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Employer Web Sites Are Growing in Importance for Recruiting
Things are getting more competitive. Savvy job seekers look for jobs on employer Websites first. If your site does not have them posted, your organization loses that opportunity to capture that applicant.
As the boomers retire, every competitive recruiting advantage becomes priceless in keeping organizations fully functioning and growing.
When I first added the Fortune 500 companies to Job-Hunt in 2000, fewer than 20% of them had employment links on their home pages. That number is very close to 100% now for the Fortune 500 companies.
The best part about posting jobs on your own Website is that you are not required to share the resumes of the job seekers attracted to your organization and your open positions. The resumes/profiles of applicants are not dumped into resume databases to be searched through by hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of other employers, as they usually are on the large employment sites.
Attracting Job Seekers to Your Website
1. Is your site visible?
A Google or Yahoo! search on your company’s name, or on the name and location if it’s a very common name, should bring up the company’s Website as the first unpaid link. If it doesn't, shake up your Web team until it does. This is costing you business as well as potential employees!
Purchase Google AdWords,Yahoo Search Marketing, and/or other online ads to bring additional traffic (visitors) to your site. However, for the long-term, you want to be easily found in the regular, free (a.k.a. “organic”) listings on the search engine results pages since ads stop sending traffic when the budget runs out.
2. Are the jobs hidden or easily found?
Once someone has found your site, make it easy for them to find the job openings. Put a link to your Careers or Career Center pages on the home page and in the primary (usually top or left column) or secondary (usually bottom) navigation of all the other pages. Take a look at the Websites of employers who constantly need more staff - like hospitals. Most of them make it VERY easy for job seekers to find the jobs on their sites.
3. Does the site sell the company as a place to work?
Provide more than just job listings. Include information about benefits, career paths, company locations, interviews with employees, a typical day as a [fill in the blank] at [your organization], a typical career path for a [whatever], etc. to make your company more attractive and to provide content for the search engines to pickup. In addition, suggest that visitors make your site one of their “Favorites” by setting a bookmark. It’s easy to do.
Offer visitors the option of registering their e-mail addresses to receive news and other information about the organization, new job openings, etc. Then, cherish those e-mail addresses and cultivate those connections for the future.
Encourage visitors to send job descriptions to their friends/coworkers. Your Web team can set up an "email this page" form to facilitate the process.
4. Treat job seekers as you would want to be treated.
That means, at a minimum, responding to applicants with a confirmation that their resume or other document was received, preferably responding within 24-hours.
It also means respecting job seeker privacy - not sharing or selling those resumes, posting an accurate privacy policy, and providing real contact information (names and phone numbers).
Above all, do NOT require job seekers to provide their Social Security Numbers with their resumes and/or applications. Too many fake employer and job sites are out there harvesting personal information for who-knows-what nefarious purpose. Don't give job seekers a reason to distrust your site or your organization. They may leave and never return.
5. Cherish repeat visitors and in-bound links.
Don't play 52 Pick Up, reshuffling the pages and content of your Website, every few months or every few years! That reshuffling orphans bookmarks and favorites (including the ones in social/bookmarking networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Del.icio.us (et al) as well as those valuable in-bound links your Web team pays someone to help your site collect!
Websites more
than a few days old have “footprints” in cyberspace
that should be retained, both for recruiting and for marketing.
Whenever your Website is revised, keep as much of the old footprint
as possible. Retain directory and file names, and insist that your
Web team intelligently manage the transition from the old site to
new site.
I’ve seen
the company’s employment section change from www.[company].com/jobs/
to www.[company].com/Careers/. So
what? Lost visitors! Diminished Google PageRank!
The seemingly minor “/jobs/ “ to “/Careers/” change means that your company Website risks losing its “installed base” of potential repeat visitors who have saved the old URL. When they try to return, that old page is gone, and they get a “404 Page Not Found” error. Many people give up when they run into the page-not-found error assume that the Website - and the employer - are gone. That doesn't need to happen, and your Web team should know how to protect that old footprint rather than discarding it.
In addition, sites, like Job-Hunt which provide in-bound links that both send visitors to your site and increase your site's Google PageRank, may discard your site as a “maintenance problem” needing too much attention.
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Once you have job seekers finding your Website and the jobs on it, then they need to trust you enough to respond. But that’s another article – stay tuned...
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