Comment: does your careers site have x-ray vision?
When businesses face increased competition, they inevitably invest in marketing to help them better understand, segment, differentiate and all the other stuff marketers do…. By Chris Bogh, technical director at online recruitment software specialist Eploy.
In a world dominated by technology, there are myriad marketing tools to help gather data, prospects and marketplace.
I’m sure your corporate website has some form of analytics system that gathers data that your marketing team pores over to assess what is working and what isn’t.
But when it comes to careers sites, this information is not always shared with recruitment, even though there are tools available that will help you to understand how well your careers pages are working. They are simple to implement and inexpensive but most importantly they can really help to improve the performance of your careers pages, vacancy listings, application processes, and candidate portal.
Never Miss a Retail Update!At Eploy we’ve been on a significant recruitment drive recently to help fuel our own growth. We need to attract and recruit people with the right skill sets and attitudes that our business and customers demand, so we (like you) need to ensure that we advertise our opportunities in the right places and on the right job boards and social networks. Equally, we need to understand how potential candidates use our careers site.
We also need to ensure we’ve got the ‘candidate journey’ right – how they view the jobs pages, get more information, register and apply. Some of this information can be gleaned from the analytics tools that your marketing team uses, like Google Analytics.
To get a deeper understanding, we also use Crazy Egg (crazyegg.com), which tracks every visit and click. Importantly, it tracks exactly where on each page visitors click – right down to the pixel and presents it as a heatmap’ – a visual overlay that pinpoints the hot spots – helping you establish what works and what doesn’t.
If your careers site is built using responsive design, which means it automatically adapts to the type of device that the visitor uses (and if it isn’t…then it probably should be), it will let you compare side by side your desktop and mobile views, letting you easily spot usage differences.
This really comes into its own when you filter the information to show you, among many other things:
• From which sites the visitor was referred – this enables you to spot which social networks and job boards provide the best return
• Days and times – so you can see when mobile and desktop users are more likely to engage with your career portal
• Whether visitors return to your careers pages – ‘new vs returning’ visitors enables you to see how often people return before they commit to applying or registering
• Search terms – what the visitor searched for on a search engine to find your careers site.
Seeing this information is like giving your site x-ray vision – it helps you to diagnose and potentially cure any problems in your application forms and job descriptions. It can also inform and educate recruiters in their recruitment campaigns.
And I’ll leave you with an interesting example – we learned that software developers are more likely to search and view new career opportunities on a Monday or Tuesday (55%) but they are more likely to apply for the opportunity at the end of the week (Friday being the most popular day for applications). So while the Monday blues may spark a job seeker’s search, you probably won’t hear from them until the weekend.
Learn how to attract the best retail talent and upskill your employees to build better teams by booking your place for the 6th Retail Bulletin HR Summit in London on 8 October. This high quality event, which is attended by a host of major retailers, will enable you to network with your peers and debate the issues with our expert panel of speakers. Click here for further details and registration.
