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Is Your Career Site Turning Off Top Candidates?

By Lou Adler, December 11, 2008

Most career sites are designed to repel the best and attract the worst. Where do you stand on this critical measure?

Following is a 10-factor evaluation you can use to benchmark your company's career site. If you don't score at least 50 points on the 10 core factors, you're needlessly losing some great candidates and paying too much for those you do hire. (We offer a free online evaluation of your site, so you might want to take advantage of this.)

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As you read each factor, score yourself on a 10-point scale with 10 being "super attracting" and 1 being "useless or repellant." Remember that the top performers you want to attract need to be treated like your best customers, since they all have multiple opportunities. Unfortunately, most companies build their career web site with a fortress-like mentality, trying to do everything they can to prevent the weak from applying. Unfortunately, they lose the best in the process.

1. Can candidates just look, or are they forced to "buy"? If candidates can easily get more information about a job without applying, you're in the top half on this measure. You're at the top score if candidates can chat via IM with a live recruiter or talk with a real hiring manager. The idea here is that you should look at your career web site as a place where candidates can find out more information without actually applying. Making people apply first is comparable to going to a store and being prevented from entering until you complete a credit app.

2. Are jobs easy to find? If you're still using pull-down menus to find job titles and locations give yourself 1 point. You get 10 points if a person can put in a generic title and a city and find all related jobs instantly. Give yourself 5 points if you use some type of search engine to find jobs even if there are some restrictions. Try this out with one of your open jobs and make sure it works correctly before you give yourself a grade here.

3. Can your career site be found easily? Ask people in some department other than recruiting to find your career site. Then ask them how they found it and how long it took. If they complain, give yourself 1 or 2 points. You get less than 5 points if it's stuck in the bottom of your company's home page in small type. If they found it within seconds from your company home page, give yourself at least 5 points. I only give a company 10 points on this factor if the career site link on the company home page stands out and clearly says (directly or indirectly) that our employees are our most valuable assets.

4. Are your job descriptions boring or compelling? Read your job descriptions from the perspective of a top person who has multiple opportunities. If it doesn't "WOW!" them, it's a waste of time. To score a full 10 points here you'll need to describe the job in compelling terms, highlight the major projects, describe the impact the person can make, and include the learning and growth opportunities. You'll get about 5 points if you do all of this, but if the description is not customized for the specific job. You get no points if you emphasize skills, duties, and responsibilities that turn the best people off. Here are some articles on how to write compelling ads.

5. Is the application process simple or an endurance contest? If it takes more than 5 minutes to apply you can't score more than 5 points. If a person can upload their resume along with their email address and be automatically matched with open jobs you deserve all 10 points. As long as you're tracking your web analytics you already know that most people won't apply if the application process is time consuming or unprofessional. Also, remember that the opt-out rate is far greater for top performers. So if your current opt-out rate is 80% for all candidates, it's probably 95% for top performers. (Give yourself an additional 3 points if you track your opt-out rates at each step in the process.)

6. Is there a way to stay connected without applying? This point revolves around the idea of building a proprietary resume database of top prospects. You can do this through the use of proactive employee referral programs, talent hubs, and making sure that everyone who gets to your career site submits their resume or signs up for something. A prospect database has fewer reporting requirements, and by using Boolean search strings it's simple to separate the best from the rest, so this is a critical aspect of a just-in-time sourcing strategy. (Attend one of our free sourcing webinars if you'd like to learn how to do this.) Give yourself the full 10 points if you have this type of system and it's up and running and delivering 30-40% of your candidates. Give yourself zero points if you're still only talking about this and 5 points if you at least have a system that you're using and improving.

7. Is there a CRM nurturing process? The idea here is that you need to touch your prospect database with a series of regular emails and newsletters. This is what candidate relationship management (CRM) is all about. Sending out compelling emails to your prospect database is pretty basic and deserves no more than 5 points on this factor. If you're getting kudos for this nurturing effort and it's working, give yourself a few more points. Take all 10 if you have some type of auto-responder where prospects can respond to the first email and receive a series of auto-generated responses. Don't take any points if you don't have a prospect database or it's just sitting idle.

8. Can your ads be found by those who are Googling for jobs or those not looking? More and more candidates are bypassing job boards and going directly to Google to search for jobs. This is especially true for top performers. If you want to score high on this factor, Google your own jobs and see where they show up. For example, if you're looking for nurses in Nashville, Google "nurse jobs Nashville" and see if your job is listed on the first page. Subtract 1 point for each subsequent page you're not on. Also, to score high here you need to push your compelling ads to blogs and social sites to attract the attention of prospects who are intrigued by your offering. This is what Web 2.0 is all about. If you do this and it's working, add 5 points back to your score to tabulate your total results for this factor.

9. Do you use SEO'd talent hubs for groups of similar jobs? If you want 20 points on this factor (that's a 10 point bonus!) stop posting job requisitions on job boards and only use talent hubs that have been search engine optimized. A talent hub is a micro-site that's designed to be found, is very compelling, is loaded interactivity and it allows people to easily become part of your company's prospect database. Give yourself 10 points if your company is aggressively moving towards the 100% use of talent hubs instead of requisitions, and give yourself somewhere between 5 and 9 points if you use talent hubs for all of your high-volume positions. Send us an email if you'd like to find out our recommended vendors for helping you build these talent hubs.

10. Can your candidates find employees they know within your company? As far as I'm concerned a proactive employee referral program (ERP), a CRM prospect database, and the use of well-designed talent hubs should be all you need to fill most of your positions. If your employees are proactively filling your prospect database with the best people they have ever worked with in the past, give yourself 5-7 points on this factor. Take 2-3 more points if these top prospects have some easy way to naturally connect with your employees as soon as they begin thinking about leaving their current jobs. Your ERP program deserves 5 points if it's a reliable source of good people, and less if you don't achieve this minimum requirement. Here are some articles on how to put this type of ERP system in place.

Your company's career site is a critical part of your overall sourcing efforts. If it's not designed from a marketing perspective, by default you've succumbed to a bureaucratic view of candidates as something to repel, not attract. In the process you're not even seeing some great people you'd want to hire, and spending too much time eliminating those you don't.