Hacking Your Candidate Funnel – Part 2

What does a trampoline park and your career site have in common? A high bounce rate. You want to keep your bounce rate low.
In part 2 of Hacking your Candidate Funnel we’ll be talking about how you can increase your candidate funnel via your career site. You can read the first part of the series here.
Before we get started, do you know the answers to the following questions?

• What is our current career site / job vacancy bounce rate or drop off rates? (a bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A drop off rate is a visitor who leaves the site after more than one page)
• What are your major sources of traffic to your page and when they leave where do they go?
• What content on your career site is getting the most engagement and what isn’t?
• Are you running SEO, SEM, CRO, Re-targeting campaigns and if so, how effective are they?
• Have you developed candidate personas to tailor your messaging? (persona development narrows your content to engage with a specific group of people)

If the answer to any of these is no, or ‘I don’t know’, and you’re concerned about the performance of your career site (you should be) then read on.

Bounce Rate

First and last impressions count. Most employers invest a lot of money in marketing (branding), advertising, social media, and job boards to attract candidates to your career site or job vacancy, only to have them leave soon after arriving without consuming your content. If you are measuring bounce rates, then you’re probably doing so for your career site home page with Google analytics, but are you doing it specifically for your job vacancy? Probably not, and you should.
Let’s take a look at the following example – HBF, a Not-For-Profit Health Insurer here in Perth. I came across this experience recently whilst job hunting.

It’s your typical modern day corporate page. It’s easy to look at and navigate around. But I’m looking for the careers section. You need to scroll all the way down to the bottom to find the link. It’s down there somewhere. That link takes you to this page:

The site is consistent to the home page which is great. We all appreciate consistency. But I’m here to look for a job. Look at all those options I can select. What are all those options and how are they relevant to me, a job seeker who came via google search. Awesome to see some tips, and gain some clarity on the recruitment process but where are the jobs? Oh, that little hyperlink down the bottom of the page. Let’s click that link and you’ll get here:

At this point I would love to see the data on people now leaving the site (drop off rate). Notice all the consistency of brand messaging has all but gone. You can’t even click apply in this screen.  Hover your mouse over a vacancy and no highlight over the job. You just don’t know what’s going on. So, what happens if you click on a job?
Well here’s what a job vacancy looks like. Here’s another data point which would provide interesting information on bounce rate or drop off rates.

See the word Apply? Well that is the actual apply button. Feel free to go through the candidate experience yourself, sadly it only gets worse.
Now put your applicant hat on. Would you have applied to this role or gone elsewhere?
Let’s look at another company and I’ll use the most recent company I worked with. Unfortunately, I tried looking at other similar health insurers and suffered the same fate.

In Comparison

Google search HealthEngine Careers and you get taken here.

The site is dynamic and scrolls up to provide additional information. Immediately on the landing page you can move to current opportunities. Let’s click that and we can taken here:

A list of jobs appears. No need for red boxes highlighting what we’re talking about here. Click on the top most job and let’s see how they shape up:

Pretty nicely, as it turns out. Look how prevalent the Apply button is here. The job advertisement I selected contains links to a job video preview and a blog to provide more information about the role, team, culture etc.
Which of these two examples do you think provide the better candidate experience, a more consistent brand? Which do you think has the better conversion rate (candidates clicking the apply button)?
Why do I like the HealthEngine career site over HBF?

• Employer branding is consistent from page to page
• The site and pages focus on careers, there is no external noise in terms of non-career related content
• You can quickly move to vacancies and easily find the apply button
• You can search for the job on google and get taken directly to the vacancy unlike HBF

Part of the problem here is the technology being used by HBF. It appears to limit the ability to maintain consistent branding across pages. Would HBF allow this if it were a consumer wanting to sign up to its products? I doubt it. It is a quick and easy fix with either the existing digital marketing team which they have OR with some great recruitment marketing software.
I’m not saying the HealthEngine site is perfect, or the HBF site is bad. Both can be improved, but the experience with HealthEngine is far better than with HBF. If both were recruiting for a Software Engineer for example, which would you be more likely to apply to?
So how do you improve bounce rates?

• Provide relevant, consistent content and brand experience
• Speed up page loads
• Have external links open in a new window
• Create landing pages tailored to each job vacancy
• Ensure your HR technology (ATS) provides a consistent brand experience

Bounce rate is just one aspect that needs to be looked at. Up next we’ll be working through SEO, SEM, and CRO tactics to boost your candidate funnel.
This is part 2 of a series of articles on improving your candidate funnel. For more tips, strategies and ideas, check out parts one, three, and four.
Cover image: Shutterstock