Does Your Website Help with Talent Acquisition?

With an expertly produced website, you have a proverbial Swiss Army Knife that possesses a potent versatility.

It acts as a brand ambassador, salesperson, marketing guru, advertising space, and – most relevant to today’s blog – a talent recruitment tool.

And with 90% of businesses finding it difficult to recruit qualified candidates for open positions, one would think more effort would be put into using company websites as a recruitment tool.

Yet, as web designers, we notice that far too many businesses put minimal thought into how their website impacts talent acquisition—especially with their ‘Careers’ Page.

Such a faux pas is counterintuitive to attracting top talent. Bringing in top-notch performers requires a multilayered, effective branding strategy. Also, a targeted recruitment process is a must.

For further context, consider that 38% of people will stop engaging with a site if it doesn’t have an appealing layout or design. And the strategy put in place to attract top talent is akin to that of attracting consumers.

Stats aside, if your website and ‘Careers’ page aren’t up to standards, why would the most impressive candidates on the job market want to work for your company? After all, it tells them that your business doesn’t care about its image, nor does it possess attention to detail.

As such, if talent acquisition hasn’t been a primary focus in your website’s design, it’s time for a paradigm shift of sorts.

Read below, and we’ll discuss some of the finer points of this issue:

Establishing Your Candidate Persona

Before examining the candidate persona and how it impacts your website as a hiring tool, we’ll provide a working definition of the term.

Your candidate persona is a list of attributes and characteristics you’re looking for in an ideal hire. To successfully craft an acquisition strategy, HR professionals must define a candidate persona that best matches the culture and operational nuances of your business.

Website aside, this guides leadership through the hiring process in a way that reduces turnover rates and decreases recruitment costs.

A thorough grasp of a candidate persona also significantly enhances the quality of hires.

So, when you’re putting together your ‘Careers’ page (and your whole website), you need to take this candidate persona into account.

This principle should be apparent in the narrative and perspective used in the copywriting on your ‘Careers’ page. It should also play a part in your design layout and the graphics utilized on your website.

In a nutshell, every decision you make for your website (especially for your ‘Careers’ page) should be reached with your candidate persona in mind. After all, those are the people with which you’re trying to speak directly.

Optimizing Your Conversion Pathways

As we alluded to in the introduction, the methods of attracting job candidates (namely, top-notch talent) mirror those of converting customers.

At the end of the day, these people will set your business apart from the rest of the pack. The quality of your hires will be a deciding factor on whether your business succeeds in the long run.

So, what are the stages of the candidate conversion pathway?

Here’s a brief breakdown of the process:

Attraction 
The funnel entry-point where applicants find your job listing through a career site, advertisement, or referral, etc.

Application 
When candidates apply for a position with your company  

Screening
This stage involves initial phone screens and primary interviews

Making the offer
This happens once you’ve selected the desired candidate 

Offer acceptance
Finalizing the hiring process

With these stages in mind, you must assess what role your website and ‘Careers’ page can play in the recruitment funnel. 

For the most part, your website is crucial for attraction. Meaning, you must utilize the correct language in describing your company as well as the role itself, for instance. 

Something else to consider is how your website can impact the application process. Ask yourself how seamless it is to apply to a role with your company through your website? If it’s a colossal pain to access the application, or the process is clunky in any way, it may act as a form of deterrence to potentially lucrative candidates. 

Your website can also play a vital part in the initial screening process. There are technologies out there that can assess whether resumes possess specific keywords that make an applicant viable, for instance. Other automated practices can integrate with your website, such as pre-screen surveys. 

Pre-screen surveys can either be sent through an email after being triggered once an online application is filled. Furthermore, they can be directly embedded into your website.

The surveys mentioned above can put forth knock out questions that discern whether a candidate is fit for a role. More specifically, only 60 percent of applicants bother to fill out the pre-screen survey. As such, you’re accomplishing immediate screening that clearly shows who are the most engaged candidates.

Finding a way to implement some form of screening into your website’s application process will save a wealth of time and resources. It ensures you’re only interviewing candidates best suited to the role you’re attempting to fill. 

At the end of the day, it often costs thousands of dollars to fill a vacancy within your company. In utilizing your website efficiently and cleverly to filter down candidates, you’ll mitigate those steep costs. Provided your business is still a young startup, or your budget is tight, this cost-effective outlook can positively impact your bottom line. 

Honing-in On Goal Tracking

In a world where Google Analytics has provided a wealth of statistics that convey whether sales goals are being met, the same insights exist for hiring.

When framing your goals, you need to consider these factors:

• Are your goals measurable?
• Are your goals attainable?
• Are your goals relevant, worthwhile, and reasonable?
• Are your goals specific?
• Do you know what you’re aiming to accomplish and why you want to get it done?

The central aspect of hiring goals that your website should be able to streamline is with measuring and metrics. 

Also, there’s a need to grasp your recruitment analytics.

Firstly, to establish your goals and create a recruitment strategy around them, you need to know where your traffic is coming from. Is it from organic Google searches, paid searches, or social media, for example?

Knowing these numbers will help you comprehend what campaigns are drawing candidates to your website.

Then, are you tracking your conversion rates? If you’re drawing traffic to your ‘Careers’ page but failing to convert them into applicants, it might indicate that you’re doing a good job garnering click-throughs. But your onsite CRO (conversion rate optimization) isn’t up to snuff. Perhaps the language isn’t clear, or the layout isn’t appealing. 

Once you’re aware of where you’re most successful and unsuccessful, it becomes far easier to establish attainable goals.

If you go into the process blind and say, “I want 700 candidates from LinkedIn,” you’re setting yourself up for guaranteed failure. Why? Because you have no context or knowledge of the landscape. 

Goal-tracking means virtually nothing if you’re tracking unsound goals. Analytics provide the necessary information and tracking that helps you craft a strategy around those goals.

And with the talent recruitment software available on the market, you can integrate recruitment goal tracking into your website’s framework.

Are Your Keywords Optimized for Talent Acquisition?

The implementation of strategically inclined high-volume keywords is integral to your recruitment efforts. Without the requisite, thorough keyword research, there won’t be any potential candidates perusing your website, never mind high-quality ones. 

By utilizing competitor research, analytics software, and even free online tools, you’ll craft a recruitment keyword strategy that generates impressive SERP results. 

However, keywords do require plenty of nuances to be useful in any way. Just cramming your ‘Careers’ page with high volume keywords will actually work against you and deter Google’s algorithms from ranking your site.

It’s Time to Optimize Your Candidate Conversion Rates

Without taking the time to enhance the above aspects of your website and ‘Careers’ page, you’re missing out on hiring the most impressive candidates on the market. 

In fairness, with your busy schedule, finding the time to painstaking analyze all these details all on your own is unrealistic.

This kind of optimization necessitates the guidance of web design experts who understand the ins-and-outs of generating quality candidate conversions. You also need to partner with a company whose services integrate with recruitment software, like August Ash.