Is your career site strategic?

Amazon has great logistics, workflow, tech, service etc. but imagine if they had a clunky web site.

What would you think?

How successful would they be?

The answers are obvious as Amazon got their web site right way before they became known for the other aspects of what they do in order to fill your order.

So why is it if you look at the end-to-end recruitment process, it is rarely up to Amazon standards on the front end i.e. the career site.

Tactical and cheap are fine

Not every employer needs a career site up to Amazon standards or to spend the amount of money that some of the major employers do. A simple low cost career site can be built on free platforms such as Google Sites or slightly better blogging platforms such as Typepad or Wordpress. There will often be restrictions on what you can do or a few hiccups when they upgrade their platform but on the whole they are perfectly adequate for a low cost, tactical career site. This blog is on Typepad and uses custom stylesheets which gives lots of flexibility and control.

If you are using job boards as your primary attraction channels, with applicants going directly into your ATS, that is a strategy that can work well for smaller employers who don't have the brand, expertise or skillset to do more themselves.

Strategic career site

But if your organisation is growing significantly and needs to attract the right kind of people to help you achieve your growth, recruitment is a strategic imperative which means like Amazon, your web site is vital to your success. Again like Amazon though, whilst your career site may be at the centre of your recruitment strategy you also need to be thinking about recruitment marketing automation, candidate pipeline, workflow, onboarding, closed loop analytics etc. A great example of a single marketing automation platform is HubSpot. (Quote " Easy. Integrated. Powerful.")

Marketing vs. recruitment

I have used HubSpot as an example as I firmly see recruitment primarily as a marketing activity; attracting and funnelling prospects from the top of the sales funnel through to the reject or accepted lead (by sales) stage. Over time we will start to see more dedicated recruitment marketing people within the function so that consultants/recruiters only work on "qualified" candidates. This is not that different to how it already works from a process viewpoint but in reality is not that common. 

The CRM e.g. Salesforce sits in the same place as the ATS which is why the likes of HubSpot focus on what they do (marketing automation, CRM integration, analytics) and the CRM focuses on workflow of qualified prospects. The ATS vendors (and CRM vendors) do not offer the HubSpot functionality hence recruiters can learn a lot from HubSpot about what is missing in their recruitment marketing approach.

• Landing pages.
• Smart CTA's. (call to action)
• Social integration.
• E-mail marketing.
• Salesforce Connector. (ATS integration)
• Analytics.
• Mobile.
• SEO.
• Website and content management.
• Blog.

Have a look at the latest HubSpot 3 to get a few more ideas and look at their Marketing Resources for some great marketing reports, webinars and case studies. 

What next?

If you believe that your career site is strategic and want to know how you can implement the kind of ideas that HubSpot talk about then you need to be looking for an Enterprise level CMS. Obviously choosing a new CMS needs some thought behind it but in simple terms, define which of the ideas you like from HubSpot and then see how a CMS compares.

Obviously a generic CMS won't have recruitment specific integrations or generally have a pricing model that works for recruitment but there are a number of career site vendors in the market who are a good start point. As your ATS is a key part of your recruitment success you should also ask your ATS vendor who they already integrate with assuming you are not planning on changing your ATS in the near future! 

Another approach, is to look for a CMS vendor that integrates with a number of ATS vendors so you can take your marketing platform with you should you need to change ATS vendor at some point.

I realise all of the above is a lot to take in so at a later stage I will show you exactly how you can implement the various tactics using a recruitment CMS such as HirePad. If you have any questions or would like a demonstration sooner rather than later please contact me.