How To Improve Your Career Site for Its Best Year Ever

In case you haven't noticed, today's candidates have options — lots of them. That said, the race to attract, engage, and convert candidates is on. And if your career site isn’t rolling out a personalized experience to each job seeker, you’re likely lagging behind.

The good news? There's a lot you can do to change that if you start leveraging the right AI-powered technology. Get the highlights from our webinar New Year, New Career Site (it was a crowd favorite, btw), and find out how companies are transforming their candidate experiences to drive 4X higher applicant conversion rates.

Watch the full webinar New Year, New Career Site here!

Winning the Race To Engage the Best Talent

As a company, it's essential to know the goal of your career site. Yes, it’ll need a sleek look representative of your company. But, as Tom Tate, Phenom's Director of Product Marketing, explained, its most important role is to help candidates reach their career goals through a uniquely personalized experience. The more efficiently we can help candidates get from point A to point B, the better.

To achieve that, your career site should focus on three main functions:

1. ATTRACTION

• Optimize the SEO and site experience
  

2. ENGAGEMENT

• Deliver true personalization
• Deploy and optimize a conversational chatbot
• Leverage video
  

3. CONVERSION

• Create a seamless application process
  
  

Related: Top 10 Tips To Turn Your Career Site Into A Talent Magnet

1. ATTRACTION

Optimize for Discoverability

When looking for jobs, candidates rarely go directly to a company’s site. Instead, they often perform a simple Google search, usually using a job title and location. This means SEO (search engine optimization) is critical to improve the odds that your career site pops up within those searches.

Here are some top tips:

• Check your site's searchability. Ensure your website is optimized and SEO-friendly to improve searchability. The Google tool Page Speed Insights provides a numeric score on your career site’s performance, and the results will help you understand where to improve.
  
• Look at the competition. Competitors can be a great source of inspiration, especially ones who are performing better. Some questions to ask: What key words do they rank for? How does the speed of their pages compare to yours? How long is their content? How recent are articles published?
  
• Test whether your job listing feeds into Google Jobs, and check how it ranks compared to others. Including details like category, title, and location will help it rank higher in those searches.
  
• Optimize your landing pages. If you know there’s a job keyword that is particularly popular, create a landing page dedicated to it. Doing so will increase searchability and drive more traffic to your site.
  

2. ENGAGEMENT

Deliver True Personalization

While browsing a career site, candidates want to understand whether that company could be a good fit for them. True personalization plays a key role in ensuring the right candidate will receive the right content at the right time.

If we think about applications we interact with on a regular basis, like Spotify or Netflix, the content populated in each user’s feed is uniquely personalized, based on their behavior and their preferences. How is that happening? AI — which uses algorithms behind the scenes to customize the experience for each user.

Career sites can work the same way, tailoring the candidate experience based on these key factors before they even submit an application.

• Location. Where are they visiting from? (with permission)
• Behavior. What are they searching for? What are they clicking on? What jobs did they view?
• History/Skills. What’s on their resume? What are their skills? What jobs have they held in the past?

Through Personalization On Demand, the entire journey can be uniquely tailored to keep the candidate engaged. First-time site visitors can upload a resume or answer a few simple questions to receive personalized job recommendations.

If they're not interested in seeing additional job listings, they can get a look a what it’s like to work for the organization through content like a blog, or employee testimonials. As the candidate browses and clicks around the site, the AI behind the scenes will tailor that experience, serving up more of the content they're most interested in.

Related — Mars’ Playbook for a Global Career Site Redesign

Deploy a Conversational Chatbot

Skeptics believe chatbots aren't worth the hype, but the data shows that almost a quarter of site visitors interact with them, making them an extremely valuable resource. Plus, they work 24/7 capturing leads, facilitating personalization, and answering questions when recruiters can't. A perfect example? Southwest Airlines. Within a year, Southwest reported 1 million chatbot interactions, saving their recruiters 92,000 hours answering FAQs alone.

If you're considering adding a chatbot to your career site, it helps to know that there are two main types — and only one will really give you what you're after — engagement, best-fit leads, and a better candidate experience.

• Menu based chatbot. Menu-based chatbots are most commonly used for restaurant menus or e-commerce sites. They don’t have live agents, and they're menu or rule based. They'll greet visitors with a selection of options and follow up with whatever choice is selected.
  
  In many cases, they're not connected to a company's career site — which means they can't feed learnings back into the site or help personalize the visitor’s experience.
  
• Intelligent chatbot. Intelligent bots are enabled to have conversations, answer questions, and provide actionable recommendations. They're integrated into career sites, making dynamic changes to the site as the conversation is happening. It’s truly like having multiple full-time employees working around the clock.
  

Utilize Video

Today, video is king. We not only engage with it regularly on different social media platforms, but we've grown accustomed to using it for work. Its biggest benefits are higher engagement, authenticity, and the ability to show instead of tell.

For career sites, its use has become critical to reflect everything from company culture and employee testimonials to actual job descriptions. No longer expensive or difficult to produce, TA teams are leaning on video more and more as part of the candidate experience.

Video capture tools make it even easier for teams, employees, and candidates to quickly and easily record and submit a video for just about any purpose. Case in point: luxury health club provider LifeTime leveraged it on their DE&I page to share authentic stories from their council members and ambassadors, driving more than 13,000 page visits last year.

APPLICATION

Create a Seamless Process

When thinking about a great candidate experience, the application process should be easy, intuitive, and seamless.

Don't complicate it by requiring unnecessary information that ultimately discourages candidates from making it through the process to a completed apply. Instead, prompt a quick registration up front so the candidate is already logged in when they start filling out an application. Only require data that's needed to be compliant. Lastly, let candidates know the process once they apply, and ensure you have campaigns set up to keep them in the loop as to their status.

The best advice? Make it simple yet personalized. Pretend you're the one applying for the position — what do you want the process to be like?

The Right Questions To Consider

We now have a list of all the necessary aspects to making the career site experience the best it can be — optimizing discoverability, personalizing content, implementing a chatbot, leveraging the power of video content, and creating a smooth application process. What comes next?

To help identify areas of opportunity, ask these questions:

• How is the career site hosted? Is it performing well? Does the existing vendor have additional functionality that could be implemented?
  
• How hard is it to change or create content within the CMS? Can it be done in house or does a developer need to be involved? How is the content stored, and is it easy to repurpose?
  
• Is the chatbot connected to the content or CRM? Does it help candidates build a profile to better provide job recommendations?
  
• Are you losing candidates in the application process because it's disjointed? Are they being asked for redundant information?
  

Your answers to these questions will determine the extent of work required to make your career site the best it can be.

If it feels like a lot, start with the basics. As long as you're working with a partner who can get you where you want to go, your refresh can be gradual with minor enhancements layered in strategically. Rome, after all, wasn't built in a day!

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