14 Ways to Get More Candidates to Apply
One of my favorite marketing gurus is Guy Kawasaki. He recently wrote a blog article with tips for companies wanting to increase their on-line sales. The same rules apply to organizations wanting to increase the percentage of candidates who apply to job posting ads:
- Do not require immediate registration. Wait until they're ready to apply and not a moment before.
- Make your web page addresses (URLs) short and friendly. If people can communicate your site’s URLs to others over the phone then you're in good shape.
- Don't frame your pages or have pop-ups that don't display their URLs. If one candidate wants to tell another candidate about one of your opportunities but there's no visible URL, you just lost one and probably two candidates.
- If it takes more than one click to go to any page on your site, then you need to have a search box. Google sells its search engine technology for $500 per year. We use it in the top right corner of virtually every page on our site. It's great.
- Add code to every page to encourage visitors to bookmark your pages on sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark, and Facebook. These draw clicks and improve your search engine rankings.
- Make it easy for candidates to contact you by email AND by phone. I hear recruiters saying they can't answer their phones because they're too busy. That's just an excuse. The phone is ringing because there's a candidate on the other end. Answer it and you won't have to post that ad on-line and then wade through the dozens and perhaps hundreds of resumes.
- Add RSS feeds and email lists. If people want to keep up-to-date about what you're doing, shouldn't you want to help them? These are your fans. They're your network. Cultivate them. Stay in touch with them daily, weekly, or monthly but stay in touch with them.
- Don't make them re-type the email addresses of their friends in order to tell their friends about your site. Let them upload their address books. Plaxo does this. Why not your organization? Actually, now that I think about it, why not CollegeRecruiter.com? Hmmm.
- When your candidates register, allow them to pick user names with the “@” character because they can then use their email address as their user name. It is much easier to remember your email address than one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of user names that we're all forced to accept.
- Don't require case sensitive user names and passwords. They're more secure, but we're not protecting state secrets here.
- Make any anti-spam confirmation codes (often called captcha forms) readable. These are the forms where you have to type in the series of numbers and/or letters that you see to confirm that you're a real person and not a computer program that is creating accounts for some unholy purpose. These codes are important but again, we're not protecting state secrets here. Make them easy enough to use that ordinary people can get past them.
- Require all of your employees to include a full signature section at the bottom of every email so that those with whom they're corresponding can easily call or send something to your employee.
- Don't send automated emails telling people not to respond. How unfriendly is that? Get someone to monitor the email address. Efficiency is great but not at the cost of becoming ineffective.
- Support all major browsers, not just Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Windows. About 19 percent of our visitors use Mozilla Firefox. I use Firefox. How many of the candidates that you're trying to recruit use Firefox, Apple's Safari, or some other browser?
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