How to Boost Your Recruitment Efforts Via Your Website
Establishing an effective sales funnel is near the top of every marketing manager’s wishlist. But when it comes to serving all of your business needs, you have to look beyond just your website’s sales capabilities. If you want to secure a bright future for your organization, you need qualified people on your team, and that means using your website as part of an effective recruiting funnel as well.
For all the care organizations extend to lead generation, talent acquisition deserves – and rewards – a similar level of focus. Even if you rely on outside employment platforms to handle your recruitment, you’re missing a vital opportunity. With a strategic approach, your website becomes a vital tool to demonstrate the culture of your workplace to prospective hires.
Every company says its most important resource is its people. If that’s the case, you need to take as much care with your efforts to attract employees as you do for potential customers. If your website supports one but not the other, your digital strategy winds up at a dead end.
Why the Careers Page of Your Website is Neglected and Why It Matters
When a company redesigns its website, the first priority is transforming it into a powerful tool to attract new customers. From the start, you have to spend the money to improve your site to deliver more conversion opportunities. Unfortunately, that emphasis on new business often comes at the expense of the rest of your site.
If you’re managing a tight budget, you’re often left with limited options when it comes to serving secondary audiences. Consequently, human resources pages go neglected in favor of implementing quick-fix shortcuts.
Many companies use the convenience of an iFrame to pull data from a vendor like Workday onto their careers page. But the resulting user experience is often disappointing. As you pull data from Workday or another similar vendor’s site, you sacrifice control over how the information displays, which can appear disconnected from the rest of your site and provide a poor user experience. Plus, as visitors navigate to your outside hiring platform, they lose access to further details about your company.
Even if you work around an iFrame’s limited visual capabilities, you’re still offering a limited view of your organization. When you’re trying to attract the best talent, especially at the executive level, your organization has to put its best foot forward just like any job candidate.
Admittedly, integrating outside data onto your site pages via an API is a complicated undertaking, and it comes at a cost. But once you have acquired that listing data for your website, you have more flexibility for delivering a curated experience.
How to Craft Your Recruiting Funnel to Attract Better-Fit Candidates
Ultimately, you should consider the journey of any job candidate the same way as you would any other website customer.
Just as when you optimize your website to create a marketing funnel, a thoughtful approach to recruitment illuminates your brand’s story. Sure, you can post Word documents for each listing that outline job requirements and who you are as a company. But at the other end of the spectrum, your organization can provide a persuasively illustrated prospect experience just as if you were selling any other product.
At COLAB, we worked with Virginia Credit Union to redesign each component of the bank’s website. On the bank’s careers page, instead of seeing only a rundown of Workday listings, prospective hires are first given a detailed rundown of the bank’s benefits package. At the top, a video testimonial from employees offers personal perspective on what it’s like to work at VACU.
Instead of providing a functional resource, the bank uses digital hiring efforts to provide a glimpse of the organization’s culture. Along with offering candidates a fuller picture of the company, VACU is seen as a more appealing place to work. After all, the bank isn’t just aiming to attract the right candidate; they’re also competing with larger organizations seeking that same talent. If your company effectively showcases all you have to offer, you’ll attract the candidates who see themselves in your culture as well.
Granted, someone searching for a new job will take the time to research your organization. But by providing a hiring experience that’s more integrated with who you are as a company, your HR team competes at a higher level.
Add a Recruitment Portal to Centralize Hiring Efforts
When your recruitment efforts are optimized, your website becomes a vital extension of your Human Resources effort. Even if your organization uses an outside provider for job listings, you can integrate this information into a powerful centralized resource so hiring runs more smoothly.
As companies enter periods of growth, they often run into delays as HR coordinates with marketing to post open positions. As the volume of listings increases, marketing easily falls behind while attempting to incorporate the hiring demands into their existing responsibilities.
Using a company like Workday or Greenhouse to handle your job postings allows HR teams to create their listings but at the expense of providing a curated experience. Working with the health care provider ChenMed, COLAB allowed a large organization to eliminate recruiting bottlenecks while easing the administrative burden on its HR department.
Through API integration, the company’s HR team can publish job listings to a centralized recruitment portal that ensures each post conforms to brand guidelines. Plus, the information could incorporate location-specific details and be distributed across different markets.
Along with delivering a faster, more efficient experience for its HR team, the recruitment portal’s ability to centralize and distribute job listings data improved the experience for prospective candidates as well.
Optimize Your Website HR Efforts to Stay Competitive
In a tough economic climate, your marketing team can have a hard time securing the digital resources it needs. One of your primary goals as a marketer is to bring new business to your organization, which can come at the expense of allowing your website to optimize and empower your organization’s HR efforts.
Frankly, we get it. But if you want to make sure your business remains competitive in the long run, you have to make sure the most talented people are on hand to work toward your goals.
Employees are your company’s most precious resource, and your website should offer an accurate reflection of that perspective. If you think your recruitment efforts could deliver a stronger first impression to the talented people you need, let’s talk.