Recruiting challenges aren’t just threatening the success of HR professionals—they are hindering the success of organizations as a whole. In fact, Business News Daily reports that finding and hiring talent is the biggest challenge for CEOs in 2016.
If you don’t want your recruiting challenges holding you back any longer, you need to find a solution. And more likely than not, your ideal recruiting solution is an effective career site. Career sites are incredibly valuable because they can resolve various recruiting pain points, including the following:
Recruiters often face the harsh reality that today’s job market is highly competitive, and SHRM confirms that this problem will only intensify over time. While more jobs are being created, fewer people are entering the workforce—giving candidates a surplus of jobs to choose from. Because today’s job seekers have options, they’re asking, “Why should I work for your organization? What’s in it for me?” If recruiters want to fill their positions, they must provide an answer that is more compelling than their competitors’.
“In an era in which bad news travels instantaneously and an organization’s culture is both transparent and directly tied to its employment brand, great companies consciously cultivate and manage their culture, turning it into a competitive advantage in the marketplace.” Global Human Capital Trends 2016An effective career site showcases your employment brand and employee value proposition, so it provides candidates with all of the compelling reasons why your organization is a great place to work. This simply can’t be done within a restricted job advertisement or social post. Studies also show that most job seekers consider your employment brand before they even apply to your positions, and they rate your company career site as the most valuable resource for learning about it.
Telling candidates why they should apply is one thing, but actually getting them to apply is an entirely separate challenge. Research shows that if job seekers can’t easily find, review and apply to their organization's jobs, they will give up and move on to other available jobs. And unfortunately, most applicant tracking systems (ATS) are built with a focus on recruiter workflow, not on the candidates. They offer few job search capabilities and lengthy applications as a result, creating a poor user experience. This kind of experience is proven to cause higher applicant drop-off rates, leaving recruiters with fewer resumes to review.
“People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.” Jon Kolko, Vice President of Design at BlackboardEffective career sites display your jobs in a prominent and engaging place so that job seekers can easily find and review them. Both the site and its job listings are optimized for mobile devices too—empowering your organization to provide a great experience on every device. And if you use an ATS, you can integrate jobs from your ATS into the career site. This way, you can optimize your candidate experience while still leveraging the back-end workflow for your applicant management.
Even for the most experienced recruiter, recruiting and hiring for hard-to-fill positions can be a daunting task. Especially if the position is in a highly-competitive industry such as healthcare or technology, finding the perfect candidate can feel nearly impossible. But if you want to preserve a low time-to-fill without sacrificing your quality of hire, you must find a way to connect with the talented candidates you need.
Fortunately, career sites can prominently feature your hard-to-fill jobs and their details to enhance their online visibility. The best career sites also contain strategic messaging and internal pages that speak directly to your niche candidates. For example, if you are a healthcare company struggling to fill physician jobs, you can add a page on your career site to tell physician job seekers why they should work for your organization. You could even consider creating separate career microsites that cater to specific groups of candidates, just like Pediatric Associates did.
“We’ve had so much success with our new career site that we built a separate site just for providers and physicians—a place where they can go and see why they should leave where they are and come work for us.” Angela Caruso, Human Resources Director at Pediatric AssociatesWhile some recruiters are struggling because few candidates are applying, others are struggling because the wrong candidates are applying. This creates additional recruiting work and can hinder your quality of hire, leading to high turnover and increased hiring expenses. But how can you stop the wrong candidates from applying, while attracting more of the right ones?
Here is the answer: launch a career site that clearly communicates what it’s like to work for your organization. This communication will compel the right job seekers to apply while inadvertently letting the unqualified ones self-select out. As a result, you will spend less time reviewing unfit resumes and and you will improve your candidate quality. In fact, many companies have reported that enhanced candidate quality was the most valuable advantage of launching their career site—including Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA).
“Because our career site engages our prospective candidates, we are gaining more high-quality applicants. Now we don’t consider and interview as many candidates who don’t belong here, which saves us time and money, and ultimately improves our bottom line.” Scott Gallo, Talent Relationship Manager at Cancer Treatment Centers of AmericaNow that Millennials make up more than half of today’s workforce, the recruiter’s playing field has dramatically changed. Recruiting practices that were effective in the past are no longer sufficient today, and monetary incentives are often second-rate to intrinsic benefits. But with a limited recruiting budget and little knowledge of how to engage the changing workforce, many organizations are still struggling to adapt.
The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016 reports that Millennials desire to make positive contributions to their organizations. If you communicate this exact message on your career site—along with any other intrinsic benefits that you offer—you can motivate more Millennials to apply. A report from Nielsen also confirms that Millennials are the largest group of smartphone owners, and they spend more time on these devices than any other generation. Fortunately, career sites can advertise your jobs on mobile devices 24/7. This means that you can engage Millennials on any device, at any time.
“More and more candidates are living their daily lives through their personal devices. This has required us to streamline the application process and to make sure that our site is mobile friendly both from a content, delivery and functionality perspective. Now, more than half of our applications are coming through mobile interfaces or applications.” Scott Pustizzi, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Correct Care Solutions If you’re experiencing any of these challenges, an effective career site could surely be your ideal recruiting solution. In addition to relieving your current pain points, a career site will empower you to achieve your most ambitious recruiting goals. In return, your recruiting responsibilities will be much easier to manage and substantially more rewarding.
