idealpeople blog

There’s an interesting report produced by Hire Strategies, which makes for some interesting reading. You can download the report for free, or accept our word on some of the content.

It’s now very common (you could argue it’s almost necessary) for part of a company’s direct hiring strategy to encompass advertising and encouraging applications via their website.

By using four “mystery” applicants, this report highlights some severe failings companies tend to make with regards to their on-line recruitment strategy. The key findings were:

- 42% of companies have such long-winded on-line application processes that they took more than 30 minutes to complete
- 59% of companies took more than 5 days to respond to an on-line application
- 11% of companies didn’t respond to an application at all

The report also looks at diversity and discrimination in on-line recruitment - although that’s a bit off-topic for this article. The report makes some recommendations - which include undertaking an assessment of your recruitment site, testing the application procedure yourself, making the content of your site clear and easy, making same-day phone-based responses to applicants and generating SLAs internally.

All good stuff. We’ve lost count of the amount of poorly-done recruitment pages on companies’ websites. We came across one inviting applications via e-mail - but the link offered was to an address beginning with recrutiment@……

However, before you go and completely re-design your careers page and on-line recruitment process, we wanted to share with you some research of our own. Granted it’s not particularly scientific, but here goes.

One of the first question we ask when interviewing for people to come and work with us here is “so, you’re currently looking for a new job. What’s your strategy?”. The aim of the question is twofold - for one it gets the candidate talking, and secondly it gives us an insight into their ability to plan and think tactically. Having noted their answers, we can tell you that 90% will say I’ll start looking at the on-line job-boards and applying for jobs of interest and/or I’ve posted my CV on Jobsite/Monster/job-board X. If needed, we’ll push them and ask what they would do if that failed and pretty much all of those will say I’ll look in the local press. When push these 90% of people again on the assumption that this too fails, they might say I’ll network with friends and ex-colleagues. Only as a last resort will most people confess to attempting to establish who the best or most suitable local employers are and approach them directly. (If you’re interested, the 10% of people who use all of the above in their first answer are the ones who start the interview on a good footing).

Roughly speaking then, most people don’t consider seeking out local or desirable employers and applying directly. Or if they do, they don’t own up to it.

Given this, it’s important to get your priorities right.

If we assume we’re working with a fairly small section of the public who will be seeking out and using corporate websites to apply for work, how do make sure that your company are identified? It’s probable that most people won’t know about your company unless you happen to work for one of the area’s largest and most visible employers. SEO on your website may help - but what will really help is to work hard on your Recruitment Brand - on how you’re viewed as an employer.

If people don’t know who you are and what’s great about working for you, then the chances they will even get to try out your well-designed careers page are low. As a starter, check out our initial tips on Employer Branding here, or on our corporate website here. We’ll be posting more soon.