CRO stands for conversion rate optimization, the process of enhancing your career website to increase the number of candidates you convert into applicants. Done right, CRO not only leads to more qualified talent in your pipeline, but can also help lower your recruitment costs and improve your overall hiring ROI.
So, if you’re still wondering whether you should be pursuing CRO on your site, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
How to See If It’s Working
This comes down to the data and conducting testing. Look at your data in Google Analytics before and after you make a change. Essentially, you are conducting some A/B testing, which we have some great examples of below. If the data shows an impactful change, that’s great and it means to do more of those changes. If the data shows a negative trend, it’s time to adjust and continue the testing.
Where You Can Put CRO To Work for You
Your home page, landing pages and blog are among the areas on your website with the potential to benefit from CRO.
- In addition to making a positive first impression on candidates, your home page is also an excellent channel to retain them and lead them further into your site. Do this by including links to relevant branding content and/or incorporating a chatbot to answer their questions and keep them engaged.
- Landing pages are inherently designed for visitors to take action. So they are fertile ground for high conversion rates. A strong tactic is to offer a free item or resource, with preview content to encourage visitors to download it. It can also be beneficial to run A/B tests on your landing page to identify your best design and content features. For instance, you can test different versions of copy, offers, images, or form questions.
- On your blog, you can add calls to action (CTAs) in articles or invite readers to submit their email address in exchange for an ebook or other helpful resource. You can also create text-based CTAs within posts, but make sure they’re effective. For example, avoid banner blindness, which occurs when visitors automatically ignore banner-like information. You may want more lead flows: high-converting pop-ups that attract attention and offer additional value.
CRO is a process. CRO is not an event. Making a change today may have positive results in the short term, but it has no guarantee that it will work in the long term. The best CRO focuses on a long-term thought process to constantly striving to improve the results of all aspects of your marketing – websites, chatbots, social media, email marketing, etc.
Social media retargeting can also be a smart move towards CRO – specifically to re-engage job seekers who have visited and subsequently left your site before applying for a job or otherwise engaging. Retargeting on Facebook and other platforms tracks these visitors and serves them online ads as they visit other sites. It can be especially impactful when you retarget candidates who have visited your highest-performing web pages.
To more fully grasp the value of CRO and how to use it to your hiring advantage, contact the Haley recruitment marketing team today. We can help you pinpoint and continuously build your candidate-to-applicant conversion rate including planning, testing, strategy and implementation. Let’s get started on this and your other recruitment marketing tactics with a free, 30-minute focus call.