For nearly every recruiting organization, the corporate Career Siteis their recruiting hub.  It’s the one place that all the online recruitment activities point back to and where candidates ultimately end up when they are looking for and applying for employment opportunities.

Done are the days where the Career Site is just a static repository of your jobs.  Just like the recruiter’s role, the Career Site’s main functions have expanded much past what it used to be.  Career Sites now not only house all your employment information and application process but are built to drive candidate traffic and provide customized content to help lead to more candidate conversions.

With an ever expanding list of responsibilities and functions, the Career Site provides recruiting organizations with a single asset to help them accomplish their overall recruiting goals.  Let’s take a look at a few functions you should look for your Career Site to accomplish:

Getting Found: Just like your corporate web site, your Career Site needs to be able to drive traffic to your employment opportunities through it’s own volition (in coordination with your other proactive recruitment marketingefforts).  If it doesn’t then you have some problems.  For starters, you need to make sure that your Career Site is SEO optimized with every job having it’s own landing page with relevant keywords and tags.  Your content should be similarly SEO friendly.  This will be where most of your Career Site candidate traffic will come from.

You will also want to make sure your site is optimized for mobile recruitingso that when candidates do searches on their smartphones (this is increasing by the day) they will be able to easily navigate your site.  Lastly, make sure that your site is readily shareable.  Not only by having great content but also that you include easy options to share on the major social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)  This can help you drive traffic through candidates sharing your jobs and content.

Educate: Once candidates reach your Career Site, they should be able to easily find the right information on your employment opportunities and targeted messaging for their interests and skill-sets.  When they walk away, they should have a great idea of the value you provide to employees and the jobs that are available.  For this function, navigation and search are key.  First, candidates need to be able to search quickly to find jobs and content that is relevant to them.  Second, you need to suggest and highlight relevant and timely content that can help them understand the value you provide (think Netflix or Amazon suggestions).  Measure how effective you are at educating through page view traffic and conversion data, so you can understand what content and pathways best turn candidates into applicants.

Convert: The most important function that the Career Site handles is conversion. That is making sure that when a candidate visits the site they leave only after they submit an application.

In whatever ways candidates make it to your Career Site and jobs, you need to know when they convert and measure that back to every step that influenced their decision to apply.  Did they come straight from a job ad?  Through a Google search?  Did they visit a number of different pages?  Or use the job search?  All these recruitment metricsare important in figuring out what actions lead to the most valuable conversions (qualified and hired) so that you can work on making sure your Career Site makes these actions happen more often.

Your Career Site is one of the most important assets you own in your recruiting strategy (your recruiters are #1) and it’s crucial that you set goals for the success of your Career Site in all of these areas.  Most importantly, the more you measure, the more knowledge you can bring to improving your Career Site content and processes to ensure it’s the most valuable asset in your recruitment strategy.

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter @smashfly.