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11 Must-Haves for Every Staffing Website: A Presentation from the Colorado Staffing Association Annual Conference

Colorado Staffing Association | Recruiting Websites
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Want to turn your website into a staffing ATM?

With the right approach, your site can generate job orders and placements day in and day out! In this idea-packed presentation from the Colorado Staffing Association Annual Conference, Brad Bialy, Social Media Marketing Advisor, will show you the most important “must-haves” for an effective staffing and recruiting website.

 

Video Transcript

My name is Brad Bialy. I’m from Haley Marketing Group up in Buffalo New York. It’s a pleasure being out here. If you have any questions throughout the presentation please stop me and let me know, I’d rather get them out of the way while it’s while we’re thinking about it and stay on topic.

I have 11 topics that I want to discuss and ultimately I want to talk about how to turn your website into a staffing ATM. How we can start to make more educated decisions with our websites to actually see true business results.

How can you make your website work for you?

Just by a show of hands, anybody that has website for their company, which I assume you all do, can you tie true business results to your website yes or no? Show of hands would be yes. So you cannot. Maybe?

Okay that’s an issue what we want to see is that as we have a website it starts to work for us not against. We want it to be used as a tool not something just that we have because our competitors do or we were told that we have to have one. We want to have a website that actually drives true business results.

Let’s talk about 11 must-haves for every staffing website.

I’m not saying go out and put all eleven of these on your website right away, but I think it’s something you can start to think about start to incorporate maybe a little bit at a time snd that as you start to grow you’ll start to think of other ideas and other ways to expand the website.

  1. Incredible User Experience

    When somebody comes to your website they should absolutely love the fact that they are on your site more than any other site that they’ve been to.

    Especially as a staffing firm. We think about competitors and how we differentiate ourselves having a website that’s easy to navigate easy for a candidate to get to an available job easy for someone to get a hold of you get in contact with you, user experience is everything. And user experience comes down to more than just the content and the jobs that are on your site it comes down to how fast the side loads. It comes down to the overall display of the site. When you open up your website on a mobile device do you have a pinch and zoom so that you can get to different areas of the site? Or does the whole site render on one screen? That’s important because as you start to turn off different candidates they’re making a decision about you before they even know who you are and we want to put our best foot forward.

  2. Mobile Responsive Design

    When we look at data from June compared to August of this year I asked out Tech Team to pull a little bit of data for us 28% of all data from websites hosted by Haley Marketing Group, that’s about a thousand sites, about 28% of that traffic came from a mobile device.

    In august of this year 37-percent of traffic came from mobile device or six million pageviews. So if you have a website where you’re loading up content on an iPhone and you have to kind of do that pinch and zoom where you read one half of the screen zoom back out zoom back into the other half of the screen you’re losing a lot of candidates and you’re losing their interest again before they even get the chance to know you and pick the phone to learn who you are so mobile is essential.

    You see a couple options here, and i’ll use the pointer, in the top left you have a real easy apply now right when you get to the home page on mobile. In the middle you have a very nice split between job seekers and clients so if you’re looking for jobs you immediately have one button to click if you’re looking for talent on the other hand you have another button to click and it takes you to separate pages on the site but it’s routed very strategically. The one in the upper corner there is more geared towards job seekers so you have faster talent faster hires you click that and you can also apply for jobs.

  3. Well-developed Conversion Funnel

    What I mean by that kind of refer back to a grocery store. When you walk through the front door of a supermarket there’s a ton of product everywhere. You have a ton of purchasing decisions that you can make but the grocery store’s layout guides you to the items that they want you to buy. So before you know that you want the new Oreos that are on display just for fall they guide you to them. Whether it’s through the end cap, whether it’s through signage, whether it’s just through designing that aisle so that you have to go past the Oreos to get to your milk it’s all strategic and your website should be the exact same.

    When a candidate comes to your site we want to guide them to either the search jobs page we want to guide them to the contact page want to guide them to a conversion page so we can capture who they are because at a high-level they’re just a number until they actually give us their information and become a user on that website. We want to turn the pageview to actually somebody that we can get a hold of and contact.

    So thinking about that funnel thinking about okay if somebody reads a piece of blog content or somebody reads an e-book what do we want them to do next? Think about the end goal. If contact submissions are the main goal let’s work backward. How can we get people to that and think about that funnel.

  4. Google Analytics

    So I asked earlier who has a company website and who sees true business results from it. Who that has a site has Google Analytics installed on that site? A couple. So three maybe a couple others aren’t sure but of those three that have Analytics on your site can you read the data? Can you analyze it significantly well? Do you know what it means?

    Google Analytics is one of the biggest tools that you can have on your site. It tells you exactly what pages are being looked at, exactly how long people are staying on those pages, how they’re getting to those pages, where they’re going afterward.

    We can understand the user significantly well.

    This is a report that I put together for Haley Marketing Group. I sit on our marketing team and I actually run our social media efforts. So every now and again we get together as a team I have to report back as to what my social media efforts are doing and what that’s resulting in from a business standpoint. So when we sit down I use Analytics to look at ok how much traffic came from LinkedIn this month? How much traffic came from Facebook? Twitter? How much came from the email marketing we’re doing if I want to sprinkle that too, but more importantly we want to look at contact form submission. On the otherside we want to look at how many people filled out a lead generation form or how many people got to get an estimate and gave us their information. We tie that all back to how the user got there now we know what initiatives are working and more importantly what initiatives are not working.

    I’m extremely data-driven and I almost like to see what efforts aren’t working more than which ones are because it tells me what I have to work on. If I come in here and I say we had a ton of LinkedIn traffic that’s awesome but Facebook is super low I know I have to go back to the drawing board and it gives me a challenge.

  5. Represent Your Company

    We just redesigned haleymarketing.com and when you get to our website this is the first picture you see. It’s a team of 45 people that I work with that I love working with and it’s the first image you see because that’s who we are. Kind of quirky outgoing group of people. We all hang out together outside of work. Someone mentioned earlier going to happy hours and things like that, we do that basically on a weekly basis. We play volleyball together on a team we actually have two teams going now. We do different community outreach. We want people that come to our site to know that.

    I often say that people don’t do business with businesses they do business with people. If you can get to know who we are before you even pick up a phone and call us I believe that’s a big win right there.

    So not only do we have the image on our homepage of who we are but we also have what’s called a team bio and this is my example. So when you’re on a desktop version of our site it has a hover over effect so as you’re scrolling with your mouse you can hover over my normal picture on the one side the hover over is me playing the guitar because that’s what I do outside of work. I play around Buffalo every now and again. But everybody has something different that they specialize in so
    Mark one of our Creative Designers; it’s a picture of him playing soccer. Everybody has something specific whether it’s that they’re into cars or into hockey it shows our personalities so that when you get on the phone you’re not just talking to Brad the marketing guru or whatever adjective you want to use there but you’re talking to Brad and you get to know me a little bit more. I think that’s important.

    We also have true false questions at the bottom of our team bios so every time you come to our page there’s three questions. I am not fluent in Spanish, French, Italian so that would have been False.

    There is one more about getting to know your team. I think a team bios page is very important and that’s kind of what you saw in the last slide, but this is a page dedicated to 100% who works at Haley Marketing Group. So there are some fun pictures on here. You can see again our team’s kind of quirky we’re kind of out there but we like to have fun and we like each other. So we do that and we showcase that. Here’s Krista’s birthday with a picture of that on there. All these pictures also get shared on social media so not only are they on our site but we’re also showcasing to our followers our connections who we are so that people can get to know who Haley Marketing.

    Something i want to mention over here in the corner, we won best places to work in western New York we were one of the companies that was honored with that award so we all dressed up as characters from I believe Saturday Night Live and a little bit of Wayne’s World there in the middle yeah. But, it’s just another way for us to showcase our team.

    One thing i didn’t mention is we also have personal team testimonials that slide throughout the entire page so here’s one from Brad Smith says, “We actually care about each other it’s a nice and tight-knit group that focuses on success treating each other with respect and all growing together”

    We’re showcasing who our team so that again you can get to know us and start to trust us.

  6. Attractive Job Opportunities

    Regardless of what ATS you use it’s important that those route back to a page on your website.

    This is an example of a job board solution that we offer. Without really plugging that and just talking more importantly about why you need jobs on your webpage it’s great not only because candidates that come your site, but now they have a next path in that funnel so we can guide them to available opportunities, but we also keep all those opportunities on our site so we’re not driving them somewhere else where they get lost in the clutter. We’re keeping them right on our domain and that’s exactly what you should do as well.

    So you have these available positions, in the example here I clicked on Machine Operator. That bounces out not only do you see all the description the information the hours and pay but we also get to know about Terry Robinson and I think that’s important. Not only does the candidate to get to learn about the actual position, but they get to learn about the recruiter that they would then be working with so they get to learn a little bit about Terry become a little bit more comfortable with her and it also has her social media buttons under there too so maybe they want to fill out and apply online up at the top or they want to apply later and get a reminder in a little bit, they can also reach out to Terry on Twitter or they can send her a Facebook message so it’s a real nice way to bring that all together.

    Jobs on your site are also great for search engine optimization it adds real nice relative keywords, relevant keywords, adds real nice page density to your site. The more pages on your site the better Google likes to see relevant pages and continued growth of pages on your site so as you’re adding new jobs that’s a great opportunity as well.

  7. Search Engine Optimization

    I did a Google search back in Buffalo for employment agencies in Denver, Colorado and on this side of the screen my right you’ll see the Google map which is going to be agencies that have set up through Google+ that are showing up on the map then you’ll see their listings under it when you get into the organic search results. We can influence organic search results by search engine optimizing our webpages on our site so by sprinkling in keywords like Top Denver Staffing Firms, Top Denver Staffing Agencies, Staffing Agencies in Denver into our headings on our site into the page titles of our site into the web copy of our site we start to influence what Google starts to show.

    You can post great content on Facebook, you can send out a great newsletter, and you can even put in some paid search behind it but with organic search and influencing that copy people that are just looking for employment firms in Denver can start to find you as well. It’s a very critical part to the website copy of that process.

  8. Great Content

    I’m a big proponent of fresh content unique content and a wide wide variety of it. I have a hard time running different social media programs just posting job after job for clients I try not to do that ever.

    Instead we want to hook them with really good content and then push them towards job opportunity through our call to action or through that funnel that we talked about.

    So what constitutes great content?

    It’s very easy to set up a blog on your site. I recommend getting into a blogging routine where maybe you start to post every other week and task that around your office and then you can get to the point where you’re posting every week maybe twice a week. Everybody within your office is knowledgeable on very specific topics. Let them showcase that. Let them be a resource to the candidates and clients that come to your page and show them that content.

    What I love to do, I write for Haley Marketing probably every other week, what I love to do is write blog content around questions that I’m getting a lot. If I have a bunch of clients emailing me saying hey we heard about this new Facebook update what does it mean? I’ll blog about it and now the next time I get the question I send a link to the blog article. Now I have them on our site where we can work them through our funnel. We can start to capture them as a lead even though they’re already a current client, we can capture them as a lead coming in for maybe something else another service, but more importantly we’re getting more traffic to our site and building awareness for the content other.

    Content could include a candidate resource center maybe it’s a client Resource Center, ebooks, whitepapers, video.

    Video is King. If you can put together a video of top jobs, top resources, maybe take a blog article and then you have somebody read that article or just showcase the top five points of the video, put that on your website. I mentioned ebooks but having good Great content is not only the fuel for a social media strategy but you could also use it for an email marketing strategy. You can start to distribute that out through different channels use that to hook people and I like I said leverage your funnels and how you’re building your site to get them to take an action.

  9. Calls to Action

    On a website by nature people are going to come read your content and want to leave. They got their answer, they got what they were looking for. There’s really no more purpose for that one page unless we hook them with the next step.

    So a lot of times you’ll find content might not have a strong enough CTA so we’re not driving people to the right page. We need to we need to change that.

    So, what we like to do at Haley is create different visual call to action buttons.

    I’m also a really big fan of fly-ins and pop-ups things that come from the bottom and sides. It’s a little bit more intrusive than just the button at the bottom of a blog post but I think it flies low enough where it’s not overly intrusive. It’s not like Forbes does it where you go to look at the blog post and you get their add for 5 seconds. It’s a real direct CTA looking for a job? Signup here. Click and it signs you up for job notifications.

    The bottom of this one is a Cobb Pediatric example. You get through a blog post, it says looking for additional support contact us today. Very direct. Tells them exactly what we want them to do. They click that button.

    What’s also great and a little bit of side note but through Google Analytics we can track all these clicks. We can set up what’s called UTM Tracking and in Analytics what can then happen is I can tell our boss, my boss rather, or you can report to whoever you need to give this data to and say listen through the month of September 15 people clicked on this flyin. In the month of august though 60 click that. Maybe it’s getting old? People are understanding that is there and we should change it up. It gives you good concrete data and lets you make educated decisions moving forward.

  10. Lead Generation Forms

    I’m a big proponent of having a contact form and lead generation form directly on the website. Something that is extremely easy to fill out. Something that maybe has 3 to 5 fields.

    We want to keep it as short as possible

    This is an example from Rollinc actually. We are currently working on their new site. I don’t know if anybody is in here from Rollinc but this is a look at their new contact form and you’ll see that there are two, four, six different fields but only three are required name, phone number, and email.

    That gets sent to their team, they can then reach out and get more information. We don’t need everybody’s information and all their details right to start. We can get a good quality lead and then let the sales team follow-up afterward and let recruiters follow-up afterward but what we want to do is make it very easy.

    I like short forms because you know that people are using smartphones more.

    A stat that I was going to say about mobile responsive, but a report from Nielsen showed that ninety-one percent of adults have their smartphone within arm’s reach 24 hours a day. So the more people are using smartphones, mobile devices, the more we want to continue to create our website to field that platform.

    A long form with a lot of options asking for resumes asking for items that somebody might not have if they’re on the bus or cab, make it easy make it efficient. Let them give you their information and then we can follow-up afterward to get more from them.

  11. Social Proof

    Social Proof is a way to basically prove to your audience that you’re somebody.

    So on our site this is a couple Haley Marketing examples we have a button in our sidebar that shows you how many followers we have on every platform. Numbers that we’re proud of so we like to showcase them. If you have a good audience it builds a little bit of authority to people that come to your site so we put those numbers on there and that updates in real time as we get more followers that’s going to update.

    What we want to do is show people that hey we’re active, we’re listening. If you reach out to us we’re going to respond back and also like I said build a little bit of authority there on those platforms.

    Also, the footer of every page has Connect with Us buttons so that if people are active on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin wherever their attention is we’re there too.

    One of the biggest things with social media in the way that starts to shift and to go a little bit of a tangent is you’re constantly fighting for people’s attention. Regardless of social media, email, phone calls you’re fighting for attention.

    You can’t just run a Facebook page if your audience is on Twitter. You need to go where their attention is an actively engage with them. So by us building out and constantly updating our pages and engaging with our audience we’re doing so where they’re active and engaging where they’re listening.

    The last part of social proof that we have is at the bottom of every piece of content we have what we call share icons very easy to turn on if you have WordPress.

    Similar to how you build Authority with your follower count on the side this builds authority for the blog article itself. So this article that I shared that I took a screenshot of was shared on LinkedIn 220 times. Was shared on Facebook 15. Twitter actually doesn’t track their counter anymore so we can see that one but what’s good for us to see is that as it gets shared more it’s a sign for us as we’re evaluating what content is resonating well with our audience. It’s also a good sign for somebody that hasn’t heard of who we are before hasn’t heard of Haley Marketing Group. They see that this article, other people are talking about it and that builds their trust. It helps them trust us more and helps us move in the right direction.

 

Those are my 11 tips and what I consider my 11 must-haves for all staffing websites again.

I don’t think you need to roll them all out all at once.

I think this is something that can be rolled out periodically. Maybe take one at a time and just roll slowly with it. But I did want to open up for questions and I wanted to save time for that.

So if you have questions about your own website maybe something that I mentioned feel free to ask now. I also have my contact information up there if you would rather reach out privately but I’m definitely available to answer anything that you might have.

 

 

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