Practical Ideas For Improving Your Recruitment
Website
By Paul Quinn, © 2002
Listed below are seven ideas to help attract more people
to your agency's website, build candidate loyalty to your
brand, increase job application rates, and generally help
to improve the user's online experience.
1. Increase user interaction with visitor polls
Visitor polls represent a win-win proposition for both your
site visitors and your agency. Not only can you gather useful
information about site visitor's opinions and preferences,
you can also use polls to provide your visitor's with fresh
and interesting content. In addition, the information gathered
from your visitor poll can be further leveraged to improve
your profile by writing a press release about the results
and distributing the release to career editors from local
newspapers and trade publications. Maximise the success
of your visitor poll by selecting topical recruitment-related
issues and keep the question regularly updated.
2. Offer something for free
Consider adding free salary information, white papers, market
trend data
anything unique to your agency with perceived
value to your target market. In offering useful content
for free you increase the chances of your customers referring
other prospects to your site and you position your site
as a valuable information resource worth returning to.
3. Encourage your customers to dictate the development
of your site
Often the best ideas for improvement come from the very
people that your site targets, so offer them a number of
options to have their say. This sends a clear message that
you care about what they think - you may not always agree
with the feedback, but it costs nothing to listen. Check
where your feedback option is located. Don't bury it at
the bottom of your "Contact Us" page in a small
font size as this not only discourages people from using
it but also sends a message that their feedback is not important
to you. Consider adding a clearly identified feedback option
to each page of your site, or perhaps adding a "Your
Say" page devoted to listing ideas and comments from
site visitors.
4. Identify and promote your most popular pages
A list of the most visited pages on your web site is easily
obtained from your site's log files, which are available
from your site hosts. Use this information to include a
"Popular Pages" heading on your homepage to help
direct site visitors to the pages other visitor's value
the most. The word "popular" is a proven motivator,
helping visitors feel at ease in the knowledge that they
are visiting a page that others find useful.
5. Ensure that your site is search engine friendly
Web sites that are optimised for search engine indexing
often report a significant percentage of their site traffic
originating from that source. Imagine the benefit to a specialist
Sydney-based accounting recruitment agency in ranking first
in Google.com's search results for "Accounting Jobs"
and "Sydney". Search engine optimisation can be
a complex process yet the rewards are plentiful for those
who get it right. However, most recruiters either (a). don't
have meta tags in their HTML code to help search engines
find their site, or (b). overlook the option of paid search
engine or web directory listings on key sites such as Yahoo!
and Looksmart. A $400 investment for an express listing
on Looksmart's network of web directories can often pay
for itself in increased traffic within a few weeks.
6. Optimise your job ad template
Offer candidates multiple ways to apply for vacancies and
you will instantly improve your response rate. On your web
site's job ad template, be sure to include your contact
phone number, fax, physical address and e-mail address as
opposed to just having an "Apply" button. People
often print out the job online to read and muse over offline
and later want to phone the consultant to discuss. It is
also a good idea to include an "E-mail this job to
a friend" option to make it easy for people to refer
other suitable candidates in their network. You may even
contemplate adding a referral bonus to your ad template.
Not providing options such as these can often mean missed
opportunities for the recruiter.
7. Focus on building a community of users
The Internet provides recruiters with excellent opportunities
to nurture a loyal group of potential candidates. If executed
well, recruiters can easily increase user interaction by
adding features such as a candidate bulletin board or online
chat facility. By encouraging regular online interaction
amongst candidates to discuss issues such as interview techniques,
resume tips, industry gossip or even by including an 'Ask
the Expert' section, recruiters can form a stronger bond
with candidates and help to improve the perception of their
brand.
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