Monitoring your recruitment website’s performance via analytics will help you to ensure that it is providing the results that you need it to. We’ve looked at the top recruitment website statistics from 2021 to help you enter a new year with a website that is indispensable to your recruitment marketing plan.
Your recruitment website is – or should be – a vital part of your recruitment marketing strategy. It should serve many purposes – as a job board, a branding tool, an advertising platform, a mouthpiece for your content, and much more.
A good recruitment website never rests on its laurels. It is dynamic, changing and updating all the time, and it should be constantly monitored to ensure that it is achieving the goals you want it to. To do that, you need to track its performance by monitoring key web analytics stats via Google Analytics.
To save you time, our data analyst has found and analysed the top recruitment website statistics from 2021 so that you can make changes as necessary to boost your website’s performance in 2022.
1. Recruitment websites with videos have a lower bounce rate
Video has been a huge trend on websites for a few years now and multinational technology conglomerate Cisco forecasted that online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022. But is video is right for your recruitment website?
Our analysis shows that the bounce rate is lower and session duration longer for recruitment websites with video as compared to those without. This is also true for pages with video compared to pages without it within the same website. This suggests that video engages users far more than other forms of content, something that the Content Marketing Institute also found.
Increased engagement – good from both a conversion rate and an SEO point of view (search engines recognise and reward low bounce rates with higher rankings as it means the page has value) – and increased approachability through the connections made via a personable video are two of the benefits of video.
However, caution must be exercised when it comes to video – not everyone is a fan, there can be accessibility issues and it can slow down page load speed times. Taking all this into consideration and understanding that, for the biggest impact, written and video content should work together, you may want to include some sort of video on your website in 2022.
There’s a huge variety of video that can be included on recruitment websites, from brand videos, to event videos, how-tos, to testimonials, news to background videos. Keep it clear, concise and combined with words for the greatest engagement.
2. The homepage and job search pages are the most popular
Of all the pages you’d usually find on a recruitment website, the homepage and job search pages receive the highest number of visits. This is perhaps unsurprising given the importance of each.
The homepage is like an online shop window and front door. Visitors should be able to click onto your website and immediately understand what you do, what you offer and where to click next. Users should be able to see what lies deeper in your website if they start to navigate through it. It is the gateway to your website – and your business. It will be the first impression of your business that many visitors will so have so it is vital that you get it right. Display key information but don’t overwhelm visitors or overcrowd the page. It is the first step of the journey and the copy, design, images and calls-to-action will both set the tone and guide visitors in the right direction.
Most candidates visiting your website will end up on your jobs page, some will click straight onto it, and that is of course exactly what you want. One of the most important roles for a recruitment website is to generate quality applications. If your job search page is one of your most visited, your website is achieving one of its primary goals. If you’re not getting the traffic you want on your job search pages, ensure your SEO strategies are tight (including keywords, meta descriptions, standardised job titles, etc), and that your job page is optimised for Google for Jobs (see numbers 6 and 7 below).
3. Users spend longer on the job search page than the homepage
If you have designed and optimised your jobs page well, candidates searching for jobs will be in browsing mode, taking their time to find the right job and reading the job ad carefully.
A high volume of page visits is one thing but if they are quick visits with a high bounce rate, it means those visitors aren’t engaging and they’re certainly not applying. Again, this should be one of the goals for your recruitment website – a relatively high visit duration period.
It is vital to offer a range of job search functions to make searching for the right job easier. The ability to refine a job search is key. Include extra fields such as job categories, salary ranges and locations to help candidates fine-tune their results. Giving users as many options as possible when searching means they can filter the results depending on their requirements. Make it too difficult and you run the risk of candidates giving up and clicking away onto a competitor’s jobs page.
4. Organic traffic constitutes an average of 22% of all website visits
Organic traffic is any traffic that originates from a search engine but that isn’t paid for, meaning that it is a result of inbound marketing and SEO. As this is essentially free traffic, it offers a great ROI but it is widely considered the most valuable source of traffic for more than just financial reasons.
Many people trust organic search results far more than paid ads as a high Google ranking means that your content is trustworthy and high quality. Your position on the search engine results page (SERP) makes an incredible difference to the click-through rate. According to a study published by Sistrix, the first organic result has an average click-through rate of 28.5% but the second has just a 15% click-through rate and the third an 11% click-through rate. Move down to the 10th position and you’ll see just a 2.5% click-through rate. It takes time and effort but generating traffic via organic search is well worth it.
Although the average is 22%, we have seen websites with around 50-60% organic traffic. How can you increase organic traffic to your website? By improving your search ranking, and to do that you need to improve your SEO. There are many ways to do this (keywords, mobile optimisation, measuring and acting on site analytics, adding meta data), including several underrated SEO strategies that can seriously boost traffic to your recruitment website, including transcribing and optimising image titles, updating navigation, internal linking, refreshing content, and increasing page speed.
5. Over 50% of all internet traffic is mobile
Internet user behaviour has changed greatly since the iPhone first came to market in 2007, a product launch that birthed the era of the smartphone. Since then, as it has become cheaper and easier to own a smartphone, mobile internet usage has rocketed and has been growing year on year.
Statista reported that in 2020 there were 4.28 billion unique mobile users, representing over 90% of the global internet population, and mobile internet traffic now accounts for more than 55% of total web traffic.
Mobile traffic to recruitment websites is also growing. RecWebs’ 2020 Recruitment Website Trends Benchmark Report found that 43% of users accessed recruitment websites from mobile devices – more than double the number recorded during the previous year.
As a result of the steadily increasing number of its users accessing its search engine via a mobile device, Google made the decision a few years ago to rollout out mobile-first indexing. In March 2021 – pushed back from its original date of September 2020 due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic – Google switched to mobile-first indexing all websites.
No longer can you focus on a desktop version of your website to the detriment of the mobile version. If your website is not mobile-optimised or if you don’t have a mobile version of your website at all, organic traffic is likely to be seriously impacted.
Design and content should be mobile-optimised, as should speed. You obviously want desktop users of your website to have a good experience, and that hasn’t changed, but Google has ensured that mobile is now the priority. If traffic decreases, so can conversions and, in the long term, revenue.
Check that your website conforms to Google’s mobile-first best practices (all RecWebs websites do) and get ready for the mobile-first revolution.
6. Google for Jobs brings 5-6% of the overall traffic for many websites
Google for Jobs is an incredibly useful tool for recruiters, offering a free way to increase organic traffic to your website and of course your jobs.
Launched in the UK in 2018, Google for Jobs acts as an aggregator, compiling job listings from both job boards, recruitment websites and careers pages and displaying them in a Jobs section within the search results.
Just as on your own jobs page, Google’s jobs tool allows users to filter their search by category, date posted, location, company type and more. Candidates can view the ad from within Google for Jobs and then click to apply through your website. As the function allows for more targeted searches, it will help you attract more motivated candidates who are actively looking for your type of job.
If your jobs aren’t set up and optimised for Google for Jobs, you could be missing out on a valuable source of traffic.
7. The average conversion rate from Google for Jobs traffic is 25%
This statistic speaks volumes. Bringing in traffic is just the first step – what you need is for that traffic to convert, i.e. to apply for those jobs. And some RecWebs websites are converting over 62% of traffic from Google for Jobs, whether in the form of applying for jobs or registering a CV.
Again, without optimising your jobs for Google for Jobs, you will miss out on applications, registrations and candidate engagement.
Optimising Google for Jobs on your website can drive talent to your jobs and be a valuable source of organic candidate applications, yet the RecWebs Recruitment Website trends Benchmark Report found that only 41% of analysed websites had applied the data structure. Of that 41%, 19% showed one or more errors that compromise the system and could lead to jobs not being displayed.
As a zero cost source of talent attraction, optimising for Google for Jobs should be on every recruiter’s to-do list. As well as following SEO best practices, you’ll need to set up your jobs for Google for Jobs.
There are several details that must be included in your job listings – salary, location, job title, skills, responsibilities, and qualifications. In-built SEO tools such as those on all RecWebs websites will help you to optimise your jobs so that they rank well in Google for Jobs.
There are a few steps to take, the main one being including job posting structured data in all job listings as this is what makes your jobs eligible to appear in Google’s search results for jobs. It’s also important to use and update sitemaps and make your web pages indexable.
And a few more statistics that may interest you…
- Websites with the highest volume of visits from Google for Jobs are in the automotive and HR sectors. Keywords such as ‘HR jobs’, ‘Human Resources jobs’, or ‘Automotive jobs’ feature in a high number of searches.
- Recruiters post an average of 87 jobs on their websites at any one time.
- The average number of applications per job is 4 but some websites receive 28 or 26 applications per job.
We recommend that you regularly monitor and measure your website’s performance using analytics in order to assess how successful it is in achieving the goals you have set out for it, such as driving traffic, keeping visitors there and converting visits to applications.
The results will indicate whether there are any areas for improvement and therefore whether anything needs to be changed. Without analysing web metrics, the marketing strategy for your website is pure guesswork. With solid data into user behaviour and website performance, you can determine what is working and what needs attention, ensuring that the ROI for your recruitment website is as high as possible.
Using these top metrics from 2021, you can storm into 2022 with a website that brings you the results you need.
