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In a candidate shortage, your recruitment website needs to work extra hard

It wasn’t long ago that recruiters were experiencing an influx of candidate applications as redundancies mounted and jobs fell away. We’re now experiencing the opposite problem – high jobs, low applications.

WaveTrackR data for September revealed that jobs had risen to a huge 400% over the 2020 average whilst applications had dropped for the third month in a row. The result? A war for talent the likes of which we haven’t seen since those distant days before the start of the pandemic. The likelihood is you’re flat out trying to attract talent and could do with all the extra help you can get.

And that’s exactly where your recruitment website comes in. At times like this, it is even more important that your website works hard for you and really proves its worth. Your recruitment website should provide a first-class candidate experience from the second candidates land on it to the moment they submit an application for one of your jobs. 

Make your website work hard for you by:

Strengthening your brand and values

The design of your website is paramount to building brand trust, ensuring positive perceptions of your business and promoting your values – all of which help to make candidates feel confident that you are the recruiters that will find them the perfect job. Tie your branding into your website design and integrate that throughout the entire site. Expert design that reinforces branding goes a long way to create positive associations.

Making your jobs easy to find

Most candidates will come to your website to search for jobs – and that is exactly what you want them to do. Make it easy for them by placing a link to your jobs page in highly visible places – in the main header and as calls to action on other relevant pages. Further, your jobs should be easy to find even before a candidate lands on your site. In order for Google to find your jobs and rank them in relevant searches, there are several details that must be included in your job listings, including salary, location, skills, responsibilities and qualifications. By optimising your job listings for Google for Jobs, candidates searching for jobs like yours are more likely to see them.

Ensuring a positive candidate journey

A positive user experience is vital to keep candidates on your website and the journey starts here. Applications should be easy to submit and a candidate dashboard will make it simple to view, make notes and rate each one. Being able to track where they are in the process, for example, a new application, post-interview or archived, will mean that candidates never get lost in the system or left waiting. It will help you to keep on top of your communications with candidates, making them feel valued and instilling trust.

Utilising your candidate database

If your recruitment website offers a candidate portal you may already have the talent you need sitting right there within your website. By allowing candidates to register their CVs you can curate your own searchable CV database which can be invaluable at times of low candidate availability. With an internal talent pool, you will have top talent at your fingertips whenever the right opportunity arises.

Optimising your website for search engines

Your website should be built with best SEO practices in mind and have in-built SEO functionality so that you can continue to optimise your jobs, blogs, page titles and meta descriptions as you add them. That way your website stands the best chance of appearing in candidate searches. Your recruitment website should be an integral part of your talent attraction strategy. If it’s not, it’s not doing its job properly. At times like this, you need every weapon at your disposal. Utilise your recruitment website to its full potential and it will not only help you to find talent, it will encourage that talent to apply for your jobs. And that is worth its weight in gold.

This article was originally posted on the September 2021 edition of The Global Recruiter magazine, and edited to include more relevant and up to date information.

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