Today’s guest blogger is Rick Maré with JXT. Rick is the founder and CEO of JXT, the number one provider of cloud-based digital marketing solutions for recruiters and corporate recruiters. Rick has coached thousands of recruiters, empowering them to take their businesses and careers to the next level. Connect with Rick on LinkedIn.
Your recruitment website is much more than just your digital presence. It’s an integral part of your business. Your digital marketing platform can streamline your entire hiring process and candidate experience. With optimised SEO combined with a strong marketing strategy, your website can showcase your employment brand and latest vacancies to more candidates than ever before. To help you ensure your recruitment website is providing a strong return on investment, here’s ten things your website must do to drive your business.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
Your recruitment website is an integral part of your business that, when optimised and used correctly, can improve your candidate experience, and promote your brand and credibility.
1. Contain a Candidate Portal
Your recruitment website should aim to improve and simplify your end-to-end job application process. A great way to achieve this is through a candidate portal that provides your candidates a more meaningful interaction with your agency. A fully implemented candidate portal is standard with all our digital marketing platforms. It simplifies the application process by providing job-seekers with the option to apply and register their details at the same time. This allows candidates to upload copies of CVs and cover letters and apply to multiple vacancies with ease. This feature also enables candidates to quickly track the status of their applications, update their details and attachments, and contact their recruitment consultant should the need arise.
A candidate portal won’t just improve the experience for your job-seekers, but also improve the service you provide to your clients. Not every job-seeker will find a job the first time they visit your website. However, by including the option to register and receive job-alerts via email, you can keep these candidates in your talent pool. When a client provides a job vacancy that matches a candidate’s profile, your recruitment consultants will already have their CV and contact information available.
2. Have Apply with LinkedIn/Seek/Indeed Functionality
Although enabling candidates to upload their CV and apply to roles with a few clicks can considerably improve your candidate experience, your recruitment website will need to go a step further. Candidates want the ability to apply to vacancies with minimal effort on both desktop and mobile devices. Hence, if your recruitment website doesn’t offer this service, you risk losing out on great talent. To meet this demand, enable job-seekers to pre-fill applications forms using their LinkedIn, Seek or Indeed profiles and quickly attach their stored CVs through ‘Apply with LinkedIn’, ‘Apply with Seek’, and ‘Apply with Indeed’ buttons. For website providers to offer this feature, they need to be partnered with these platforms. Some providers have partnerships with Seek and Indeed which puts them above other generic vendors. However, JXT is the only recruitment website provider to have a partnership with LinkedIn, and the ability to offer you and your candidates the option to ‘Apply with LinkedIn’.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
Implementing a candidate portal into your website can smooth out the application process and aid in keeping candidates in your talent pool for longer.
3. Integrate with Your Databases
To further improve hiring processes and the overall candidate experience, your recruitment website needs to be fully integrated with your back-end databases. Your data is the lifeblood of your recruitment business and analysing it is a crucial, albeit tedious, task. However, integrating it into your website can make that problem a thing of the past. Our Digital Marketing Platform seamlessly integrates your internal databases, such as Bullhorn, Jobscience and many more, directly into your website. This feature will provide you with the tools needed to extract hidden value from your data, and ensure your agency is fully capitalising on your consultant’s hard work.
4. Be SEO Optimised
SEO optimisation can have a huge impact on the performance of your website, blogs and job postings, but you don’t have to be a search-engine wizard to get it right. Our Digital Marketing Platform is designed from industry leading digital architecture, allowing recruiters to use built-in SEO capabilities to optimise every point of exposure for search readiness. How frequently Google updates its search algorithms can often disrupt SEO optimisation, which is why we continually upgrade our platform to adapt to these changes.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
Your recruitment data is the lifeblood of your business, and integrating this into your website can provide you with the tools needed to ensure your agency is capitalising on your consultant’s hard work.
Our built-in SEO capabilities can enable anyone to optimise the search readiness of your website pages, blogs and job postings to ensure the right people are exposed to your content.
5. Be Set Up for Your Marketing
In an earlier article, I highlighted why you should care about digital marketing, however before you can fully capitalise it, your digital marketing and recruitment website needs to be integrated with one another. Recruiters often struggle with maintaining their digital marketing content and brand because either the technology platforms are too complex, they’re unsure which marketing strategy to adopt or they simply don’t have the headcount to do everything. Our Digital Marketing Platform solves all three of these problems. Our product’s architecture is built and updated with digital marketing front of mind, so you can be confident you’ve picked the right platform. We’ve made complex marketing activities simple through our Content Management System. This system allows anyone from the CEO to a newly hired intern to easily publish blogs, update web content and share jobs and posts direct to social media. But what makes JXT a leading provider of digital marketing solutions is what we bring to the table. Our team of experts have a deep understanding of both marketing technology and the recruitment industry.
6. Showcase Your Recruiters with Hero Pages
More and more people are demanding to learn about the individuals behind an organisation rather than the company itself. When a prospective candidate or client Googles one of your recruiters, you’ll want to control that experience. The fear of having their recruiters poached has led to recruitment agencies often being reluctant to use Hero Pages to put the spotlight on their consultants. However, the risk of leaving it to chance is that you have little to no control over other platforms these people could land on, such as your employee’s LinkedIn profile or another website altogether.
Hero Pages can direct this traffic back to your website. Once a user has arrived at your consultant’s page, you can showcase their skills, expertise and experiences to reinforce their credibility as a recruiter. In turn, this can also promote your agency’s position within the market. Our Digital Marketing Platform provides an easy way to create, host and update content, such as video interviews, and client and candidate testimonials. Our website will also enable you to put strategic conversion mechanisms in place, like snapshots of the consultant’s vacancies, latest blog posts and critically, their contact information. Thus, these factors can convert this website traffic into potential business leads.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
It’s crucial that your recruitment website caters to your digital marketing needs and have an easy-to-use Content Management System that turns complex marketing activities simple.
As more people demand to learn about the individuals behind an organisation, including Consultant Hero pages is a sure way to convert this website traffic into potential business leads.
7. Be Fully Mobile Responsive
Favouring the changes digital has brought to the recruitment world, 70% of job-seekers are now willing to apply for jobs on their smartphones. To avoid unintentionally turning these job-seekers away, your recruitment website needs to be mobile-responsive. If your recruitment website is mobile-responsive, then its layout, font sizes, images and buttons automatically adjust to match a device’s screen size.
As a standard, our Digital Marketing Platform is mobile-responsive, which is crucial for any recruitment agency who wants a solid digital presence. If you need to test how mobile-friendly your current website is, check out Think with Google.
8. Clearly Represent Your Brand
Your recruitment website and marketing content must genuinely reflect your external brand and internal culture. The risk of your digital marketing misrepresenting your brand is the damage it can cause to your business and reputation. This can also lead to the potential to attract candidates, client and recruiters who will likely disengage once they’ve learned more about your company. We work with over 500 recruitment agencies around the world and have unique partnerships with major recruitment technology providers, industry associations, aggregators and digital platforms. So, we know how to make your brand look stellar without misinterpreting your business values and culture.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
Your recruitment website must be mobile-responsive to engage the large volume of job-seekers who use their smart-phones to job-search.
To avoid attracting the wrong type of candidates, clients and recruiters to your business, your recruitment website and marketing content must genuinely reflect your brand and culture.
9. Be Encrypted and Secure
Your client and candidate data is the cornerstone of your business and the protection of that data should be taken seriously. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. The link ensures that all data passed between the server and browsers remain private and integral. SSL is an industry standard and used by millions of websites to protect any online interaction with their users. All information provided to JXT is stored, transmitted and used via state-of-the-art encryption software and is contained in a secure data centre with 24/7 security.
10. Have Jobs Searchable by Map
Google Maps changed the way we search for things. If you want to find local restaurants, cafes or shops, you can load up Google Maps on your phone and scroll around looking for something that stands out. You can even read a few reviews before you decide, so why should searching for a job be any different?
If you use our Digital Marketing Platform and provide a general location when a job vacancy is posted, a map will be displayed showing where the job is located. Job-seekers can open this map and see vacancies around them or in areas of interest. This feature is great for candidates who are looking to relocate to a different area, city or even country. However, this is an optional feature and doesn’t have to be used if the location of your job vacancy is confidential.
KEY TAKE-AWAY
To protect your clients, candidates and your own data, all information you store, transmit and use must be securely encrypted.
Although an optional feature, having jobs searchable by a map is a great way to engage people looking for an easy way to scout job vacancies by location.
Summary
To stand out from your competitors, your digital marketing platform must seamlessly integrate each recruitment component your business relies on. This includes everything, from your back-end databases, social media, SEO to your content marketing material. All of it needs to completely secure, easy-to-manage and mobile-responsive. Usually, it would take a considerable amount of time and providers to build something like this, but that’s where we come in. As the leading provider of cloud-based digital marketing solutions for recruiters of all shapes and sizes, our Digital Marketing Platform has everything that will help your business grow.
