Tough Questions for Your Employment Website: Does Your Site Measure Up?
No matter how good or bad our "dot-economy" may be at a given second, there will continue to be one fundamental truth about your employment website: it will talk to most candidates before you will. If you're consistently serving up a bad experience to candidates every time they visit, chances are that your competition will be getting the cream of the talent crop and you'll be getting their leftovers.
Let's preface this discussion with a couple of statements:
The Internet has recently proven that it is not a great place to sell bowling shoes, costume jewelry, or lawn furniture (my apologies to those who work for dot-com companies that sell bowling shoes, costume jewelry, or lawn furniture).
The Internet is the best place for job seekers and employers to connect and will continue to be for some time.
The Internet job boards are not the endpoint of this connection. Recent independent studies of job seeking trends consistently point to companies' employment websites as the main communication mechanism between job seekers and employers. But it's not one-sided: employers, recognizing the wealth of data and cost- and process-efficiencies they can realize, are funneling the majority of candidates through their own employment sites. So if your employment site is "talking" with candidates before you are, is it doing enough to help you recruit candidates? It's time to interview your employment site to make sure that it's the most qualified recruiter you have.
The following broad set of questions and guidelines for answering them will help you determine if your site is up to snuff. These are broken down into the three main elements of your website: Design and Content, Features and Functionality and Usability and Navigation.
1. Design and Content
Does your employment site truly convince candidates to submit their resumes?
Your recruiting team's job is to persuade candidates that your company's specific opportunities are right for them. And this same standard needs to be applied to your employment site. Too often, employment sites present rather than persuade, inform rather than convince.
Does your employment site give your company a competitive advantage?
To gain a competitive advantage for talent, you'll need to understand what your competitors are up to on their employment sites and in their recruiting practices. Reach out to your own employees and competitors' employees using focus groups and surveys to find out.
The above steps will present a great opportunity to improve other areas of your recruiting process in addition to your website. As a recent Harvard Business Review article states, "Putting a website in front of a flawed process merely advertises its flaws," so if you can back up a great site with a great process, you will truly be a step ahead of the competition.
Is design and content targeted to each respective target audience group?
It is important to recognize that each target audience will have different information needs, especially in a larger, more heterogeneous organization. For example, an IT professional will be much more interested in what technologies your company employs vs. a finance professional.
Has your site been optimized for web viewing?
The well-chronicled short attention span on the Web dictates a different approach to content vs. traditional communication vehicles like brochures. General rules include making anything you say shorter and more direct, in addition to allowing users to customize their experience by using hyperlinks to additional information. User research will allow you to get an in-depth understanding of the information your specific target audience will be seeking and what their information priorities are.
Design also must follow a different set of rules, as differing screen resolutions, browser standards and platforms mean that everyone will be seeing your design a little differently. Your design and programming must be flexible enough to support the multitude of standards that exist.
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