I often get asked from the employers if they should build their Career Web Site. The fact is I never know what to answer. It is due to this expectations of what will they achieve with it. Since the investment in it is never small really when you put all the time of different internal people involved on the bill, the expectation is always that this will solve all their problems in attracting the best candidates. The result is always the opposite. The company Career Site always fails to deliver what was expected of it. It fails to deliver job hunters applications and speculative CV’s. It simply does not happen. Well it does if you are Google. But then again it is more a nuisance then since the volume that you are receiving is then simply too much, so it cannot really be properly processed.
So how does it really look within the company when you decide to set up a Career Site?
You get your Marketing and HR to talk. Now if that function is not in the same person (lucky SME’s!), those two functions are not really that compatible, so the ‘Requirements’ will be very contradictory. And as such given to some ‘IT’ who will create a small standalone unit within your site and call it ‘Jobs’, Careers’ or ‘Work with us’. After few releases, and many very happy faces you will all do the launch and a big ‘Push’ in the media. Now that ‘push’ thing is your local radio, newspaper, or marginal TV station where you will secure an interview based on some sponsorship. That ‘Push’ will cost the company about the same as what the Career Site coasted to produce. The expectation are high, and all involved are tapping their backs. The goal to get rid of enormous cost that your job board advertising has and even more expensive recruitment agency services is in your sight already!
Your push lasts depending the depth of your pocket from a week to a month. After that month there is 0 (yes – zero) budget available to market your website. When you analyse the performance – how many visitors, how many applications and speculative CVs have you collected in that first month during the marketing push, the first cold shower hits you. A lot’s of blaming around, and it ends ups with the faces that read: Who’s idea was this career site anyway?’.
Why do Company Career Sites fail?
Lack of knowledge and understanding the online recruitment business is the most often reason I have seen so far. Let us look at a bit of statistical data provided by Jobs2web published a month ago. What is shows is the dropping off as the candidates who land on your site and follow steps on it towards sending an application, and then further on to the actual hiring.
What you will see there is that (on a sample of a job hunters a few times the population of Ireland!) for one person hired on a Career Site you will need 826 visitors to the site. So why is that? Why is the average conversion rate below 1%? Why do less than 1% of job hunters who come actually apply? Well that is how it is. You are unlikely to change it (much) on your site. You might get to perhaps 2% or in best case with very targeted traffic to some 3% conversion rate. But as you know you will still need hundreds of job hunters to visit before you make a single hire.
All that initial push, again depending on the size of your offline investment will make about 1 hire. You will realise now that you have spent a multiple budget that the cost would be if you have advertised on the job board or have used the services of a recruitment agency. What we have learned is that the company career sites are not profitable. Period (except for Google).
Attract more job hunters to your Career Site
Realising that now you have ‘State of the art’ career mini site, and one and a half visitor a day on it, the next step is to go and get some traffic on it. Google is your best friend with the lovely Google AdWords service, providing you with instant traffic ‘on tap’. On average you will spend about €1 per visitor that really depends on the industry you are in. The statistics above show us it will cost you between €500 and €1000 for a single applicant to send you the CV. We all know that there is not much to choose from if there is only one, so you will get 3 or 5, or perhaps 10 candidates bringing them via the Google AdWords to your career site. That bill from Google is again going to be larger than what the job board advertising would cost and perhaps the same as a recruitment agency would charge you for the whole process.
What is a Career Site good for?
Well branding really is their main purpose. If you are in some industry that can be perceived immoral by some people like gambling, dating or even worse ‘evil’ like Microsoft or Google, than you can publish data on your career site that will convert the minds of those potential applicants. It is also a very good PR channel, and there is no better news than that you are hiring. The large the scale of your recruitment drive the better. Happy faces of your staff, and HR people will drastically improve the conversion rate here. Light colours, clear font, no small print ToC, honesty and trustfulness need to be projected from the careers section of your site. Benefits, canteen, gym, parking, crèche, sports and social club, charity activity, barbeques,…
Career Site can do wonders for you. Long term especially. Integrate it with blogs (RSS) and company twitter accounts, and it will come to live by itself. Just to not expect it to deliver by itself – you will still need to work it out. It is just a controlled channel where you can brand your company in the way you want to be seen (as opposed to Facebook). So do drive people to it, and make sure that if there is not job for them right now, that you still capture them in some mailing list, social media group or anything where you can reach them when you do have a job they are suitable for.
