Conversion on your job board can mean different things to different stakeholders. If you’re a marketer, conversion might mean how many candidates complete full profiles or uploaded resumes. If you’re in sales it might be the percentage of customers purchasing through E-commerce, or your overall close rate.
However, most discussions around conversion or response rate focus on how to get more candidates to apply for vacancies once they have viewed a job. In this case, your view-to-application ratio is your conversion or response rate.
It is important to note that you can’t force a candidate to apply for a job and it’s not always easy to understand why application rates aren’t at the level you’d like them to be. That being said, there are a few things you can do to encourage users to submit more applications.
Job Advert Quality
Let’s start simple. How well do your clients write their job ads? Are they formatted well? Are they easy to read? Are the job titles accurate? Is the essential information included? A poorly written job ad is never going to speak to the person it wants to, and if it can’t do that then you won’t be seeing good conversion rates on your job board.
Categorization
Are your job adverts categorized correctly? Does the ad that a candidate is reading match what they have searched for? If you aggregate jobs from backfill providers, are these jobs being posted correctly and matching your taxonomy? Poorly written ads, and or a poor search experience will result in poor conversion.
Are Your Employers on the Same Page?
Do your job adverts speak to your candidates’ values and personal drivers? Research suggests that Millennials and Generation Z place company culture, personal development opportunities and ‘making a difference’ as significant drivers when assessing career opportunities. If your job ads aren’t addressing this new workforce, you could be missing out on valuable applications.
Quality Control
Many of our clients scrutinize postings before they go live on the job board to ensure quality control. If you don’t have the resource to do this, then I would simply ask yourself how often you work with your clients to ensure they understand the importance of a quality job ad.
Supply and Demand
Do your jobs match the needs, interests, and demands of your candidates?
If all your candidates are looking for sales jobs, but the only jobs posted are teaching jobs, then it’s highly unlikely that your candidates will apply and your conversion will be poor. This is a simplified example, the situation is often far more complex as candidates will show interest in jobs not just by function, but also by sector, seniority, location, pay scale, and many more.
Are you looking at your data to understand if the needs of your candidates are being met? If you’re not, you could be missing out on applications.
Data Capture
During your candidates’ search for a new career opportunity, you need to make sure you are continuously building up your repository of data. If you don’t capture their details during their journey on your job board then you run the risk that they use your site once and never return.
You should make it as easy as possible for your candidates to provide their contact details, job preferences, resume and profile data. If your candidates give you this information you have the ability to remarket to them and provide them with job ads that match their preferences without them needing to perform more job searches. You can make their life easy.
Our research shows that targeted email campaigns have a far higher average conversion than most of the other traffic sources. That’s no real surprise. Personalization is becoming increasingly important for consumers across all industries and recruitment is no different. But, it can’t happen unless you’re collecting the relevant data.
There you have it, a few things you should be doing to help drive conversion on your job board.