Candidate Expectations Have Outpaced What Career Sites Offer
It’s not surprising that almost no one enjoys the job search process. Truth be told, the very candidates you’re trying to attract have an evolving set of digital expectations that aren’t being satisfied. When they’re not job searching—i.e. most of their life—they’re using amazing mobile and web technology built by consumer-oriented companies that differentiate themselves based on user experience.
Why does the job search and apply process have to be any different?
We live in a candidate-driven economy, and candidates’ expectations have started to outpace what most career sites are able to offer. At Jibe, we’re on a mission to change that, helping companies deliver a consumer-quality candidate experience every time job seekers hit their site. Because that’s what people expect!
Falling Short on Consumer-Quality Candidate Experience Is a Growing Risk
In today’s fast-paced, digitally-focused business environment, sticking with the status quo is proving to be an unsustainable business model. When it comes to recruiting and, more specifically, the career site, the status quo is operating on the outdated technology delivered by most enterprise Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
By following strategies with technology that “worked” a decade ago, today’s candidates:
- May not be able to find your site on search engines
- Are turned off by its outdated look and feel
- Have a hard time searching for jobs on the site
- Can’t apply from mobile phones or tablets
- Will likely never return to your site
- Will tell others how bad the experience was
The candidate journey has evolved alongside the consumer journey, and the best recruiters are taking a page from the book of digital marketers. Digital marketers know converting consumers is about wowing them, getting them to opt-in to learn more, and nurturing them until they’re ready to buy. More recruiters need to start thinking like that.
By sticking with the status quo in recruiting, you’re losing ground by the minute. And the candidates that you may get to your site—probably a fraction of what you could be getting—who don’t apply are likely gone forever. Something needs to change.
It’s Time to Blur the Lines Between Candidate and Consumer Experience
We want professionals in the talent acquisition space to really understand what a consumer-quality career site should look like. So, we created an open-to-the-public career site for a fictitious company, Morton Financial. This site is built entirely on Jibe, with converting today’s digitally and mobile-savvy candidates as the focus.
The trial site has more than 20,000 jobs, it supports multiple languages and regions for entry-level and advanced positions—all pulled directly from a legacy ATS environment. In other words, this is what Jibe delivers on top of your existing legacy ATS.
The Morton Financial trial site makes it easy for job seekers to find and apply to a position that’s relevant to them, or opt-into a recruitment marketing relationship so they can be nurtured via job alerts or through a talent network over time. It works on whichever device you may be using to read this blog post.
More specifically, some of the attributes that make this a “consumer-quality” site include:
- Responsive web design: try to shrink down the browser for any page and see how it “responds”
- Job alerts: search for a position and see the prompt to get alerts based on those results
- Talent network: see how easily you can opt-in to the talent community
- Branding: take note of how branding stays consistent as you go from the career site homepage through the apply flow (instead of going to the ATS apply flow look and feel)
- Landing pages: look at the location-based and experience-specific landing pages, which are crucial to user experience and SEO performance
- On-site job search: see how intuitive the job search is, with the ability to simply filter and narrow your search
– See more at: https://www.jibe.com/blog/candidate-expectations-have-outpaced-what-career-sites-offer/#sthash.cKSXENV2.dpuf
