If your company’s career site is currently ineffective or nonexistent, you are likely losing great candidates every day. According to a 2015 Talent Board Research Report, job seekers are two times more likely to go to a career site than LinkedIn or review sites like Glassdoor. Knowing this, you can’t afford to wait any longer to reevaluate updating your organization’s career site.
Once your company has a compelling career site, you can more successfully compete for top talent, improve your team, and strengthen your business as a whole. But if you keep putting it off, the following statements will unfortunately ring true for you:
Studies regularly find that over 75 percent of job seekers conduct extensive research and consider your employment brand before they even apply to your positions. When they are looking for this information, candidates consider your company career site to be the most valuable resource. If job seekers can’t find you or your career site during their job search, they can’t or won’t consider you as a potential employer. Career sites are also the primary source for an employer’s information, and 76 percent of job seekers prefer to apply through a career site. So when you don’t have an effective career site, your candidates have a much more difficult time finding and applying to your jobs.
Your career site has the potential to boost the visibility of your employment brand so that more job seekers find you and consider working for you. Once career site expands your candidate pool, you can create a more effective talent pipeline and proactively recruit—eliminating the possibility of talent shortages within your business. In fact, companies that strengthen and promote their employment brands maintain turnover rates that are 28 percent lower than companies with weaker employer brands.
If you’re having trouble engaging and converting your ideal candidates, it’s likely because you lack an effective career site. For several companies, such as Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), connecting with target candidates was the main and most valuable advantage of their new career site. “Because our career site engages our prospective candidates, we are gaining more high-quality applicants,” explained Scott Gallo, Talent Relationship Manager at CTCA. “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.”
Especially in today’s competitive job market, having a career site that engages your prospective candidates is critical. And if you compete for talent within several competitive industries—as is the case for Pilot Flying J—a career site can be invaluable. Due to the challenging demographics of the industry and the competitive employment landscape today, recruiting CDL drivers is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations nationwide. To address this concern, Pilot Flying J launched a new career site containing landing pages designed to engage specific visitors. Six months after launching the site, driver applicants increased by 30 percent—enabling the business to hire for more of these hard-to-fill positions.
IBM Analytics reports that 55 percent of today’s job seekers use mobile devices to search for jobs, clearly revealing that more candidates are going mobile. Knowing that this trend will only rise, a mobile-optimized candidate experience is now a must-have for all employers. In addition, IBM Analytics found that approximately three in five job seekers say organizations offering mobile recruitment are more attractive to them. This means that if you don’t have a mobile career site, you are likely losing candidates to your mobile-friendly competitors every day.
Fortunately, these statistics also prove that if you launch a mobile career site, you can appeal to more candidates and compete for talent. Providing this massive audience with a more positive candidate experience will also help you convert more mobile job seekers and grow your talent pool. And thanks to Google’s Mobilegeddon update, your site will be favored more highly in search results when it is mobile-optimized. In turn, you will boost the visibility of your jobs, drive more traffic to your site, and cultivate more awareness for your brand.
If you aren’t utilizing an effective career site to attract applicants, you are investing money into other tactics that generate less impressive results. Year after year, career sites are proven to be one of the top three most effective sources of hire. In fact, a recent SilkRoad Top Sources of Hire 2015 study found that career sites were the second largest internal source for interviews, and the second largest online source for hires. Due to their effectiveness, career sites can dramatically improve time-to-fill, cost-to-hire, and other significant KPIs. So if a career site isn’t included in your recruitment strategy, you could be doing your ROI a disservice. A career site can also improve the results of your current recruiting initiatives, allowing you to accomplish more of your recruitment goals. For instance, if your company uses an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), a career site can help you drive more traffic to it and capture more candidates. Knowing this, covering your ATS with a career site is a no-brainer.
Every day your company goes without an effective career site results in lost applicants and inefficient recruiting investments. So, what are you waiting for? If you would like to learn more about how a career site can benefit your company, contact a Cloud Recruiting Specialist at Recruiting.com today.
