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There is an increasing number of eCommerce sites who are starting to wise up to how they can make their sites more profitable by using smart CRO thinking. If it works for them, then it can work impressively well for recruitment companies.
For some of us “conversion rate optimisation” is a scary unknown term and in simplicity it means sending more potential visitors and getting them to do what you want them to do. In on-line retail terms, we are trying to get more people to visit a specific product area and following through to the shopping basket and paying for their items. Amazon does this to perfection!
Turn this retail scenario upside down and apply it to recruitment, shoppers browsing are the potential job seekers people wanting to “buy” are your applicants and product areas are your employment adverts. So many jobs to choose from are on display, and you really want those potential job seekers to choose yours. The transaction as such is made by the Curriculum Vitae.
Clearly we know it’s not all about the volume of applicants, relevancy is also very crucial. We need to make sure that there is an amount of accuracy match between the “buyers” and “products”.
Now we want to get more relevant people applying for those jobs. So how do we do this?
The Ad Content
In my experience the single most important factor for nurturing the conversion is the actual content of your job advertisement and this will make the sale.
We need to focus on what information is most important to people searching for jobs. I would say the three key criteria are:
- Title of the job
- Where the job is
- Salary
We need to seriously consider all three these factors as without them our conversions will struggle.
We shouldn’t use “in-house” job titles, consider using stock standard and easily recognisable job titles. This helps search engines deliver better search results and also gives the potential job seeker a concise idea of the responsibility level and position in the potential company.
We don’t want to confuse the potential candidates with multiple irrelevant locations on the advert as this adds to the confusion. Although this may seem to increase your chances of coaxing applicants to your website, it is not a great idea to have your ads show up on multiple candidate searches and cause doubt in the jobseekers mind. Questions they may start asking are: “Where is this job exactly?” and “Am I going to have to travel to all these locations?” Every time we create doubt, this will reduce our conversion rate!
Be careful when mentioning expected salary totals, saying something like “not negotiable “or “competitive” will put candidates off – they want to know what they are going to earn. Are you really going to go through all the effort of applying and then going to the interview without knowing what potential salary you’re going to earn? I would say probably not.
It’s all about benefit not feature led text and it is all about them and not you. We should tell them exactly what the job will do for them. What great opportunities, empowerment, culture and remuneration will they get from working at your company or potential company? Address their needs in your ad text and use your opening copy to make a positive impression.
The Ad Design
We know the content makes the sale; the complete design of the ad is critical for first impressions and also promotes movement through to the next stage.
What is good to consider is to look at what exactly your ads say about your company. Are they professional, innovative, exciting or cheap? What impression does it convey?
Create a strong headline – which is not included on job advertisements and usually found on strong converting commerce platforms. A great headline will almost always tell a visitor exactly what you can do for them. If you think about it, you only have a second to fully grab the visitor’s attention and by using a headline that stands out on a page will get them to read on and not hit the back button.
We want to use a strong, clearly visible Call to Action – I really want to overstate this as super important. From my experience working on commerce sites, I am still amazed how this is overlooked. For a visitor to do something after viewing a page, make is ridiculously obvious what to do next and where to do it! In most cases this would be a clickable button which needs to grab the visitor’s attention and really stand out on the page. Being clever on the wording is crucial, don’t use boring text like “Click Here” or “Application”, show them what to do next – “Apply Now”.
Imagery being used to aid conversion can be a science, but one thing from experience is to do this: people buy from people; people respond well to images of real people! No cheesy grins from models in stock photos show me the people I will be working with.
Test it
I feel confident that implementing the advice above will help the increase of the relevancy and the volumes of applications. If specific job ads are getting decent hits of traffic, try an A/B test. There are many tools available to do this, one being Google Analytics Content Experiments.
Conversion rate optimisation is not just for big retailers such as Amazon. We can apply it to any business or retailer where there is an exchange of info or transactions.