Your Most Important HR Recruiting Tool

Sometimes you put so much effort into marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter, that you forget your most important recruiting tool: your company’s career website. This site provides valuable information for prospective employees that other websites can’t. It should be where you see the highest conversion rate for clicks-to-applications if you’ve built it right.

What a fundamentally sound career website provides
An efficient career portal can shepherd candidates through professional opportunities, give them valuable, enticing company information, and ultimately make the recruitment process easier by having to rely less on job listings to find top talent. A well-designed site can funnel the elite job seekers to your company and help promote your employer brand.

However what do people look for on a career website? The Talent Board asked 100,000 survey respondents and found out their top reasons:

• 42 percent of job seekers go to the company website to find out about values pertaining to the brand
• 37 percent want to learn about what the business offers its consumers
• 35 percent like to see employees review the working conditions
• 31 percent simply want to know why people would work for your organization, while 23 percent want to know why they stay

All these answers involve some part of company branding, and it’s up to HR to develop an identity that extends to the career site. Not only will it make recruiters’ lives easier, but it will help you get more use out of time-saving technology like an applicant tracking system (ATS), which can easily sync up to your career website as well as other job listing sites. By pushing the values of your ideal candidate, an ATS can be used to sort a list that should already be filled with viable talent.

Improve your company website
There are some ways you can enhance your career site experience for candidates who visit. Making it easy to use and navigate will ultimately lead to more applications. Then it’s up to your ATS to help you decide which of them is qualified for the open position.

The first thing to make sure your website is geared for is user experience. Usability, the leading resource for user experience information, offers a great honeycomb chart that gives you an in-depth look at what will make visiting your career site an enjoyable venture. A career websites value is derived from a number of characteristics, such as its accessibility, usefulness, usability, and credibility. Hitting on all these points will help you design a flawless website. This includes the backend as well—make sure the coders have taken the time to integrate your ATS so it’s easy for you to pull applications and review them.

A well-working career website can draw candidates to your company and lessen the recruiting load on HR.

Make sure the website engages readers, Recruiting.com suggested. This can be done on multiple levels—video, content, and audio. Put up speeches that employees have given, or host employee generated videos so applicants can see what goes on behind the scenes. The longer you keep them on the website, the better chance you have of getting them to apply.

An excellent career site is worth its weight in gold if set up correctly. Show candidates what it’s like to work for your company and create an easy path for them to apply by having a streamlined layout. It doesn’t hurt to make it easy on yourself by incorporating technology like an ATS into the backend so it’s easier to review, sort, and rank the large volume of résumés you’ll be receiving with your newly improved career portal.