Content Drives Web Traffic. So Why Not Use It On Your Company Career Site?

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Those in the marketing industry know that content is king. It drives traffic, makes your website sticky and increases brand recognition, loyalty and sales. With the recruiting function looking more and more like marketing everyday, it’s no wonder that what works for the marketing pros very well could work for our industry too. Content makes sense in marketing, and there’s no doubt that it can also help us drive candidates to our career site, engage them and increase the likelihood that they’ll ultimately decide to apply for a position.

Why not your career site?

Many in the talent acquisition industry know how important a career site is, but still, many are missing the mark on content. At the center of your candidate engagement efforts is your company career site, but what you may not realize is that it’s more than a place to share open positions and use employment branding. It is those things, but it can also be so much more. You have the power to make it a place where candidates want to spend time and revisit. Rather than simply sending candidates there, candidates could actually find it on their own as they scour the Internet for resources and answers to their questions. Your career site is already the center of your recruiting universe, but content can elevate it and make it a dynamic, ever-changing entity that candidates don’t just visit once.

If you’re considering the time commitment that a content strategy will require, let me tell you that it’s worth the effort. As Scoop.It! reported, the company B2B Content Engine conducted a study to evaluate the relationship between content curation and website traffic and found that consistent content curation provided tremendously increased website traffic, but most importantly, it also increased generation conversion by 12 percent. In this competitive job market, who wouldn’t enjoy being pursued by 12 percent more interested, qualified job seekers?

The how to

In recruiting, lead generation happens when candidates sign up for your job alerts or email newsletter, apply for a job, attend a career webinar, or become a member of your talent community. You can make all this happen by simply providing content that people need.

Your content strategy for increasing traffic and leads should cover three important areas. First of all, it should be content that candidates want and need. If you know what candidates are searching for, you can make sure you’re on the other end of that search. This means providing resources that you may think don’t directly serve your interests (but of course they really do!) such as a job search guide, resume tips and interview tricks.

Secondly, your content should be timely and consistent. The most effective way to continually drive traffic is to continually produce content. Ideally, you’d have two to three blog posts a week, a new job-seeker resource monthly, and supplemental resources such as videos, webinars and podcasts bi-weekly.

Finally, your content should be sticky and convert your readers or viewers. It should leave them wanting to know more, like venturing over to your job search page after consuming the content. Always include some type of call to action, though you should consider doing so in a natural way rather than a forced request to view open positions.

Content is a powerful force, so make the most of it and increase the impact your career sit has on candidates and in within the talent pool.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.   

How to Increase Candidate Conversation on Your Career Site

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Your career site is one of the best tools you have to engage candidates but you could be missing the mark. It’s an unfortunate fact that most HR and recruiting teams don’t have a careers site that fosters and encourages conversations, interaction and engagement – even those with seemingly stellar websites. The truth is, you can have a beautifully designed and branded site that is comprehensive and easy to use, but you still might be forgetting a few keys that could unlock candidate conversations.

The vast majority of potential candidates who visit a career site will not apply for one of your job openings. As a recruiter or talent acquisition leader, you might pride yourself on the fact that your career site leads to higher quality candidates, but statistically speaking, you’re still probably missing out on a lot of great candidates that visit your site but never take the plunge. You might point to candidates who visit the site and see they’re under-qualified, or say that there wasn’t a position that matched their needs as reasons for low conversion and no engagement, but I believe a lot of candidates are leaving your website for reasons within your control.

You most likely post job listings on your career site in a standardized format for 14 to 30 days, and that’s about as far as your careers page goes. By relying just on these postings, you limit your qualified candidate pool. Stretch your career site’s reach and influence with these four tactics:

Create landing pages

Landing pages give your careers site much more visibility in searches and allow you to attract candidates who may not know to search for your company but are looking for a job in your industry or a position in a specific area, such as IT. From your landing page you can link to current openings and encourage interaction even when there isn’t an open position, such as joining your talent network, giving you the ability to build a candidate pipeline.

Build a talent network

A talent network truly is the best way to encourage engagement through your careers page. This kind of environment makes talking to a recruiter easy and takes the awkwardness out of starting conversations. Technologies like TalentCircles have made it easy to create this space within your careers page and I would argue that it’s an essential piece for any organization that prioritizes candidate conversations as part of their strategy.

Optimize your site for long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are phrases made up of three to four words that are typically very specific, and they are perfect for employers looking to recruit. You can optimize your career site for long tail keywords and take advantage of SEO by finding out what searches are leading candidates to your website already. These are especially useful because candidates using these phrases obviously know what they’re looking for. By optimizing, job-ready candidates looking for the exact positions you’re hiring for are being delivered to your website. Creating a conversation with them is a natural next step.

Provide downloadable candidate resources

There’s an essential question that every corner of the Internet, including recruiting, must ask. What value do I provide? Think beyond the job opening itself and consider what you have that makes a candidate want to visit, re-visit and hang out on your careers page. Give them a reason to by providing downloadable candidate resources that help them in their job search. This could be resume or interview tips, FAQs or industry-specific topics. You could make these available by entering an email address, or better yet, by joining your talent network.

All these tactics make your careers site more visible and give candidates a reason to engage.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Career sites will be windows of the marketing and sales soul

By Kevin W. Grossman

And there were those who said the internet would kill business (then with a capital “I”). Crazy, don’t you think? We certainly know better now.

I worked in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s where companies scrambled over another like ants to sugar to get a website up, any website up, in order to have a website up. Fast forward to today and we’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization (SEO), lead capture, call-to-action and the fact that according a recent The Economist article there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world’s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.

One to two billion people use the internet. Research survey after research survey validates that the first place more and more of the growing internet user world goes in online, so it makes sense that the primary business website (and mobile-friendly website) are the eyes to the window of the marketing and sales soul.

Consumer product companies get that and B2B companies are getting it. But what is still lagging is the parallel (and the parable) of the company career sites, portals, pages, whatever you want to call them.

We treat (we can only hope) our prospects and customers like kings and queens because they’re the livelihood of our businesses. However, so are our employees and managers, because they’re the ones who make and deliver the things that are the livelihood of our businesses.

Just as we profile our customers we profile our candidates (or should be), but unlike our core buyers, we should give our future employees the opportunity to profile themselves, to create a “universal profile” that’s portable and includes a 360-view of all interests and skills and experience, housed anywhere they want – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, other networks – to then be able to move among the online crowd whether they apply for a job or not. Yet.

Granted, talent acquisition technologies including applicant tracking systems (ATS) have been slow to adapt to the online profile – there’s still the “click here” to upload your resume. That’s changing for the better as the candidate experience improves allowing for easy integration of the online profile to the employer of choice, not to mention the benefits of a search optimized professional profile. Kind of like the way we’ve moved into the product and service marketing realm.

And that means that the company career portals will continue to evolve as the final destination – all employment brand fodder and job opportunities will lead to them like sugar trails of Web lore.

Career sites will become windows of the marketing and sales soul. Amen.