As the web continues to evolve and advance, HR experts question how it will affect organizations’ current recruiting efforts. How will job boards transform? What place will social recruiting hold in the future of talent acquisition? Will career sites remain a valuable piece of a recruiting strategy?
While the future landscape of the online job market is never predictable, there is one piece of an organization’s recruiting strategy that has the power to persevere--the corporate career site. Unlike some recruiting trends we see come and go, an adaptive career site is an effective tool that continues to sustain its place in strategic recruiting.
Today, a career site gives your company the complete ownership it needs to build your employment brand. Functioning as a hub for your company's candidate communication strategy, a corporate career site can house each subset of your recruiting message: job seeker content, social media streams, videos and blogs. Even as new technology continues to manifest, corporate career sites have proven their staying power by evolving to meet job seekers’ needs.
The fact is, career sites are here to stay. And as long as your organization continues to develop and evolve its own career site, it can remain a critical pillar in your recruiting strategy. Here's more reasons why corporate career sites will benefit companies for years to come:
Unlike Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and sites like Glassdoor.com—where the employer brand can be heavily influenced by outside contributors—your career site can offer full authority over your recruiting message. You get to choose what content, videos and photos best represent your company’s culture and essence. By having control over your online image, you can drive a clearer employment message to the job seekers you’re trying to reach.
To continually attract the right candidates, it’s important to keep your recruiting message fresh and current. Today, you can find tools that allow you to have complete control over content without having to rely on internal resources (like IT and Marketing). By incorporating a content management system into your career site, you can eliminate the need to understand coding. This makes updating your site’s content an easy task without having to face an internal process delay.
Because of tools like a content management system, you can create unique pages that speak to each of your target candidate audiences. For example, if you hire most often for sales and engineers, you can create separate “in-depth role pages” to speak to each unique job seeker. By incorporating segmented, customized content into your career site (assuming it contains keywords or phrases), you can improve your search engine visibility to those job seekers who are in pursuit of such niche positions.
Today, more and more job seekers are searching for new opportunities while on-the-go. If your career site isn’t optimized for that audience, it’s not easy for them to learn about your job opportunities without having to un-squish a tiny screen. The great news is that with a simple snippet of code and no effort on part of the job seeker, you can give them a better mobile experience.
Since many job seekers start their hunt with search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, it’s critical that you’re optimized to show up in their search results. Today, you can invest in a career site that optimizes links, page titles, tags and content to include keywords and improve your search engine visibility. Improving your SEO helps drive more candidates to your open positions.
Because today’s careers site have the ability to be living, breathing extensions of your employment brand, you can keep job seekers up to date with relevant company information. In doing so, your prospective candidates can use it as a tool for their pre-interview research. A career site that provides prospective candidates with current information makes for more effective conversations during the hiring process.
Without a career site, your company has to rely solely on the applicant tracking system interface for candidate interaction. Because these systems have such a notorious reputation for long processes and poor SEO, covering your ATS with a career site is a good option for guaranteeing a better candidate experience.
Manually circulating job postings across multiple channels can be a time waster for recruiters. Today, you can utilize a career site to automatically distribute job ads across all currently-used platforms. That means you could post a job ad to your career site, Facebook page, Twitter feed and multiple job boards with one simple update. This frees up your recruiting time tremendously and allows you to focus on more important tasks.
Today, you don’t have to blindly make budget decisions. Invest in a career site that offers tracking and analytic capabilities. That way you can better decipher your ROI and see what recruiting efforts (from social initiatives to job ads) are working and which are not. A career site that delivers candidate source data can provide the investment knowledge you need to make smarter budget decisions.
Nowadays, you can utilize tools that help highlight the most qualified applicants. Use pre-screening questions to highlight the right (or best qualified) candidates and avoid unnecessary time spent filtering out the wrong ones. Plus, you can use tools like auto response to give candidates an immediate response with suggestions for moving forward and next steps in the process.
This is one of the biggest benefits of having a career site. It’s a place that can completely capture your company’s culture. From the writing style and word choice to images and videos, every piece of your career site encapsulatew your organization's personality and work style. There is nothing that can compare to these all-encompassing features, which makes it an ideal tool for attracting candidates who are the right fit.
Because a career site can have multiple pages, robust content and integrated features to engage viewers, it’s an incredibly useful tool for getting prospective candidates to learn more. An effective careers site is more compelling for job seekers (then say your Twitter account), so they are the ultimate tool for inciting interest in the most qualified candidates.
There is a good chance that the most interested candidates who visit your job postings or career site don’t see a position that’s right for them. Fortunately, career sites can provide a talent community widget to let candidates submit their resume without applying for a position. That way, you can strengthen your candidate pipeline, build a relationship and reach out to them when the most fitting position opens up. For more informaiton, read Why Your Recruiting Needs a Talent Community.
Businesses often grow, change and adapt. This means your ideal candidates or targeted industry may change over time. With a career site, you can easily adapt to whatever audience you’re trying to speak to. Thanks to tools like an easy-to-use content management system, adding or editing your career site copy can be as easy as hitting “update” (no coding required). This way, you can quickly adjust your content to target the right candidates.
An organization’s career site sets the stage for attracting top talent by being a centralized recruiting hub, just like your corporate site is for your clients. Without a strong one, your company is missing out on the opportunity to effectively showcase and communicate your employment brand. The great news is today there are several tools that make launching and managing a career site incredibly easy. And as technology continues to improve, career sites capabilities will continue to adapt. That’s another reason why we believe the careers site is here to stay.
