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Want More Candidate Applications? This One Change Increased Job Board Traffic By 37.97% and Doubled Applications

Website and SEO Trends
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Record-low unemployment rates. Hard-to-fill job orders.

Not a great combination for staffing and recruiting firms. If you can’t get applications, you can’t fill job orders, and you can’t turn a profit.

While some staffing companies just throw more and more money into recruiting efforts – other smart companies have taken a step back. Before throwing more money into job postings and other recruiting tools, you need to find out what the real problem is.

Candidate Traffic Might Not Be The Issue

For one of our clients, we found that their overall website traffic was up. Our blogging and search engine optimization efforts were doing their job. We got in front of more and more people, improved search rankings, and attracted more people to their website.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, even with all that increased visibility and traffic back to their site, visits to their jobs and applications weren’t going up.

How do you drive more job views and applications?

The easy answer might be to spend more money. If you promote more jobs and spend more money, you should see more applications; right?  Surprise, throwing more money at a process that is broken, might not fix it! With a little bit of digging, we found that overall traffic wasn’t the real issue. We were doing the right things to attract candidates to the site and saw big increases in traffic. However, that traffic wasn’t making its way to open jobs or the application. The real problem was that the website (disclaimer – we did not design it!), didn’t make it easy to find jobs!

Using Google Analytics we were able to identify traffic patterns and look at exit rates. Candidates were making it to the homepage and leaving, or to the main candidates section and leaving. They were never making it to the job board. Why? Because of issues with the site’s navigation and user experience.

When looking at the site’s navigation, it had a long dropdown list of every page on the site. A link to “Search Jobs” was buried beneath the page fold (you needed to scroll down) and only appeared once you clicked on “Job Seekers.”  There also weren’t any strong calls-to-action to “Search Jobs.”  So, here’s what we suggested:

  • Streamline Navigation
    If you’re #1 goal is driving applications, get your jobs to the top. That long drop down was streamlined and “Search Jobs” was placed at the top, front and center.
  • Update Homepage
    The homepage banner had great information – for employers. Like many of you reading this article, this company had more job orders than they could fill. So, instead of using that homepage banner to focus on employers, we suggested a candidate focus and strong Call-to-Action buttons to “search jobs” and “apply online.”
  • Update Candidate Copy
    They had a decent candidate page, but their call-to-action was missing. They explained why working with them was great for job seekers, but they didn’t offer a link to apply or search for jobs. The site left the candidate guessing on what to do next. By adding in buttons and a clear path to “search jobs,” we made it easy for candidates to take that next step.

The One Key to More Applications: Make It Easy to Find and Apply!

By identifying the areas of fall-off and updating the site to make it easier to search for jobs and apply, we saw an immediate impact:

In roughly 3 weeks time, we were able to increase overall traffic to their open jobs by 37.97%. Not only that, their job applications doubled. When you consider the fact that they place very senior-level, niche industry executives in key roles, the bottom line value of this increase is dramatic.

Looking for More Recruitment Marketing Tips?

Contact the team at Haley Marketing Group. We offer a full suite of recruitment marketing tools and strategies to help you overcome the current shortage of talent.

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