7 Recruiting Challenges Your Website Needs To Solve

Given the uncertainty of today’s economy, recruitment may be the last thing on many employers’ minds. However, the resourcefulness, innovative thinking, and productivity that proven talent brings to an organization are needed now more than ever in any industry.

The question is, how can your organization find this talent?

Many employers need to find the right applicants as quickly as the applicants need to find the right position. A job search of any length can present challenges for both the prospective employer and the applicant. Developing a new corporate career site or refreshing your existing one may be just what you need to grab job seekers’ attention and set you apart from your competition.

There are a number of challenges that an informative and user-friendly career site can address:

Some job seekers may get lost on your company website and never find your postings. Also, your postings may not show up in search results. Your job listings must be easy to find and your career site must be easy to navigate. Be sure you have the right keywords so the job shows up in the results of Google and other search engines.
There can be disconnects between the organization as described during the interview and what new hires actually experience. Effective career sites can highlight the corporate culture through videos, team member profiles, employee testimonials, and regular messages from executives on key business news and initiatives.
Job seekers don’t come in one flavor. Their perspectives and preferences differ along generational, economic, and social lines. By setting up different sections of the website to address particular topics you give the site a personal feel, better communicating about issues that matter to prospective employees.
Applicants don’t always appreciate the value of what you have to offer. They need to see beyond cash compensation, to the value of their total compensation. Consider providing things like sample total rewards summaries for specific positions, and list each employer-provided benefit and work/life perk that employees may receive.
The application process is too cumbersome. Candidates with the experience and skills your organization needs will be more likely to apply online if you make the process as user-friendly as possible. One best practice is to automatically tag the application with the appropriate job reference. Another is to allow applicants to save their resumes and other information in your system for a period of time; in this economy, job seekers may be applying for many different positions at once in your organization.
Employers get too many applications from unqualified applicants. To help narrow the field to a more manageable pool, consider online pre-assessment tools that ask applicants certain questions about themselves — like number of years’ experience in a certain industry, whether they have certain degrees, and so on.
Employers often want to stay in touch with former employees, hoping to rehire them in the future. How do you do that? Even for those you were forced to lay off, you can create an alumni network to provide a readily accessible and familiar talent pool once you’re ready to rehire.

Placing the right people in the right jobs at the right time always presents an employer with challenges. A well designed and maintained career site can help your organization effectively work through these challenges.

This was originally published on Buck Consultant’s Buck Blog.