Recruiting is a consistently evolving machine and recruiting the top talent in a candidate driven market place can be every HR manager’s largest headache. The evolution of the Career Site has occurred rapidly over the last decade or so. Career Sites are no longer just static job pages of years gone by linked together by a single homepage. A good functional Career Site can really act as your recruiting hub for engaging and interacting with candidates about your company and employment opportunities.
Here are my top 5 reasons to invest in a Career Site for your company.
1. Branding opportunity for employers
All successful company should be utilising their career site to project a consistent brand and company image/values to prospective job seekers. In what is now a very competitive, candidate driven market the top talent can be very particular about whom they work for and a companies career site can often serve as a basis for their application decisions. Candidates; especially the best ones crave information, they want to know about your company and it’s culture so they can make an informed decision and your Career Site is the best place for you to control this flow of information and sell them on your organisation.
2. Reduced cost-of-hire
Online job postings can range from £150 to approximately £500 per job on the more niche job sites plus the additional cost of CV data base search functionality.
This is considerably more cost-effective than the 20% of an annual salary fee that many traditional recruiters charge or the costs of newspaper/publication ads for the same reach and time period, however recruiting direct through your company career site can reduce this cost yet again by around 35%.
3. Reduced time-to-hire
On line recruitment allows for immediate, real-time interaction and 24×7 hiring and job search activity. Employers can post a job direct to their Career Site in as little as 5 minutes and start receiving CVs in response immediately. Traditional methods where a newspaper ad may take a week to appear and then only appear for a day, or a HR Manager has to wait till month-end to see the benefits of a costly ad in a monthly industry or geographic specific publication can increase the time and cost of recruiting the best talent.
Recruiting the top talent through an agency also takes time. From shortlisting your chosen suppliers to meeting them and finally giving one the opportunity to work on a role can take up to to two weeks.
Utilising your own Career Site is on average 70% faster than traditional hiring methods as you the employer are in full control. You can contact candidates immediately and directly and you do not have to wait for a middleman to sift through, filter, assess or select the top talent. By being in the driving seat you gain valuable insight into the nature of the marketplace and the competitive landscape for the position. You are also able to ensure a superior match and a better fit for your organisation in the long term.
4. Allows for database build-up and tracking
As previously mentioned the cost of utilising a CV database on any of the nations many job boards can be very costly and is an exercise that will need repeating at every hire. Your own Career Site will give you, the employer the opportunity to save high profile or particularly attractive CVs to build a priority database of pre-screened top talent for future use. This will in turn reduce cost and time per hire.
To asses return on investment you should be monitoring the interaction with every vacancy you post. This can be done on your Career site with metrics that will allow you to track everything from page views to search engine keywords, you need to understand what content is driving the best results for your company in terms of the top candidates and hires.
5. SEO
13-15 million people are searching for jobs each month. They type the job titles into Google. They don’t find your vacancies as they are hidden behind your ATS or within a long list of every other company’s vacancies. A career site can change that and ensure the top talent view and apply to your vacancy FIRST.
To ensure this it is important that every page on your Career Site includes the right balance of relevant keywords, page specific SEO friendly URL’s as well as appropriate Meta tags and links. Every position you post should have it’s own page which in turn is SEO optimised. This should happen automatically and be created when posting the position.
It is also imperative to have content outside of your jobs and running consistently throughout your site. This content should be focused on answering relevant questions about your company and its culture. This is a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness, communicate your company values and really promote you to the very best talent.
Ready to see the benefits of a Career Site for yourself? Find out how we can help your company attract top talent and improve your hiring process.
