This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
So, thousands of candidates have been surveyed and over 500 employers analyzed, looking for the gaps between what talent asks and what companies offer online.
Now you might wonder: what is THE major communication trend we will talk about in 2024 that it deserves to be Door Number 1 in this advent calendar?
TikTok? Certainly growing, but nothing new really.
Artifical Intelligence? Talked about it will be, but affecting employer branding - marginally.
I'm tempted to answer: landing pages. Too boring to get any public attention, but a certain way to increase your competitiveness.
I love things that appear dry and hype-less, but are underestimated and very practical, so let's dust this one off.
So what are landing pages? We are talking about pages on the career website that target specific audiences like software engineers, salespersons, inhouse consultants or shop assistants. They contain content relevant to this group only, like testimonials, benefits or open positions in that field, while still being embedded in the regular career website.
Their purpose is for the right talent to "land" on them and from there hop on to their final destination, the applicant tracking system.
Important to say I don't mean geenral sections for students or professionals, but more topical pages that refer to a specific profession or area of work.
So say an employer runs a campaign for Software Engineers (SE) on social media, they link from there straight to the SE landing page, bypassing the career "home" page. And from the landing you easily get to the open SE positions.
I'm not giving away too much when I reveal that according to the new research, the number of landing pages is currently skyrocketing.
And recent qualitative tests have shown that a good landing page can increase the target audience's understanding and the attractiveness of the employer.
The basic dilemma being: most visitors on your career website go straight to your jobs, but from there, most of them bounce or apply to the wrong job.
The reason is obvious: your list of jobs does not answer the vital question - where do I fit in? (Unless you think modern-day job titles are self-explanatory, but most candidates would disagree.) Nor do jobs answer the other question, what makes you an attractive employer for me? Naturally, your reply will vary for each candidate.
So a concept long known in online marketing is slowly making its way to career websites (a very typical 20 years belated) and, thereby, further closing the gap between emplopyer branding and recruiting.
Because recruiting is about filling positions, and landing pages can help with that.
A career website is more than a list of jobs with a few texts and pictures. It's a marketing tool. And we know: the more content candidates consume, the more likely they apply, and the more likely they apply to the right job.
This is following the trend that I, the candidate, want my information, not just any information.
I called it a major trend because it represents a change in mindset: from treating the career website as a library with content on display to building full-circle candidate journeys from social media to the jobs. The goal is to optimize the conversion from user to applicant for each of the journeys.
Another typical dilemma of career websites is that you know so little about your visitors. Not only because of privacy laws, but simply because no one signs up and tells you anything about them until the moment they apply. So you have little to no data to personalize content.
Landing pages enable personalization by content. Visitors choose their own page or are linked to it based on what they clicked on social media (or searched on Google).
If you'd like to see some landing pages, check out this example, or this one. Just a few excellent ones that come to mind. And employers keep improving them.
No unfortunately, building landing pages requires
resources
an idea what to say to the target group
creative skills
traffic, like social media campaigns.
However, I see all this as a good thing: making a handful of landing pages forces you to identify who you target, what you have to offer and how you stand out against your competitors. This is the essence of marketing.
And then to drive traffic to them from the right target audience is what a social media strategy should be about anyway.
Here a few tips from the Potentialpark research for how to make your competitive landing pages competitive:
You can start with a small number of pages for job profiles that are hardest to hire and grow them in number and quality over time.
Take a marketing perspective: don't simply explain, but convince. Let your people speak. Show what sets you apart. Less corporate wikipedia lingo, more emotions and stories.
Think in terms of calls to action: what do you want visitors to do next on the landing page? If it is to apply to a job, make it easy to find the job list or, even better, embed the suitable open positions right there on the landing page.
Make it easy to find the landing pages from both the start page and the main navigation (trivial point but easy to miss). If you have a number of landing pages, you may want to think about a landing page overview site.
The last point has inspired a number of companies to create a little tool that I would call "start page matcher". It asks the visitors of their career website a few questions to direct them to their content. (But more on that in a later Door of this Advent Calendar.)
Good landing pages are a piece that complete the puzzle. And they give employer branding teams some real space for creativity and to inspire talent - which for many is the fun part of the job. I personally think this will be the way to go.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of the new Talent Comm study when it comes out? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Come back tomorrow for the next Door of this Advent Calendar.
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