When taking a look at your recruitment marketing funnel, you’ll notice 3-4 distinct points in the process where a candidate needs to ask themselves a question: “Do I continue on or do I drop off?”  It is these points that we call candidate conversion points.

Candidate conversion points are the stages in your recruitment marketing funnel where you either convert candidates to the next stage in the funnel or lose them.  Every recruitment marketing funnel has multiple candidate conversion points but the most common stages are the following:

Awareness:  This is the first stage in the funnel and is when a candidate first comes in contact with your job position.  The candidate sees your job title and determines that is compelling enough to view the job ad description.

This can be on your career site, on a job board or another recruiting channel but the main driver of conversion is your job title.

Interest: After a candidate views your job ad description, they will ask themselves two main questions:

1. Am I qualified for this position?

2. Am I interested in applying for this position?

If the answer is yes to both questions, then most likely they will click to apply for the position.  The main driver of conversion is your job ad messaging and the content you provide for the job position.

Contacts: This stage may not exist today in your recruitment funnel, however, I encourage you to find a way to build this stage.  If you have this stage in your process, once a candidate clicks apply on your job ad, they will be taken to a simple Talent Network opt-in form.  This is what we call a dual purpose job ad and once the form is filled out they will be taken to the application.

This stage enables your organization to collect contacts that may drop off during the application.  This stage also includes all the contacts you collect on other channels such as on your Career Site, in your social profiles and through sourcing efforts.

Applicant Conversion: This is the final stage as any candidate that converts becomes an application in your ATS.  The main driver of this stage is your job application and how easy it is for candidates to finish the apply process.

For every stage during the recruitment marketing funnel, it is important to collect recruitment metrics in order to identify when bottlenecks appear in your funnel.  The most common metrics that help you are your Views, Apply Clicks, Contacts and Applicants metrics that you collect.

When you determine that there are problems with your funnel using these metrics, the question is how can we improve our process and convert more candidates in each stage of the funnel.

Here are a few ways to improve your process:

Job Title: When you are receiving too few Views on your job ads you need to take a look at your job title.  While it may seem inconsequential at times, it is the main reason that candidates will enter your recruitment funnel and needs to be thought about.

To create a good job title, here are a few tips: 

Make it Keyword Rich: It is important to include job specific keywords in your job title such as JAVA, Marketing, Sales, VP, etc. when publishing a job.  You also may want to include location cues in your job title on geographic specific jobs.  All recruiting channels have search features on their websites so it’s as important as ever to include significant keywords in your job titles. 

A-B Testing: Not sure between two job titles?  Try them both.  One of the best ways to see what job titles work best is to test and measure which ones candidates find compelling. 

Look at Competitors: Competing with other companies for similar job positions.  See what they are calling their positions.

Job Ad Messaging:  When you have a high number of views and low apply clicks, you know that the problem lies in your job ad messaging.  With your job description, you have the unique opportunity to sell not only your job position but your company to a candidate.    There are a few ways that you can improve your job ad messaging:

Questions to Answer: When writing your messaging make sure to answer three main questions:

Why should the candidate work for your company?

How will this position help the candidates career?

What are the key skills required for the position?

The first two questions relate to the core value proposition you provide to candidates as an employer.  The last question enables unqualified candidates to drop out once they see they don’t have the necessary skills for the position.

Formatting:  Having great content is one thing and displaying it in the optimal way is another thing entirely.  When you’re creating your job ad, you want to make it as scan-able as possible.  Candidates will read your job ad for 10-20 seconds if that.  You need to make it so that candidates can easily find the information they need to make a quick decision.

Two ways to do this are as follows.  First, use Bullet Points to easily list out benefits and responsibilities for the position.  Second, use subject headers such as “Why work for our Company” or “Required Skills” so candidates can quickly navigate to these sections.

Employer Branding: Make sure to include your social recruiting profiles, employer branding videos and other recruiting content as links in your job ad (and make sure they open in a new page.)  This will provide candidates with a way to add themselves to your social connections as well as provide them with more information on why they should apply.

Application: With your job application, you want to make sure that every part of your application works and makes sense for candidates.  There is no reason that a candidate should drop off your application because it doesn’t work.  Make sure to go through your interview and application process at least once a quarter and focus on the following: 

Setting Expectations: Make sure to tell candidates at the start how much time the application should take and how many more pages of information they need to complete. 

Time: Any application that takes more than 10 minutes is probably too long.  Try to focus on the information that is important to collect in the application. 

Broken processes:  Make sure there are no broken links or redundant processes in the application that will make candidates unable to finish the application.

Take a look at your candidate conversion points.  Are they performing like you think they should?  If not, try to improve them with some of the suggestions above and test the results.  It could have a significant impact on your recruitment marketing strategy.

Read more on the SmashFly Recruitment Technology Blog.