Supercharge your sourcing efforts with a better career site

You probably see the career site as an inbound recruitment component that’s in contrast to the outbound nature of your sourcing efforts. However, the reality is that the two are linked — whether you like it or not.

The following scenario will be familiar to many of you:

You’ve just spent the last day crafting and launching 50 highly personalized emails at target candidates. You’ve just had the best response rate ever and you’re feeling pretty happy that the campaign has been a success.

But did you ever stop and wonder what happened to those candidates who didn’t respond?

Certainly some of them will have ignored your email entirely and it will remain unopened (bear in mind that pixel opening data is usually only 50% accurate so if you are tracking open rates you can quite often double the numbers).

But what about the rest? All those people who bothered to open and read your handcrafted email but decided not to respond?

For sure, many of them will have Googled and visited your company’s careers site first. The picture it painted of your organization subsequently overriding the contents of your email and giving them a reason not to respond. Most likely, something about your careers site made them ‘feel’ something negative.

Bryan and Dave in Ph Attraction talk about this a lot and even have a great video that makes the point in a humorous way. Check it out here.

Maybe they didn’t like the design and felt it was not representative of the innovative story you were selling, or maybe they couldn’t easily find some particular piece of information on the company they wanted to know before replying and became sidetracked.

It’s actually pretty easy to figure out whether or not your careers site is damaging your efforts to engage and get a response from target candidates. If this is the case, here are a couple of ways to get the ammunition you need to make some suggestions for changes to the site.

1. Use a free product like Hubspot Sales or the free Mixmax plan to send your emails
2. Embed a link to your careers pages directly into your email. People will usuallly take the path of least resistance and if you offer them an easy way to check out the career site before they respond, in many cases, they will.
3. Track the people who click on the career site but don’t respond.
4. Tabulate the responses

Here’s an example table.

Clicked but did not respond Clicked and responded Didn’t click but did respond 31% 6% 4%

In this example, a disproportionate ratio of candidates are not responding after visiting the career site. It isn’t hard to calculate the value of increasing your response rate by even a percentage or two and data like this gives you the ammunition you need to approach the career site owner and suggest some changes. Download this eBook on career site best practices for ideas on how to make yours better.

Remember also that candidates who do their homework on a company are also the ones who convert better further down the funnel ( e.g. at interview). By putting the wheels in motion on a new and improved careers site you are setting yourself up for success with hiring managers too.

There are also some fixes you can try in the interim.

1. Identify web pages or blog posts that are relevant to the role you are pitching and embed these links in your email instead of the link to the career site home page. Maybe the information that candidate was looking for was there all along but not that easy to find.
2. Consider building individual landing pages for your sourcing campaigns that contain all the information you cannot convey in the email, and link to these instead.

Good luck.

P.S. For bonus points you could try the same approach with a link to your Glassdoor page to see the effect it is having on your efforts.

Originally published at blog.clinchtalent.com.