Data from Wave’s Candidate Attraction Playbook has shown that job boards continue to dominate when it comes to job posting percentages. However, as a cost-free and hugely beneficial option, Wave’s Emily Buckley details why posting jobs to your website should be common practice as part of your overall job advertising strategy.
The recruitment industry is a complex machine but at its heart is a central goal – placing the right people in the right jobs. Attracting great candidates to great jobs is a huge part of what recruiters do on a daily basis, so why doesn’t every recruitment website have a jobs page which every job is posted to? As a recruiter, why wouldn’t you want to fully utilise the website you’ve invested time and money in to create a page on which to advertise your jobs for free, bring candidates into your ecosystem and boost brand awareness and trust?
Yes, there may be roles that require discretion but not every role or client will need this. Think that job boards are more effective? Ok, but you can post to your website as well as to job boards. Worried that it might slow down your process by adding another step? The right integrated technology – especially a multi-poster – will solve that. If you still need persuading that posting jobs to your website makes business sense, check out these 5 reasons to always post your jobs to your website:
- A great ROI
All businesses require an online presence now so there’s a good chance you have a recruitment website. In which case, you’ve got a cost-free platform on which to post your jobs. With job board prices having increased over the past few years, you’ll likely spend a good deal of your recruitment marketing budget on job board advertising. If you already have a website, there’s no additional cost to advertising on it, meaning you get free, organic traffic to your jobs – and candidates landing on your website and into your space at the same time. And with data from Wave’s Candidate Attraction Playbook showing that just 12% of jobs are posted on recruitment websites yet those jobs receive 16% of all applications, that’s a cracking return. Imagine if more jobs were posted to recruitment websites…
- Capturing candidate details
The major difference between posting to your website and to job boards (other than the cost) is that when a candidate applies to a job on your website, they upload their CV to your database – not a shared database on a job board. This helps you to build a unique talent pool in a way that you can’t by posting on job boards alone. Candidates might also register for job alerts while they are on your website so that they stay in your ecosystem for future opportunities that they may be suitable for. It’s an easy way to boost your talent pool, allowing you to utilise your database, pulling out relevant candidates when the right jobs come in.
- A positive candidate experience
When candidates apply for jobs on your website, you are in control of the experience. Instead of being at the mercy of the job board, you know exactly what the process entails and can ensure it is a positive one. A positive experience from the very moment a candidate lands on the job page will boost the likelihood that they complete the application and reduce the possibility that they drop out of the process before the offer stage. Your job adverts are likely the first point of contact a candidate will have with your agency so providing a positive experience from the start will help to build the foundations for a strong relationship of trust.
Advertising jobs on an easily searchable jobs page that offers a wide range of filters also means that the majority of candidates that land on your website won’t be disappointed. Most candidates arriving at a recruitment website will be there because they’re searching for a job or at least looking to see what’s out there. By not advertising jobs, most will therefore click away – probably onto a competitor’s website. Give candidates what they’re looking for and they’re likely to stick around.
- Increased traffic to your website
Advertising jobs is a fail-safe way to boost traffic to your website. And if you’re optimising your jobs to ensure relevancy in searches, that traffic will be of high quality. Even if a candidate ultimately decides not to apply, or is unsuccessful in their application, they will now have had exposure to your website. They may decide to further explore it, to search for other jobs that you are advertising, look at your Meet the Team page to get to know your consultants, check out your testimonials from other candidates, or read content on your blog page. Any visit to your website, whatever the reason for the journey to get there, can spark further engagement. Ultimately, your jobs are also another way to advertise your website (and your business) as well as your website being another way to advertise your jobs.
- Boosted brand awareness
The jobs you advertise are part of your brand identity. Every agency wants to be the ‘go-to’ for the industry they recruit for. Advertising jobs on your website will help to build your reputation for specific sectors and roles, which in turn helps to build a niche audience in terms of all 3 profiles you want to target – candidates, clients and consultants. Advertising jobs on your website creates an immediate and concrete link between your agency, what you do and the opportunities you match to candidates. Having a bank of live jobs on your website allows candidates, clients and consultants to have a greater understanding of the roles and companies you work with. This helps everyone – all 3 of your target audiences – to work out if you are the right fit for each other.
And to maximise results… optimise your jobs for Google for Jobs
We’ve established the benefits of posting jobs to your website, now it’s vital to ensure those jobs are fully optimised in order to be picked up on relevant searches. Your job adverts must contain several elements that will boost the likelihood of them being found and ranked by Google for Jobs. These include:
- Salary
- Location
- Job title
- Job description
- Company name
- Job expiry date
It’s a good idea to check whether the jobs on your website are being displayed on Google for Jobs and you can do that by logging into your Google Search Console account. This will tell you whether you have any ‘critical’ issues and how to solve them. In addition, we’d recommend using and updating sitemaps and ensuring your website pages are indexable.
A multi-faceted advertising approach
Most recruiters will continue to advertise on job boards and other platforms such as social media but this doesn’t mean that they can’t also post jobs to their website. In fact, advertising on a diverse range of platforms will only further to increase your reach. We fully recommend a varied job advertising approach and know from our data that job boards provide a high percentage of total applications – a huge 83%. However, if more recruiters also regularly posted jobs to their websites, their share of applications would doubtless be hugely increased. Wave data shows that organic traffic, especially from Google for Jobs, has a high conversion rate when it comes to both applications and CV uploads.
Ultimately, if you have a website, there is no additional cost to you to advertise your jobs on it and the more (of the right) exposure your jobs get, the better – it’s a win-win.
Wave aims to create a world where talent is never missed by providing an all-in-one candidate attraction solution through a combination of technology, data and human expertise via WaveTrackR (data-powered candidate sourcing tool, multi-poster, and analytics platform), WaveSites (high-performance recruitment websites) and WaveMedia (strategic recruitment media buying).
