Data is great, but only if we know what to do with it. On websites, analyzing the data can become overwhelming, which leads to not knowing what to do to improve your career site.
In this blog post, we share three metrics that will help reveal the effectiveness of your career site: bounce rate, application drop off, and mobile vs. desktop performance.
(How can you collect these metrics? At Haley Marketing, we suggest installing Google Analytics code across your career site to collect the data. The Google Analytics dashboard makes it simple to analyze and observe.)
Bounce Rate
Simply put, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on your website and don’t visit any other pages. Essentially, they visit your website and don’t like what they see.
There are two ways to look at the bounce rate for your career site and determine what’s useful and what’s not working well.
- Overall Bounce Rate: What’s the overall bounce rate for your entire career site? This metric looks at all the pages on your website. Below 50 percent gets a thumbs up. A bounce rate of 50 to 60 percent raises a caution flag. If the bounce rate is above 60 percent, we have problems.
- Individual Page Bounce Rate: This metric helps us dig into individual pages and determine which pages foster engagement with your audience and which pages are falling flat on their face. For example, your home page should have a very low bounce rate as people are landing there and see several calls-to-action. However, looking at the bounce rate of individual pages will help you determine if there is a hole in the funnel. Maybe your job seekers page has a bounce rate approaching 65 percent. That statistic tells us to look at the page. If a website visitor goes to your job seekers page, what’s their next step? Are you leading them to another page? Is there a conversion opportunity? Or is it a dead end?
Application Drop-Off
Some people would argue this metric means the most as it shows how many people are starting your application and not completing the application. You have them interested in your job, but your process is preventing them from talking to you!
The important part to this metric revolves around having an application process that you can track each page. What does that mean?
- Access to Analytics: The easiest way to have access to analytics on your job application is to have an application process right on your domain. We see a lot of staffing agencies with a third-party application and lose that data. What I mean is that when someone is on your career site and clicks “Apply Now,” they are directed to a different URL on a website that doesn’t belong to your staffing agency. The candidate path gets broken, and we lose access to the data tracking the application flow.
- Have Trackable Pages Throughout the Application Flow: Each page of your application process needs a unique and specific URL. The job description page, the start of the application, each page of the application, and the thank-you page of the application. Why is that important? If we have data on each of those four parts of the application process, we can see if there’s a hole and a specific place where people are falling off. For example, if 100 people see the description, 70 start the application, and only 2 people get to the thank-you page, that’s a red alert to look at the application process – the length and required information.
Mobile vs. Desktop
Seemingly every year, the percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices increases. Not only do you need to analyze the performance of your website for desktop visitors, but it’s important to analyze the performance of your website for mobile visitors.
In Google Analytics, select the user segment for desktop users and analyze the website metrics. Then do the same thing for mobile/tablet users. Does anything stick out? Is the bounce rate significantly higher on mobile? Is the application drop-off skyrocketing on mobile? Do the desktop stats reveal a black hole?
When you find a glaring statistic on the desktop or mobile view, re-create that experience. If the application drop off is higher on mobile, apply for a job on your mobile device, and determine why. Are you requiring too many fields to be completed? Are you requiring a resume? Think about the candidate who has never been to your career site before, is on their mobile device, and wants to apply for a job. What makes it easiest for them?
Desktop performance vs. mobile performance of your website can provide great insight on how visitors experience your career site on two totally different platforms.
Is Your Career Site Effective For Your Company?
Career sites are one of the four pillars of recruitment marketing at Haley Marketing, along with job advertising, social recruiting, and employer branding. Your career site stands as the front door of your staffing agency in the online space.
Contact the Recruitment Marketing team at Haley Marketing to learn about our best-in-class job portals and award-winning websites. We’ll get more people applying to your jobs!
