Is your career site conversion rate low? Is it  missing interesting and engaging content? Do your career site visitors leave the page immediately? Do the candidates abandon your job application form before they hit “submit”? Are you struggling to get more job applicants from your career site?

If you answered with a YES to any of these questions, the good news is that yon have plenty of room for improvement!

There are many different ways for improving your career site so that you can get more high-quality job applicants.

Why is career site optimization important?

Your career page isn’t just a place to post your jobs – it is a place to attract high-quality applicants and sell them your job opportunities, communicate your Employer Brand and your Employee Value Proposition. 

According to 2016 Global Talent Trends research,

"Candidates don’t apply immediately after hearing about a job. Instead, 59% look up the company’s website. Sixty six percent want to know about your company’s culture and values, 54% about perks and benefits, and 50% about mission and vision."

That being said, you need to put a little bit more effort into optimizing your career site in order to get more high-quality applicants and improve your recruiting success.

Today’s market is extremely competitive. If you are in an industry with many hard-to-fill roles, career site optimization is a must!

Not convinced? Check out these stats:

Convinced?

Increase the number of job applicants on your career site

Luckily, there are many thing you can do to improve your career site optimization. Tactics that I am about to share with you are proven to generate more high-quality job applicants on career sites.

Here’s the list of some of my favorite career site optimization tips that have helped companies attract and hire more high-quality job applicants:

Optimize your career site design with an easy-to-use tool

Career site design is very important for converting career site visitors into applicants. Since HR Professionals usually don't have knowledge or permission for editing company's career site, it can be hard to do so without a Recruitment Marketing platform.

These platforms offer easy career site design without any experience in coding or web-design. 

Career site SEO (search engine optimization)

Optimize your job openings and job descriptions to target best candidates that are good fit for your job opening and company's culture. Job descriptions should be clear and detailed, and they should describe roles and characteristics of your ideal candidate or your candidate persona.

Make sure that your job description includes keywords that job seekers are using to find job desirable job openings. This way, you are more likely to be found on search engines.

If you are hiring Tech talent, make sure that you know how to speak "their language". This online technology glossary for HR Professionals is a good start. 

Optimizing your site for SEO will, I can promise you, get you more job applicants on your career site.

Career site analytics

To be able to understand what is working and not working well with your website, you need to be able to track and measure its performance. 

Making changes to your website, and not being able to track the results, is pointless.

Some of the career site metrics that we provide and encourage our user to use include:

• Career site visitors
• Sites the visitors are coming from
• Visitors' online behaviour (e.g. which content do the find interesting, informational or useful)
• Number of visitors that start the application form
• Number of visitors that don't finish the form
• Point at which they abandon the application form.

Knowing these numbers can give you great insights about what can you do to improve your career site optimization.

Because every improvement starts with measuring, modern HR professionals know how to measure some of the most important HR metrics to learn about how productive their hiring strategies are. 

Easy job search and application

If you have many job openings, make the job seekers' lives easiers, and add a search bar to your career site.

Ease the job search process by allowing job seekers to use keywords to find jobs they are interested in.

Encourage and enable employees to refer

Your employees know best who are your candidate personas. Referred employees take less time and money to hire than candidates coming from any other source. Also, they stay longest with companies. For that reason, many companies have established employee referral programs. 

Next to every (or at least hard-to-fill) job on your career site, add a share or "refer a friend" button to make it easier for your employees to recommend high-quality candidates.

Various application options

Companies with a flexible application process have a much higher conversion rate than the ones that don't let the applicants choose different ways to apply.

For example, you can let the applicants apply with their social media profiles such as Facebook, or only by uploading their resumes.

Simple application form

Before starting to use TalentLyft, some of our users were struggling with high application form abandon rates because of their lack of user-friendliness.

I would encourage you all to shorten your pre screening application forms. Include only the questions that are absolutely necessary. Losing some high quality job applicants because of this reason is a huge waste!

Current employee testimonials

This is a great way of attracting your career site visitors and potential job candidates. What could be a better way of communicating your company's culture other than letting your own employees talk about it?

This is an example of a good use of career site space. There is a team introduction, but more importantly, there are current employee testimonials. A young engineer (candidates hardest to attract nowadays!) giving a feedback about his amazing experience at the company, can certainly attract candidates. 

Remember, candidates trust employees' words much more than employers' or CEOs'!

Team introduction

Tell people about your team members. Tell them why do you appreciate them. Tell them about the characteristics that make them perfect employees.This way, job seekers will be able to identify themselves if they are a good fit or not.

By doing this, you are basically letting them decide if they are your candidate personas.

Offer useful content

Create an eBook or a guide with a content useful for job seekers and your website visitors. For example, you can write about interview tips, best practices for job search, difference between corporations and startups or small business, or tips for changing career paths.

Offer this content to your career page visitors. This is a great way to start building relationships with your candidates.

Team blogging

Is your team currently working on a cool project? Do you have some interesting facts about your company's latest achievements? Are there any hot trends in the industry?

Share this information with your career site visitors by writing a blog. Let your current employees from different departments (developers, marketers, HR professionals...) write about something interesting.

These blogs don't have to be long or frequent, yet they are a great way of attracting high-quality job applicants.

If you want an example of a perfect career page and team blogging, please check out Intercom’s career site for engineers.

Contact form

Add a simple contact form to your career site. Make it as easy for candidates to contact you as possible.

Chatbot

For the ones that are used to fast responses, offer a chat. This is a great way to answer questions immediately and not losing high quality applicants because of untimely response to their questions.

Social shares

Sometimes, candidates may not see a good fit for themselves on your career site. However, they may know someone who does. Let them share your job opening, and get in front of the eyes of more people from the relevant industry.

Re-targeting

By adding a code to your website, you can track your website visitors and target them with highly-personalized job ads.

For example, you can target the website visitors that have started filling out your application form, never finished, left, and forgot about the job.

If you are having problems with engaging and converting candidates, try some of these tips. I can guarantee you that, with a little bit extra effort, you can make your recruiting and hiring strategy more efficient.