Employees are the primary employment brand asset of most companies; a close second is their racing site.
“Your career site is your first impression with many candidates,” said Matt Adam, chief talent strategist at NAS Recruitment, a recruitment marketing and employment branding firm in Cincinnati. Adam spoke on April 18 at the SHRM Talent Conference & Expo 2023 in Orlando.
“The career site is your opportunity to get candidates excited about you as an employer and why they would want to join your organization,” said Adam. “Unfortunately, many sites are not designed with the candidate experience in mind, lack consistent messaging, are not mobile friendly, are confusing to navigate and fail to engage the right talent.”
One of the biggest mistakes is not designing your career site for search engine optimization (SEO). About 75 percent of candidates start their job search on Google, but many companies don’t have websites ready to respond.
Adam asked attendees to do a little homework, think of a hard-to-fill position and do a Google search “as if you were looking for your own job.”
For many organizations, when someone clicks on a job from the organization’s careers site, they are switched to the applicant tracking system (ATS). Adam gave an example of the problem: Collision and glass company Gerber has about 960 open jobs. But a Google search only returns about 40 jobs.
“That’s because Google can’t find what’s on the ATS gateway page, where the jobs are hosted,” Adam said. “Google sees the page as a Workday page [in this case] and don’t connect the dots. That means you have to spend more money to drive traffic to your site.”
Adam presented the Cinemark cinema chain workplace as a a good example of a careers page. “The site is beautiful, with great features and functionality that give a wonderful first impression of what it’s like to work at Cinemark,” he said. “But it’s not just beautiful, it’s also built on a strong technical foundation for Google to easily find, index and publish jobs in search results. If I search for Cinemark jobs on Google, I get 1,550 results.”
He explained that the key is to take your job descriptions out of the ATS and host them on the careers site, so they can be associated with your company and be found in free organic traffic results. “You can also maintain much more control over the design and messaging of jobs on this page than on the ATS page,” he said.
Additional tips and examples include:
Personalize and categorize candidate journeys. Organize your jobs by different categories, in the case of Cinemark: theater team, restaurant team, management and corporate team. “Right now, most ‘cattle’ career sites call everyone down the same path, whether you’re a high-level executive or an entry-level job seeker,” Adam said. “You have to tailor your candidate journey to each audience. If you try to treat every candidate who comes in applying for the same thing, you’re going to miss a big part of your audience.” Build attractive pages for the programs you want to highlightsuch as diversity, equity and inclusion and culture. Develop search by locality for multi-location employers. Many job seekers want to search close to where they live, Adam said. Build custom landing pages for critical roles. “In this case, you’ll see that the call to action isn’t going into the ATS. It’s a quick application that takes about 30 seconds to complete,” Adam explained.
It’s a common top-of-funnel technique to get basic information from potential candidates who you can then engage with. Adam said cancer care center MD Anderson saw its career site conversion rate jump from a typical 8% to 80% after implementing this feature.
