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.
Today's calendar door is like a piece of chocolate: small, bite-sized and sweet - a little practical idea for your consideration: the navigation matcher.
There are many types of matching tools, and have been for as long as I have done research (which is 2002): CV matchers, LinkedIn matchers, culture matchers, psychometric test matchers, skills matchers, personality matchers... once I saw a "do you prefer tea or coffee matcher" on a career website.
The idea is always the same. Candidates answer a few questions, or upload their CV, or connect a professional profile, and the tools gives them recommendations based on their entry, and the recommendations are either matching jobs or content pages.
The rise of matching tools is no surprise: HR marketing is becoming more and more personal. As shown in Door 1 about landing pages, companies start to understand HR marketing as a way to build different candidate journeys for different audiences, converting them step by step until they apply.
And in its surveys, Potentialpark found that 70% of candidates globally agree with the statement that "companies should offer more personalized experiences based on their fields of study and / or interests".
The navigation matcher
But today's calendar door is only looking at one type of matching tools, the one that simply guides people from your careers home to the right section. This is why I'd call it a navigation matcher. It's like a virtual welcome desk.
Potentialpark did an analysis earlier in 2023 and found a number of innovative best practices. (Their current reports contain a Highlight article about it.)
Among all the matching tools, the navigation matcher can be the simplest. However, as we will see, even this one can be pimped up quite a bit!
Implementation goes from a quick and easy drop-down to full-blown video receptionist. Let me show you my two favorites. Maybe one of them inspires you?
Two Best Practices for navigation matchers
Example 1: If you enter their front page and scroll down just a bit, health care and medical tech company Fresenius offers you a drop-down menu with a bit of a decision tree that guides you to either the right jobs, a landing page, or their help and support site.
They even integrated the ATS at this point: pick "internships", and up pops a selection of internship openings right there.
Example 2: This one takes the cake. KPMG Netherlands built a virtual receptionist that even wears a jacket with the corporate colors. Check it out!
(Maybe you are like me and don't speak Dutch, but I got the gist of it.)
The video not only illustrates the values, the workplace and other aspects of the EVP. But it also asks you to pick a discipline or direction to help you find a match.
Future Outlook
If you compare career websites to ecommerce giants like booking.com or Amazon, there is still lots of room for intuitive user guidance to learn for HR marketing (partly due to limited budgets, team sizes and internal support). But exciting to see the creative energy at the moment and the progress that is being made.
The upcoming Potentialpark Summit events with trends and winners will touch upon this. I'm sure we have not seen the last of matching tools.
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.
Oh and if you don't want to miss anything on here, sign up to this blog at the bottom of the page.