some of clients are north of 30 percent?

Why do I know, simple check your career page and ATS analytics and see how many candidates actually move through your candidate ATS funnel. What is your defection rate?

Also don’t get tripped up. To repeat this very important point, the current number of candidates visiting your career pages using a mobile device is on average today between 17-25 percent+. So mobile visitation may not be so noticeable to your recruiting efforts. But it should already be and by 2016-2018 more than 50% of your workforce will be on mobile according to Morgan Stanley. So ask yourself where do you want to be? Nowhere or on mobile.

Playing Catch Up or Leading Your Industry?

Today It Is Your Choice To Decide!

To learn how you can leap frog and build candidate friendly and mobile enabled career pages that are robust along with giving your candidates a direct mobile, search, mobile descriptions and mobile apply simply give me a call at 952-417-6955 or email me at jeff@sourcemob.com . I will be happy to personally share with you how you can change your candidate experience and do it in 45-90 days.

SourceMob is helping to educate our Recruiting Industry and it one of the many factors why we are growing. Catch one of the many SourceMob Webinar each as most of these webinars are FREE.

To check out our latest Webinar Education schedule go to SourceMob.com and look for the Events link off the navigational bar http://sourcemob.com/events/

Next Webinar – August 25th – 12 PM CST

Where Are My Candidates? – The Necessity of Talent Acquisition Analytics

Presented by Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob & Jared Law – VP of IT – SourceMob & Lemonte Wilcox – Social Listening Expert

It’s FREE

ABOUT SOURCEMOB: SourceMob integrates Internet, social, talent community. HR Analytics and social listening solutios, HR Marketing Services and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob’s solutions seamlessly distribute conversations, engagement and job content all done on autopilot providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and all of the major search engines. We help you engage with your candidates and capture niche Passive candidates. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create more efficiencies and lower recruiting costs. Plus you won’t need your IT Team or HR Department to implement them. That is beauty of the SourceMob platform.

Looking forward to hearing from you…

Best,

Jeffery

Jeffery Giesener

CEO/Founder

SourceMob.com

jeff@sourcemob.com

942-417-6955

Twitter: @thegies

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener