Your careers site might be great at converting job seekers into applicants, but what use is that if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your website in the first place?
When you’re hiring for multiple roles at once, you need a constant flow of candidate traffic coming to your careers site from various sources. That way, you can convert as many of these job seekers as possible into your recruitment funnel.
And as with any volume hiring process, the higher the numbers, the better!
With this in mind, here are some recruitment marketing tactics that will help you boost traffic to your careers site and jobs pages.
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How to attract more candidates to your career site
1. Leverage job boards
60% of active job seekers will use job boards and job site aggregators to find their next role – and that number is even higher in volume hiring.
And the reason they do this is that job boards require little effort on their part: Rather than searching the web all day for jobs, candidates just have to register for once for job boards and these sites will send them any vacancies that fit their criteria (industry, location, job role, etc) as soon as they come up.
Therefore, it’s a no-brainer registering with job boards so you can post your live jobs there. Some job sites are free (for example, Glassdoor and Indeed), but if you’re paying for any subscriptions, it’s worth focusing on job boards that are relevant to the target market you’re recruiting in.
If you use a recruitment marketing software that has one-click multiposting makes it easy to advertise your roles across multiple job boards directly from within your recruitment software, then all job site traffic will filter through from these platforms to your careers site to apply.
2. Add a careers button to your website menu
It’s likely you have more daily traffic to your corporate website than you do to your careers site. Naturally, company websites tend to have more traffic because people will search for an visit a company brand site for a number of different reasons, whereas careers sites are just for job seekers.
You can take advantage of this by diverting any job seekers who land on your main site to your careers site. To do this, just add a ‘Jobs’ or ‘Careers’ item to your website’s main navigation menu and link it out to your career site.
You could even include a menu dropdown with a ‘Meet the Team’ button or a ‘Jobs’ button that takes visitors straight to your open vacanices.
Adding a ‘Careers’ tab to your navigation menu will make it instantly visible to anyone who visits your website and it means it will appear prominently in Google searches too.
3. Create employer branding content
Your careers site should do more than just play host to your list of open vacancies. Creating employer branding content for your website helps you showcase your company culture and gives you material that you can cross-post to other platforms to maximise reach then direct visitors back to your careers site.
For example, you could create ‘Day in the life’ videos with current employees and post them on your careers site but also repurpose into social media content and post on YouTube, with links to your careers site in the description.
For example, Booking.com has an entire YouTube channel for employer branding content. Every video they post contains a link in the comments sending viewers to pages on their careers site. It’s a popular channel, with more than 6,000 subscribers!
4. Use dedicated careers social media accounts
Having dedicated careers social media accounts will allow you to really focus on building your employer brand on social and you can use every post as an opportunity to send traffic back to your careers site.
Careers social accounts also allow you to post job content as often as you like without annoying anyone who follows your brand but isn’t looking for a new job. You can also link to your careers social accounts in the bio of your main brand social media profiles to leverage any traffic you get to those pages.
A good example of a brand currently doing this is Marriott Hotels. Their dedicated careers twitter account has 58k followers and the Marriott careers Facebook page has almost 1.5 million likes!
They post engaging, personable content daily that gives real insight into their employees, their hotels and what they’re like to work for as an employer.
5. Use careers hashtags
Despite what you may have been told, hashtags do still work – especially when it comes to recruitment.
A lot of job seekers will follow career hashtags (especially the gen Z market) so that job-related content appears in their feeds without them having to hunt for it. So if you hashtag your job-related social posts, this will make them much more visible to active job seekers who use social media platforms for job hunting.
Use popular job hashtags like #nowhiring #vacancy and #jobopening as well as more niche hashtags for your sector. Career hashtags like this work on instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok but not on Facebook.
6. Run a PPC campaign
If you need to get results quickly, running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad to boost traffic to your careers site will be your best option.
It’s not the cheapest tactic, but it will get you results much more quickly than any SEO strategy, which is more of a slow and steady approach.
So for example, if I search for ‘Restaurant jobs nyc’ right now, I instantly see ads for two restaurants advertising that they’re currently hiring. The ad meta description also focuses on what’s in it for candidate (e.g. ‘We offer pay and benefits that go above and beyond most others in the industry’) in order to entice them to click.
It’s also worth noting that any PPC ads you run will not only appear above any organic search results, but also above Google for jobs too if a user is using Google as their search engine to look for jobs.
Which takes me to my next point…
7. Optimize your job pages for Google for Jobs
According to Google, the number of search queries for the term ‘job application’ has increased 100% year on year since 2020.
So while there may be a candidate shortage right now, there’s still a lot of opportunity to capture more job seeker traffic from search engines.
If you don’t know what Google for Jobs is already, it’s essentially like Google’s own job board. It’s free to use, but if your job pages aren’t optimized for Google for Jobs, they won’t get picked up and made visible to job seekers. You just need to add the structured data to your job pages – here’s some instructions from Google on how to do that.
8. Do something newsworthy
If you’re looking to drive large amounts of traffic to your careers site as part of a wider recruitment initiative, it’s worth considering coming up with a newsworthy PR angle that will get you media attention.
What would make the news headlines and encourage people to apply to your open positions at the same time?
One great example of this tactic in action is Amazon’s Career Choice program from 2021, where they announced they would offer employees free college tuition in a quest to tackle warehouse labour shortages. The initiative got them a lot of press coverage and (as you would expect!) a good boost in applications on their website too.
9. Build a talent community
Each time a candidate applies to one of your roles, they enter your CRM and become part of your talent community. But are you making the most of these candidates on an ongoing basis?
You can maximise on your community through your ATS, by sending automated job alerts (through SMS messaging and email marketing) that fit their interests each time a new open position comes up. These messages should filter candidates through to the relevant jobs pages on your careers site where they can apply directly with you.
10. Use Facebook Jobs
Facebook has a jobs feature that allows you to post job openings to all your Facebook Business page followers and fans. You can publish job post visuals that stand out to your followers and, when clicked, take candidate traffic over to your careers site.
If you think Facebook isn’t the right place to pull in career site traffic, think again: In a recent survey, 1 in 4 people in the US said they searched for or found a job through Facebook.
Facebook jobs is particularly popular for certain types of roles, including contact centres and retail roles. It’s also considered the blue collar alternative to LinkedIn – making it an ideal channel for volume hiring recruitment marketing.
11. Make sure your site is mobile optimized
As much as 45% of job seekers search for jobs daily on their mobile phones. They don’t just expect to be able to browse your career site easily and look through your jobs, but 77% apply to your roles on mobile too.
If a candidate clicks through to your career site and it’s not mobile friendly, they’ll leave the website quickly and not return. So not only do you lose that candidate, but this also tells search engines that your website isn’t up to scratch, which is bad for SEO too.
Having a clean website design that’s well optimized for mobile will ensure candidate traffic keeps coming to your career site, again and again.
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