In my job seeking days, I cannot tell you how many times I would go looking for a position for a company that I admired. I would take a look at their website and to my surprise, it was incredibly hard to find or it didn’t even exist. Did this deter me away from trying to apply with the company? Eventually, yes. Not only because there was no way to apply but also because it made me think that they didn’t want to deal with applicants. If the company didn’t value their hires, maybe, they weren’t a great place to work for. These, of course, are just assumptions that they could be making, but you can see how these could possibly drive applicants away. There are ways you can step up your qualified applicant game by having a section on your website especially for all those great people who want to work for you! Take a look at these six tips on how you can make the most of your hires from your organization’s website.
Get your marketing and management team on board
First things first! Getting your marketing team and management team on board is a big must. Now, if you are working for a smaller scale organization then YOU might be the marketing team.You might ask what does marketing have to do with hiring? Well, since your marketing team has a lot to do with the website and they help to advertise your organization, you will be needing a lot of their input with the best ways to attract these quality applicants. Once you explain the strategy of how you can attract the best applicants from the terms of marketing they should be pretty excited about this. They get marketing and understand your target audiences and how to identify jobseeker personas. Make sure you get them onboard because their input is essential.
Make sure that you have a “jobs” or “careers” link clearly visible at the top of your website
Having your careers link on your website it important, but even more important, is it placed in the right location? Your marketing team might not have thought it was super important, as long as it was there on your website. You have a number have active applicants that might not have a hard time looking for it because they know where to search for a job on your site. However, you have some “passive applicants” that might not even be looking for a job, they just happen to be on your site. Why is this important? There is a little bit of psychology behind this, passive applicants might just be looking on your site to find out more about your organization. If you don’t put your careers link in a place where they can easily stumble upon it, then they might not apply. Why would you want a passive applicant you might ask? Passive isn”t necessarily a negative thing. It just might mean that this applicant wasn”t looking for a job at the time, but the still were interested in your company and have a passion for what you stand for. The reasoning for this is to get more applicants who didn’t even have the intention of applying. Wouldn’t you want those who are already loyal to your brand and who were already interested in you as an organization to apply? That tells you a couple of things about these applicants already! Ask your team that works on your website to give you a good position for your careers link on the header menu of your site, that is clearly visible to every visitor without having to look through a drop down or click to the about us page.
Make sure that you have a “jobs” or “careers” link in the footer of your website
Most candidates are accustomed to scrolling to the bottom of a website to find the careers link. (This is because most companies don”t do a very good job of putting their careers links in good locations). After searching all over your menus for the hidden careers link, they finally just scroll to the bottom of the page and look there Having the careers section in a place that is super accessible will ensure these applicants aren”t missing out. Make sure that your jobs are up to date on your site. One of the most frustrating things for a job seeker can be finding your job openings, going through the process of applying and then finding out that the position has closed or been filled. It’s common courtesy for you to keep your careers site up to date and just like any good customer service, you always want to send an applicant a response. If an applicant has a negative experience with your process, they are more likely to talk about it with friends and review it online.
Make it easy to apply.
Making job seekers jump through a bunch of hoops (downloading a pdf, filling it out by hand, mailing/faxing/attaching it to an email) will scare many of them away. Keep in mind that over 30% of job seekers are looking at your jobs on their mobile phone, and they can’t download a pdf and submit it from that device. The idea is to to be thinking about the modern job seeker and how they are going about the application process. Make your initial application pretty simple but asking them the basic screening questions possibly having them attach their resume. Save the long drawn out part for them as they move along in the hiring process. A lot of companies have the attitude that “if they don”t make it through the application process, then I don”t want them to work for me”, they call it “weeding out the bad ones”. I wish hiring managers knew what a huge mistake it this is. You will lose quite a bit of applicant this way. Most applicants know their worth and will know that if the process of applying is miserable- then that can only mean the same for the company they could potentially be working for. Your hiring process says more about your company than it does about your applicant.
Add the ability for people to do something besides just apply.
The job seekers on your company website are interested in working for your company, but maybe you don”t have the right openings for them at the moment. Most nonprofits have a policy against job seekers applying without choosing a specific position, which is great for compliance but terrible for making the most out of these highly valuable job seekers. Instead of sending those job seekers away, hoping they will come back and look again, why not offer them the ability to signing up for job alerts. All that it takes is adding simple widget on your site from icontact, and then sending out a weekly email of your job openings. Clients that use ApplicantPro also know about a free service from refer.io to handle all of this for them.This is a great way to keep those potential applicants for applying again! They clearly care enough about working for your company that they want to jump on the opportunity when another opening comes up.
Extra Credit…
This is just an added plus but, If your organization has built a Facebook following, the same things above apply there to your Facebook page. Ask them to provide you with a careers tab on Facebook to iframe in your job listings, and as to post your new openings as updates to the company”s followers by sending them a quick email each time you post a new job. Personally, this is one of my favorite ways to attract applicants because it means the people who are seeing your openings are already fans of your organization.These tips will only draw more qualified applicants to your organization and make your hiring process that much smoother. Give it a try yourself and stay tuned for more tips on increasing applicant flow!
Give it a try yourself and stay tuned for more tips on increasing applicant flow!