When businesses face increased competition they inevitably invest in marketing to help them better understand, segment, differentiate and all the other stuff marketers do. In a world dominated by technology and the internet in particular there is a myriad of tools that marketers have at their disposal to help gather data on their customers, prospects and marketplace. I’m sure your corporate website will have some form of analytics system gathering data on every visit that your marketing team pour over to help them assess what is working and what isn’t, every page visit analysed, every click assessed, every ‘call-to-action’ optimised.
But when it comes to careers sites this information is not always shared with recruitment. Yet there are tools available that are ideal for helping you understand how well your careers pages are working. They are simple to implement, they are low cost but most importantly they can really help improve the performance of your careers pages, vacancy listings, application processes, and candidate portal (if you are fortunate to have all these things…and if you don’t then we’d love to talk with you).
At Eploy we’ve been on a fairly significant recruitment drive recently to help fuel our growth further, and naturally our own careers site is powered by Eploy online recruitment software. We need to attract and recruit people with the right skill sets and attitudes that our business and customers demand, so we (like you) need to ensure we are advertising our opportunities in the right places, on the right job boards, on the right social networks. Equally we need to understand how potential candidates are using our careers site, how they arrive at our site, what device they are using, when they are likely to visit. But we also need to ensure we’ve got the ’user journey’ right – how they view the jobs pages, get more information, register and apply. This kind of information can to an extent be gleaned from the kinds of analytics tools your digital marketing team will be using – like Google Analytics for example. But to get a better understanding we also use a tool called Crazy Egg (where do they get these names from) (crazyegg.com)
Installation is simple, it’s just a little code snippet that gets dropped into your pages and then it will start tracking every visit and click – importantly it will track exactly where on a page visitors are clicking – right down to the pixel. With this data it will then produce a ‘heatmap’ – a visual overlay that pinpoints the hot spots – this helps you see what is working (and perhaps more importantly what isn’t working – for example if your page contains some content that may appear to be a link which in fact isn’t one).
If your careers site is built using Responsive Design - meaning it will automatically adapt to the type of device that the visitor is using (and if it isn’t…then it probably should be!) it will let you compare side by side your desktop and mobile views, letting you easily spot user differences.
And where Crazy Egg really comes into its own is that all of these views and all of this data can be easily filtered to show you (amongst many other things):
- Which sites the visitor was referred from – letting you spot which social networks and job boards for example are providing the best return
- Days and Times – letting you spot whether mobile visitors are more likely to engage with you in the evenings and lunchtimes and desktop users during the day for example. And which days of the week are most popular for visits and applications.
- Whether visitors return to your careers pages – ‘New vs Returning’ visitors
- Search Terms – what the visitor searched for on a search engine to find your careers
Being able to see all this information for each individual vacancy is really like giving your site x-ray vision - helping you diagnose and potentially cure any problems in your application forms and job descriptions. It can inform and educate recruiters to help guide their recruitment campaigns – which days and times work best for social media campaigns for example.
And I’ll leave you with an interesting example – we learned that software developers are more likely to search and view new careers opportunities on a Monday or Tuesday (55%) – but they are more likely to actually apply for the opportunity at the end of the week (Friday being the most popular day for applications) – so while the Monday blues may spark a job seekers search, you probably won’t hear from them till the weekend