Why is having a streamlined candidate application experience critical?
Well to start, you already know hiring exceptional talent is vital to your organization’s success, but in this competitive candidate-driven market it’s crucial, as job seekers have the ability to be ultra-selective.
One of the most important steps in the candidate journey is their first impression, and often their initial stop is your website. This is where they will learn about your company and your mission, and where they’ll ultimately apply. It is critical your website is optimized for a candidate experience that both inspires and excites.
But none of that can happen if you aren’t found, so here are 8 simple recommendations we’ve helped our most successful clients deploy to drive talent to your site.
1. Create full job descriptions with mission-driven language that will appeal to the applicants that you want.
For example, we can use AI and conduct research into the best attention-grabbing language. We can then pair that with an actual job description that also includes information about your company and mission. This will improve your SEO on major browsers and give applicants more insight into what you are looking for.
2. Implement an ATS that is cost-effective, secure, and efficiently helps you keep track of talent that’s in the pipeline.
With an ATS you will be able to have talent apply right on your website and get their resume in your ATS attached to the job. No more emailing and risk getting the email flagged as junk or missing it altogether.
3. Depending on the ATS, you can use a token tracker.
You can put a token tracker on the apply button and gauge in google analytics, how many people clicked the button to how many people applied. From there we can conduct research and make inferences about how to retain people who have taken the apply click action, but ultimately did not apply.
4. Create blog content around your core expertise.
Link them to other websites and create back linking. This will help with SEO.
5. Add meta tags and descriptions.
Ensure that all pictures and individual pages on your website have meta tags and descriptions with language around your core expertise. This will also help with SEO.
6. Use a social media posting tool such as Hootsuite that allows you to easily post jobs to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram in one click.
You can track their effectiveness through a premium Hootsuite plan or through Google analytics. This will reach more people, familiarize people with your brand, and with the right calls to action, get them back on your website. Create a social media post cadence.
7. Create a Google business page and become the owner of your business on Google.
This is where you get that profile on the right side when someone googles your company. This is where pictures are, hours of operation, google reviews, description of your company, and map of where you are located is housed. This improves your SEO on Google and gives people a more expected experience when they google you.
8. Make sure your job postings on your site gets scraped by Google.
If you don’t see it on Google, neither will the candidates!
Job seekers today have the advantage of options, and top candidates will quickly decline moving past (or even completing!) the application process with a company that doesn’t prioritize their experience. Do candidates moving through your application process have an experience that accurately translates to how your organization values its employees? A staggering 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience is an indicator of how a company values its people, and 49% said they’ve declined an offer as a result of a poor experience.
You read that right, if you aren’t prioritizing an excellent candidate experience, almost half of your offers will be declined. Let that sink in!
If you need help optimizing the application process to better reflect your culture and increase top talent applying AND accepting your offers, our experience and data-driven solutions can help.
