Nearly 4 in 5 candidates (78 percent) say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its people, according to CareerBuilder’s 2017 Candidate Experience Study. What does your candidate experience say about you?
A considerable amount of frustration and negative experience is the result of a poor employer career site. The good news is that it’s preventable. A quality career site can help deliver an optimal experience to curious candidates and improve the way candidates perceive your company and is one of the key ingredients to providing potential applicants with a seamless candidate experience. Here’s how to create a career site that improves the candidate experience:
- You can build a talent pipeline. Career sites allow job seekers to stay connected with your company’s job opportunities until they are ready to apply. In addition to inviting job seekers to apply to jobs, give them the option to join your talent network, or pipeline, so they can stay engaged with the company and learn about future opportunities. If you focus on building relationships with potential candidates at all times — and not just when you have relevant openings — it will pay off when you do.
- You can offer them pertinent information about working for your company. Nearly half of candidates agree (45 percent), with 11 percent agreeing strongly, that they can typically tell what it would be like to work for a company based on its career site, according to CareerBuilder’s 2017 Candidate Experience Study. Also, a whopping 89 percent of job seekers say an employer’s career site is important for getting key information. Does your career site give candidates a sense of what it’d be like to work for you?
- You can do something about high applicant drop-off rates. Did you know as many as 95 percent of job seekers will fail to complete an application if the application process is not mobile optimized or takes more than two steps? Think of all that wasted effort of attracting potentially viable candidates — and then losing them mid-way through the apply process. Candidates expect an easy-to-use career site with a simple application process.
- You can automatically re-engage them. Job seekers are willing to join a talent network even if there isn’t a suitable job opening on their first visit. Nearly 70 percent of job seekers provide a resume when joining a company’s talent network, which means that candidate will be automatically enrolled to receive new, relevant positions.
Find out which career site features are critical to providing the right candidate experience.