Your career site is often the start of a job candidate’s journey through your hiring process. It’s a key – and often the first – touchpoint in their experience with your company, and it can make or break their decision whether or not to hit Apply.
So, how can you improve your site to help optimize that journey and experience?
Traditionally, recruiters have used intuition and assumptions, versus hard data, to determine their best hiring methods and tools. But today, with a wealth of software and analytic tools readily available, there’s no excuse for not making data-driven recruitment your MO.
A Closer Look at the Benefits
Data-driven recruiting means using tangible facts and statistics to inform your hiring decisions. Because the proof really is in the numbers, using data, you’re more likely to be more effective, efficient and successful as you continuously improve your recruitment process.
Data-driven recruiting, starting with your career site, helps you to:
- Better allocate your budget dollars.
- Increase your hiring team’s productivity.
- Unearth issues you may not otherwise spot.
- Benchmark and forecast future results.
A Few Words About SEO
As you recruit talent, a critical area of focus must be search engine optimization (SEO). This is the practice of improving your site’s rankings in the organic section of a search engine’s results. In other words, you need to please search engines such as Google, so your site and job postings rank higher.
- It’s important to track your site’s metrics and assess its performance, so you can adopt new hiring strategies as needed. Platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can be very helpful in this regard.
SEO optimization will help you in numerous ways, including:
- Determining which candidate sources and job boards work best for you.
- Achieving a faster time to hire.
- Better showcasing your company culture and employer brand.
Metrics Matter
Among the metrics you can use to track site performance are:
- Average visit duration and bounce rate: The first refers to the amount of time spent on your site by visitors who go to more than one page. The second refers to the percentage of visitors who visit only one page before “bouncing away” aka leaving.
- Application conversion rate: This is the percentage of site visits that result in successfully submitted job applications.
- Application form drop-off rate: Tracking this metric lets you know what percentage of applications were started, but not submitted.
- Applications per job: By seeing which of your jobs garner the most applications, you can draw conclusions about which roles attract the most candidates and which do not. From there, you can customize your recruitment strategy accordingly.
Effectively using data and analytics to improve your career site and enhance your candidate experience is a continuous process that requires constant monitoring and adaptation. As you continue to build and enhance your site, turn to the experts at Haley Marketing for the latest tips, insight and guidance. Contact us today to set up a free, 30-minute recruitment marketing focus call.
