4 Ways Employer Branders Lose Applicants Online
By Julian Ziesing | September 5th, 2019
*Don’t make candidates feel like this…
Or: How To Roll Out The Red Carpet For Talent With The Limited Resources You Have
Isn't it a bit strange? Companies complain about how painful and costly it is to find good applicants these days. But at the same time, candidates who are looking for a job are frustrated to find the job search and application about as pleasant as a visit to the dentist.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The answer is communication. Most companies feel the pain of the war for talent because they have not optimized their communication from a candidate’s point of view. Employers lose applicants for all the wrong reasons. And often they don’t even know it. Mistakes that could be easily avoided.
Where this knowledge and data comes from
To come to the conclusions below, we have surveyed thousands of candidates and monitored the top employers worldwide every year since 2002. We call it the Talent Communication study.
Asking the candidates in 2019, we measured this:
Around 50% of the candidates have decided not to apply after visiting a company’s career website, often because of how poor it is.
In addition, 37% - 55% have given up filling out an online application.
These alarming numbers show that while recruiting can be expensive, having a broken candidate experience can be more costly.
Now onto the most common mistakes….
Mistake no. 1: “It’s the funnel, stupid”
Have you ever had your smartphone in your hand, scrolling through the Facebook app, clicked on a link in a campaign and realized that it leads you to a website that is not mobile friendly?
Welcome to the frustrating world of today’s job seekers. If this was a recruiting campaign, it would be a waste of money, no matter how price-worthy the creative work may be.
The purpose of the funnel is to take candidates through a journey. From mass media like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Glassdoor through your career website and job ads to the end of the online application and further. Every step can be optimized to convert as many of the right candidates to the next step as possible.
It sounds simple, yet we see companies year after year forget this principle.
It requires employers to stop blaming candidates for failing to apply and take responsibility for the effectiveness of their employer branding and recruiting strategies.
And looking at our annual ranking of the employers with the most talent-friendly communication, we see what they do better.
Source: Potentialpark Funnel
Once you see Talent Communication like a marketing funnel, you start thinking differently. You ask new questions, such as: when I created this page, where do I want the visitor to click next? How do I measure this conversion rate, and how can I optimize it?
You will test and check every step of the process, all the way from the awareness to the application, to see where you lose people and why.
It is crucial to involve different departments when developing your recruiting and employer brand strategies. Including marketing techniques into your Talent Communication, which is what it is, a marketing challenge, pure and simple. If you make the funnel a guiding principle, many things will fall into place, and you will arrive in a place where you compete with companies you thought were lightyears ahead of you.
Some companies have no plan for their HR marketing at all. Some have a plan for each and every tool and channel that they use. Only few have a plan for how to make them all work together as a funnel.
Which one are you?
Mistake no. 2: Thinking of careers as “a section of the corporate site”
Another situation that might be familiar: while browsing a career website, you suddenly realize that you are no longer in the career section. At some point, you don’t know when, you must have been linked to the corporate “About us” section.
Maybe you were curious what the employer has to offer, and suddenly you read the annual report for shareholders. And you no longer see the link to the open positions. Eventually you leave, confused and frustrated.
The problem? The corporate “About us” section, or whatever it is called, is not made for candidates, but for the broader public. Therefore, its content is not optimized for the marketing to candidates. It’s not curated by HR Marketing. And it makes navigating unintuitive for candidates.
While company brand and employer brand should go hand in hand, they are not the same. In the same way, a career website must fit together with, but not be mixed up with the corporate site.
Click here to view Fresenius Career Website (then click on Menu)
If you look at the traffic to your corporate website, chances are that the career section stands out with its number of daily visitors by far. (Maybe only second to the commercial section if you have a consumer brand.)
Still, HR often is quite restricted by Corporate Comms and its rules and templates. A typical explanation for the example mentioned above is “why should we copy content from our corporate section to the career section? That would be double content.” No, it is not double for the individual visitor.
Think of the funnel mentioned under mistake no. 1, and you realize that a career website needs to be complete on its own, working for its own purposes, relatively independently from the corporate site. For that, HR Marketing needs ownership and as much space for content and creative freedom as possible.
An effective and competitive career website starts with this simple mission: it should contain everything that candidates need to go to the next step.
Does yours?
Mistake no. 3: Creating job ads from the recruiter, not the candidate perspective
We regularly measure that applying online is the most frustrating part of the whole candidate journey. This is where you easily lose the most talent, and any investment you made into making them aware of you is lost. Besides the inhumane applicant tracking systems in existence, this is also due to job ads that are not thought through from a candidate’s perspective.
When you open a job posting, 90% of the time you know what’s coming: a bland snippet introducing the company in perfect PR language as a global leader in something, followed by 10+ bullet points of tasks and expectations, the end.
And 90% might be a very nice estimate.
Now what do candidates actually care about? According to the 2019 Potentialpark Study (Link to Methodology or Products), the number one most missing piece of information is the type of contract. Is it full-time, permanent, an internship? Less than 10% of employers make this clear in their job descriptions. Even though it would be so simple.
This is just one example of a common fail in this area. The general rule is: job ads are made from a recruiter’s point of view, not from a marketing perspective, and the sooner you change this the better.
Besides what you want to say about the job, there needs to be space to show why the job is actually attractive for the candidate. Otherwise you try to apply a tool from the newspaper age in the digital era, wondering why the recruiting pipeline dries out.
The job ads are the eye of the needle everyone needs to go through. So besides the requirements you try to get across to the candidate, think about the questions they have and answer them proactively. Maybe starting with, but not limited to, the type of contract.
Mistake no. 4: Telling, not showing
Career opportunities offer great perspectives to grow and develop. Right?
I don’t know if you ever noticed. But probably you will realize it when I say it. In the world of HR marketing bingo, the words perspective and opportunity must be among the all-time favorites. The problem is that they don’t cost anything, and therefore everyone can afford them, and thus they prove nothing.
An old agency saying is “show don’t tell”. And indeed, candidates react better to content that does not simply say that the employer is attractive in a certain aspect, but makes it tangible in what way. Be it with pictures from behind the scenes, examples of interesting projects the teams are working on, or other kinds of story-telling.
A trend we observe in this regard is micro-branding, meaning showing different insights to different target groups. Engineers, salespeople, digital talent, they all differ in their day-to-day tasks, workspace, projects. Essentially, what makes their job interesting is dependent on their function, role or department, so it makes sense to break some of your content down.
The better you can address different groups with a micro-branding and content that is targeted to them, while giving concrete insights and steering clear of the career lingo bingo, the more you set yourself apart from the pack.
A great place to start, by the way, are the landing pages of your career website. If for example a menu item is called “internship”, I bet all the money in my pocket against all the money in your pocket that it reads something in the price range of “you are looking for interesting internships with great colleagues where you can learn and grow? Check out the open positions and join us now.” This is not marketing. But it could be. These landing pages can turn into highly effective conversion pieces if only you use the chance to open up.
Conclusion
Having the knowledge of what talent needs and expects, and what frustrates them, what the pain points in your candidate journey are and what your competitors do better enables you to make the most effective decisions where to spend your limited time and budget.
And with HR marketing being under constant pressure to be efficient and explain themselves, they need good arguments to get management buy-in for their plans.
Sometimes small improvements or a slight change of course can pay off a lot in the long run.
Curious for more?
See which channels work best for employer branding and recruiting, how to optimize them to win and convert talent and what to learn from the best practices of the year. To get the complete candidate compass 2019 with the results from our candidate surveys and company audits.
Tagged: Employer Branding, Talent Communication, Candidate Experience