As a result of COVID-19, the recruitment process has taken on an entirely new shape. The burden of acquiring talent now lies on the other end of the recruitment cycle, instead of the applicants who follow job postings actively. Recruiters are now having a harder time hunting and engaging potential talent due to remote work and work-life balance being prioritized. In order to optimize your organization’s hiring processes, you must consider the candidate’s experience. A candidate’s first step when it comes to the candidate experience is their journey through your company’s website. The first point of contact candidates have with your business entity is usually this page.
You can lose a potential candidate without getting to know them in the first place if there is any discrepancy at this level. As a result, a recruiter treats the candidate in the same way a marketer treats a customer. A whole new concept of recruitment optimization is called Recruit Like a Marketer, while we are on the topic of marketing.
How does Recruitment Marketing work?
As the name suggests, this concept essentially means what it says. It gives recruiters the ability to develop a hiring strategy similar to the way a marketer approaches his customers. Selling a product involves highlighting what makes it different from other products on the market. Likewise, it is important to show a candidate how your company’s culture and benefits set you apart from your competitors. Each of these tools and techniques serves a single purpose. Recruit as many possible candidates and improve the candidate experience.
We conducted research to analyze the impact of optimizing a website on candidate experience in light of its importance. There is a direct relationship between the findings. In summary, user-friendly career sites increase candidate engagement with your company. However, you have to optimize your website based on a number of metrics in order to make it user-friendly. This blog will discuss the report’s findings in the following sections.
How to optimize your site for candidate experience with these 4 metrics
A thorough analysis of candidates’ experiences with career sites has shown that some factors have a greater impact than others. Our goal is to help you enhance your staffing website’s user journey by categorizing and elaborating on the top four metrics.
Engaging visitors from the first point of contact with your website
There are several steps involved in achieving lasting engagement. Consistency and reliability are ensured through coherence throughout the POC optimization process.
Optimization of the First Contentful Page (FCP)
It is very common that your website is the first point of contact between potential candidates and your company. In order to keep your candidates engaged longer, you must be careful with the information you enter on the website. Users who visit your website for the first time find it to be the most important marketing channel. In addition to showcasing your brand, culture, and organizational values, your career website is the best place to show off the employment opportunities you offer. In other words, if you can attract and engage a user in their first visit, you have succeeded in leaving a lasting impression.
A number of factors should be considered when assessing first impressions. A significant metric to gauge the bounce rate on your website is the time it takes for the user to reach the First Contentful Page. The First Contentful Page of FCP is exactly what it sounds like, right? In simple terms, it is the time it takes for a website to display a first visual after a user requests it. This is the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with something on the screen. High loading times lead to a higher bounce rate on First Contentful Page.
Experience optimization for users
Once FCP has been optimized, the next fundamental step in improving the candidate experience is to optimize the landing page content. Your staffing website can only attract and engage candidates with user-centric landing pages. Users will bounce back before getting to the actual staffing content/opportunities if your website is stuffed with company history, testimonials, and ads.
Integrating and optimizing media
Furthermore, if your landing pages are overloaded with content, chances are that you will lose users’ interest soon. A combination of infographics and charts can be used to replace large chunks of text-based content. In order to make your website friendly and engaging for candidates, you need to consider details from the perspective of the user.
Mapping the user journey and optimizing it
Let’s first learn about user journey mapping before we delve into the details. Is User Journey Mapping exactly what it sounds like? Analysis and projection of the user’s navigation through your career site are what it sounds like. Technically, it is the number of clicks a user needs to make before reaching the desired page/section. A staffing website’s reach time also includes the time it takes to reach certain sections. User retention is more likely to be affected by the number of clicks and the length of the journey. It is now possible to stretch the user journey mapping by considering a number of factors/prompts.
- Popup advertisements within the company
- Advertisements on web pages that are densely populated
- A menu bar that is too small
- There is no navigation bar on the site
- Landing pages with unstructured content
- Cookie, location, and permissions prompt recurringly.
- A landing page that displays a newsletter subscription pop-up immediately
Whenever you draw a line in your relationship diagram, it corresponds to a click and the time it takes. Using your diagram, reduce the number of lines and clicks. In order to achieve these reductions in customer journeys on your live website, you need to implement them once they have been completed. Your customer journey mapping has been optimized successfully.
Because pop-ups, newsletter subscription forms, and permissions are also important, replacing them from the entry point to the exit point is an effective trick. You show any pop-ups, subscriptions, and/or cookie collection requests to a user who sends an exit request from a page. In addition to subscribing to your newsletters, a user who returns happily from your site will also want to engage with your site in the future.
Enhance your career site’s mobile compatibility
Mobile-friendly career sites are vital, and no amount of emphasis can convey their importance. The majority of job portals now provide dedicated mobile apps to enhance the user experience. Most candidates are hovering over their mobile devices over job postings. Consider the scenario where someone is actively applying for jobs across companies with mobile-friendly websites and lands on yours. A mobile phone user will have a bad experience on the website because it is poorly structured and unoptimized. In order to ensure a seamless experience for candidates, your website should be accessible from any device. In order to make your website mobile-friendly, you should consider the following two factors:
- The mobile version of the website looks and feels the same
- Information is easily accessible
The look and feel of a website are more important to users than its ease of use, according to our research on candidate experience. Other benefits can also be gained from making your website mobile-friendly. It has been specifically noted in Google’s SEO metrics that mobile-friendly websites are more likely to rank higher in SERP than those with higher domain authority but not mobile-friendly. Therefore, making your website mobile-friendly is like icing on the cake. Besides optimizing your candidate experience, you also improve your Google SERP ranking.
Your website can be used as a tool for data-driven communication with candidates
If you do not provide the numbers to back up your success stories, users will not read them. That’s all there is to it. It’s all about sharing clear and transparent statistics regarding staffing requirements across the career website to maintain a data-driven approach. In order to improve candidate experience, you need to establish a degree of transparency with your users. How do you communicate with your candidates using data-driven strategies? There are no limits to them. A good place to start is by sharing the statistics regarding a particular job posting. Rather than piling all the related tasks in the job descriptions, you can be transparent about the number of positions, the salary range for a particular position, and the requirements of the role. Communication with candidates should be transparent to increase the chances of re-engaging them.
Optimizing your website’s user experience unlocks even more talent than your average pool size by improving user experience. In order to be successful, you need to follow the tips and tricks mentioned above and trust the algorithm because it has been proven to work. Would you like to learn more about the impact of the user journey on your staffing site? Are you interested in learning more about how user journey impacts your staffing site? Watch this space for more blogs about data-driven approaches to improving user experience.
