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How to get more candidates from your website

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Recruiting with Staffing Websites

Turn your website into a recruiting engine

It’s getting even harder to find talent. And while that may be a good thing for the staffing industry as a whole, there’s nothing worse for your business than an unfilled job order.

How do you get more qualified candidates to apply?

Step 1: Update your website to maximize response

  • Promote jobs on your home page.
    Use an RSS feed of your job data to show off “hot jobs” up front. Be sure to include a link to “search all jobs.”
  • Promote jobs on your job seekers page.
    Include a listing of hot jobs right at the top of the page or in a sidebar. Again, be sure to include a link to “search all jobs.”
  • Encourage people to search jobs throughout your site
    – Put Search Jobs in your main navigation
    – Add a Search Jobs button to your About Us page
    – Feature specific jobs in your blog
    – Add a Search Jobs button to your blog sidebar
    – Promote featured jobs on your Contact Us page
  • Create a page footer that promotes your jobs.
    – Display a list of featured jobs
    – Include text links to specific job categories
    – Repeat the navigation to link to Search Jobs

Step 2: Optimize and distribute your jobs

  • Ensure every job is optimized for search engines.
    Your jobs need to be on your website, on your company’s domain, and each job needs to be visible to Google and other search engines. If your jobs are appearing in an iFrame or sitting on someone else’s URL, you need a better strategy for displaying jobs on your site.
  • Automate re-posting of your jobs.
    – Distribute jobs to Indeed, Simply Hired and Glassdoor.
    – Use an RSS feed to share jobs on Twitter.
    – If you can, create an RSS feed for each recruiter, so they can share the jobs they own on LinkedIn.
  • Manually re-post jobs to Facebook.
    You don’t want to overdo job sharing on Facebook, or you will alienate people. But sharing a featured jobs one to three times a week is a good way to reactivate candidates, encourage referrals, and attract people back to all the jobs on your website.

Step 3: Build an online talent community

  • Allow candidates to opt-in for job alerts.
    If your job portal doesn’t allow people to opt-in for job alerts, get one that does! (Insert Haley Marketing Job Board pitch here!) In all seriousness, our clients get a big response to the job alert feature, which provides automatic email notifications to candidates when a job is posted that matches the candidate’s interest. It’s a really low cost way to reactivate talent.
  • Nurture your candidates.

    Don’t make your candidate communication only about job alerts. Nurture relationships by sharing career advice, job hunting tips, and other fun and interesting stories that your candidates will value. HINT: it does not all have to be business related!
  • Encourage referrals.
    Send out scheduled emails with a list of hot job openings once or twice a month, and ask your candidates to refer people they know. An active referral program gets more response!

Don’t ignore mobile job seekers

Given all the hype about mobile recruiting, it would be pretty hard to ignore mobile job seekers–but most staffing companies are! At Haley Marketing, we monitor Google Analytics on more than 400 staffing and recruiting firm websites, and mobile traffic is BIG–representing as much as 30% of web traffic.

If you’re website — and jobs — are not optimized for a smart phone user, it’s time to look at a new website or at least a new job board solution for your site. If you don’t you will literally be driving candidates away from your firm!

But that’s not all…

This article was mainly about ways to improve your staffing website to attract and convert candidates, but if you’re struggling to find talent, there are lots of other creative and low cost ways to optimize your recruiting. I wrote an article last November that addressed a few of these issues. If you missed it, you can access the here: Recruiting Optimization – How to attract more ACTIVE job seekers…without spending more.

Or you can watch our On Demand Lunch with Haley Webinar:

Recruiting Optimization Webinar

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