How Can My Jobs Page Better Engage Job Seekers? – Whiteboard [VIDEO]

If your company is looking for tips on how to increase the number of applications received for job openings, then check out this Whiteboard Chat. In this video, Jeff Hallam offers suggestions on how to streamline your Jobs page to make it easily navigable, and able to engage job seekers to share your career opportunities with others, sign up for future job alerts and easily complete an employment application.

Video Transcript:

Hi, today we are going to talk about how to make your Jobs page more attractive and more engaging for candidates. The reason this is such a big deal is there’s been quite a seismic shift in what’s happening out there in the job landscape over the last couple of years. It wasn’t that long ago that employers could do about anything that they wanted and require about anything that they wanted and people were so desperate for work that they would jump through about any hoop that was put out there in front of them. And that has changed dramatically with the improvement of the economy and with things getting better out there. And candidates, are starting to become a little more demanding and a little more discerning in terms of what they are and aren’t willing to do. So having a page that can actually catch peoples’ eye and get them engaged right out of the gate is often times kind of your ticket to entry to be able to play in that talent game. And so a lot of these are going to be things that you may have thought of before or may have heard of before, but maybe haven’t actually implemented from your end.

So one of the first of those is consistent branding with the rest of your corporate website. So instead of simply putting up a logo and a white page, make sure that the skin of the site, the images that are used, the frames, etc…everything matches up with the rest of what people would see on your corporate website. It makes it appear more natural, it makes it seem like it’s a little bit more a part of your organic site, and again it’s one of those things that can help people feel more confident about what group they’re actually applying for a job with.

And I mentioned images, and skin…no question that every opportunity that you have to inject images, and especially video, into your careers site is always going to be a plus. It catches peoples’ eye, people remember pictures, they remember videos, much more than anything we are going to write out there in terms of words and phrases.

It should go without saying, but maybe and I think this is important, I’m stunned at how often I can go to a page that’s set out there for somebody’s jobs and it’s not clear to me where I can actually find a job opening. So as you design this part of the site, make certain that it’s very clear to someone where they can find your openings so that they don’t have to look around for that. Again, while it may not seem like a big deal, you could lose people very quickly in that process.

This is also a great opportunity to tout any achievements of the organization…you know we were named to the top 10 employers in the region…we grew at a certain exponential percent, etc. Those are all opportunities, along with being able to get some perspective from current employees as to why do they enjoy working here. Those are things that are people, other than you as an HR professional, or as the owner of a company, talking about why this might be a great place to work.

Once someone has navigated to the site and they’ve found a job and they are interested in it, typically they are going to land at and should land at a page that will tell them more about that opportunity so they can determine if they really are a good fit there. This is fairly typical where you would find this…some issues that we sometimes will see that are fairly common. First off, only giving people the option of reading that job description and apply. If they don’t apply, one of the first things you can do now is use mechanisms, whether it’s social media, email or a combination of the two, to give them avenues to stay connected with your organization. Things change. They may like their job and are okay today, and they may hate it two months from now. You may not, this may not be the ideal job for them, but you may have a new job that opens up six months from now that may be perfect for them. So giving them a very simple and easy way to stay connected to you allows them to stay in an environment where once that change occurs there’s a much better likelihood that you will connect with them.

Likewise when you look at the description itself, try very hard even though we’ve been schooled from days gone by that we have to put every single thing about a job in the description, understand that very few candidates are actually going to read that full description. They’re going to look for bullet points, look for keywords and phrases and that’s when you drive whether they think they are qualified and whether they apply or not. So try to crunch that down as much as you can, make it as clear and concise as you can, but make sure you still keep all the relevant information in there about what will this job look like day to day, what are some key skills that somebody needs to have or qualifications to be considered for that opening.

Now when somebody gets to the point where they are actually ready to apply, again we talked about kind of the shift in the landscape. It’s not any more evident than here where that shift has occurred. So whereas, as recently as two or three years ago, I could require of my candidates a full online application and I would get plenty of applicant flow, that probably is not going to cut it in today’s environment. So, more and more you are seeing organizations make that process a little easier for people. Letting them auto-fill a lot of their application information from their LinkedIn profile. Letting them fill a lot of that information from job sites like Indeed where they can create profiles in advance. Doing those types of things once you’ve gotten to this point in the process now kind of continues to reinforce that perspective you’ve tried to set up up front with those candidates of being a welcoming, cool, neat place to work.

So, when you look at all of this, again, the idea of this is really nothing more than to try to bring to light some core things that you can do that can help make you stand out a little bit more in the eyes and in the minds of people who are out there looking at your career site. And again, doing it this way, making some of these changes and keeping some of these things in mind ultimately can help you as you go through and compete with other organizations in the war for talent.