Webinar Series: Career Site Optimization

Since it’s fairly safe to assume that most companies have an online hiring presence with a dedicated career site (warning: if you don’t have a career site, or don’t know what a career site is, stop reading this right now and have your IT person build one. Yes, I’m serious; it’s that important), I thought it was appropriate to write a post about what it means to “optimize” one’s career site as a primer for my free webinar next week.

Before we can get into how best to optimize your career site, we need to first understand what optimization means. The definition of optimize is to make optimal or to get the most out of something. So, when I say optimize your career site which is specific to hiring, what I’m really saying is that we want to generate the most traffic to our career site as possible and then convert that traffic into qualified applicants and new hires whilst limiting the cost associated with that. Makes sense, right?

Okay, so based on the goal we identified above, there are three key components that stand out in my mind when you’re wanting to maximize the return on your jobs page:

Track Your Results

Typically, measuring your results comes at the end of one of my hiring process spiels, but relative to site optimization, our goals start with determining where we are by quantifying our results as they stand right now. More specifically, we’re going to gauge where you fall in applicant conversion currently. So, select metrics that you would like to change – here are a few that I assess with my clients: ad views, unique visitors (traffic), conversions (how many people actually apply to your open positions, and do you have any passive applicant signups), and lastly, both interviews and hires (by source, time period, job, etc).

If you don’t have analytics already built in with a hiring software like ApplicantPro to compute this data for you, then all you have to do is register for Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to setup, and includes automatic reporting.

Use the Right Keywords

I’ve talked a LOT about keyword selection here. So much so, that I probably sound like a broken record. Again though, I share certain things with you as much as I can, even if it makes your ears bleed because they are essential to your hiring success. And since the majority of recruiting is done online, HR Professionals need to know how to use SEO properly when writing job ads and job descriptions. Pick words that are popular or get searched for. List a job title that is likely to get searched for by your applicant pool (ie: Accountant versus Jr Financial Officer I). Also, location is key. List the job opening’s city in the job title. It’s one of the most common search phrases used by job seekers.

Conduct Job Research

Your current employees are your most valuable resource when it comes to selling your company work climate. Ask them what they like about the job/company or what drew them in, and finally, why they accepted the job offer. Include this information in your original ad so that you can draw as many applicants to your positions as possible, and then convert them into interviews.

If you’d like to register. for my free HRCI approved webinar 1/22 @ 11 AM MST, I go into much greater detail about how to adopt a more optimized approach to hiring. After all, our primary purpose for overhauling our career site is to draw as many qualified applicants to our job openings as possible in order to isolate that diamond in the rough employee.