Job post traffic taking a dip? Here’s how to build out your talent pool, fast.

Pageviews and unique views to your job posts have been declining, reducing the number of application starts and resume submissions. As a result, headcounts are staying open for longer periods of time, impacting internal morale, productivity and retention. And if you move ahead with the limited candidate pool you have? Too often it’s a time-consuming task, with no needle-in-a-haystack candidate at the end of the day. 

If your HR and recruitment teams are experiencing this, they’re not alone. In July 2020,  unemployment reached 7.4% in Australia with one million people unemployed, well below the all-time high of 11.20% in December 1992. However, by mid-2022, unemployment had fallen to a 50-year low of 3.5% with just 494,000 unemployed available for 480,000 job vacancies.

In the face of talent shortages, employers in many markets are wooing job candidates with perks such as remote work arrangements and flexible scheduling. Increasingly, this kind of employer ‘romancing’ has been necessary to attract qualified employees, thanks to the ‘Great Resignation’ – a pandemic-fueled re-evaluation on the part of some workers of their work-life priorities, career goals, risk-tolerance vis-à-vis unvaccinated colleagues, etc.

So how, then, to ensure your offerings are stacking up – and that you’re being as competitive as possible in this hyper-competitive landscape? First, take a step back and consider your current recruiting strategies, messages and employee positioning. That includes: 

1. Emphasising the art of recruiting

In a hyper-competitive market, HR teams may wish to place more emphasis on the art, rather than the science, of recruiting, taking a more creative, proactive and iterative approach. If job posts aren’t receiving enough views to build a strong candidate pool: stop, assess the situation and then ask your team:

• Where are the jobs currently posted, and what other advertising media could we use?
• What could we be doing to more proactively promote open roles?
• Are we using Sponsored Jobs and Objective Campaigns to tailor campaigns to specific hiring goals? With Objective Campaigns, it’s easy to launch recruiting efforts that meet key goals such as delivering the most possible candidates, etc.

2. Evaluating benefits and perks

While you’re assessing the landscape, consider going beyond the ‘usual’ benefits of high-value opportunities. Nearly half of employers rank flexible working policies in their top five ways to attract employees, with add-ons like virtual mental health care, meditation, and counselling. At the same time, sign-on bonuses are becoming more common,  so attracting top talent may require you to sweeten the pot. What do employees want right now, and how can enhancing your offerings benefit both your hires and your business as a whole? Conduct surveys of both employees and candidates in your industry to determine what ‘sells’.

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Enhancing employee benefits and perks

• 59% of employees say they value flexible work opportunities
• 32% think discounts on water, gas and electricity would be a great benefit
• 30% of employees are interested in continuing education as a benefit

Source: YouGov Galaxy for Employment Hero survey 2022

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For example, an incentive program can attract more candidates and, at the same time, help your company reach its goals by promoting higher performance. Such an offering can also boost your employer branding. Provided the goals and incentives are achievable and meaningful, pay-for-performance models can have a significant impact on morale, motivation, and retention.

3. Considering your job post placements and messaging

Once your team has assessed job post placement, determine where you’re falling down. Among other things, you may want to examine your messaging by platform. Given the diversity of roles and potential placements, job posts and descriptions should be crafted to maximise engagement and activation of your target candidates. Different industries, levels, and even types of roles, have unique expectations and standards. For example: before the pandemic, 2016 Australian census data showed that at least 35% of jobs could be worked from home, however less than 10% actually were. During the pandemic, around 40% of workers worked from home, and in some firms the number was as high as 90%. Recent research from Melbourne Institute and Roy Morgan indicates that 88% of workers would like to work at least part-time from home, and 60% would be happy with a hybrid arrangement. Fail to mention ‘work from home’ as a benefit in your latest job posts, and you may see a dip in the number of applicants.

It’s also important to thoroughly research competitive posts to determine:

1. What competitive companies are offering that your business is not – e.g., a concrete work-from-home schedule, unlimited annual leave, childcare perks or expanded retirement programs. This research should go beyond a perfunctory ‘glance’ at the competition’s postings. Instead, consider building a detailed matrix of industry-wide compensation data, job description keywords, etc. to obtain the deeper level of awareness needed to improve your competitiveness over the long term.
   
2. How your business and a role’s specific requirements, benefits and overall employee experience differ from the competition’s. (Yes, this is data every hiring team should be collecting and analysing, but it may have been neglected during the pandemic.)

With this information top-of-mind, revisit job posts and bring forward key differentiators. Highlighting what sets your jobs apart from the competition and looking to better align them if your offerings fall short, may help candidates recognise the value in your opportunities.

Ultimately, your team’s goal is to educate and inform candidates about your business and your expectations while simultaneously pulling them deeper into your recruitment funnel. Make sure job posts are informative, diving into not just the marketable aspects of a role, but also the day-to-day responsibilities, perks and overall experience. A good post articulates not just your employer brand; it also creates an appealing narrative that the candidate will help construct. Again, this requires your team to think in terms of both the art and science of recruiting.

4. Proactively building your own talent pipeline

Beyond posting open roles, it’s essential to revisit your proactive recruitment processes and workflows. Although you may have put many of these solutions in place, momentum on one or both sides may have slowed during the pandemic. Now is an ideal time to re-evaluate their effectiveness so your team can identify and amplify top-performing candidate sources. These sources may include:

Your employee referral program

Likewise, activating existing employees can drive more successful talent engagement. Referral programs not only reward current employees, which can boost morale and ongoing loyalty, but also enable your team to connect with top talent who better understand your company’s culture and are ready to jump in on Day One. At the same time, referral programs can reduce hiring costs and time to hire, and mitigate turnover.

Make sure your team is proactively sharing open roles within the organisation and, ideally, promoting jobs to employees in similar positions or related departments. These employees may have strong professional networks from previous jobs, or from networking groups, schools or training programs as well as from other industry affiliations.

Professional and industry-specific networks

Re-engage (or increase engagement with) industry organisations, networking groups, TAFE and university career offices/departments/student clubs if these activities fell by the wayside during the pandemic. Even for niche roles and industries, these can be turnkey partnerships for attracting existing and emerging talent. Many young people, those with disabilities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are unemployed or underemployed, despite today’s hiring challenges. Nurturing these relationships can help create a long-term funnel of high-potential candidates.

Relationship-building is also critical for more senior-level and niche roles. Connecting with these organisations, their leadership, and participants on a one-to-one level can help build a talent bench that can be quickly activated when appropriate roles open up.

If page views and unique views are on the decline – or you’re seeing dips in candidate engagement in the early recruitment stages – take a pause and dig in. By assessing your recruitment mix and determining if you’re truly meeting candidates where they are – and enticing them with what they want and need right now. 

Beyond that, don’t be afraid to think creatively and treat every open job as a unique campaign. Being more proactive and focusing on each role’s (and your organisation’s) unique selling points and messaging can better position you to attract and secure top talent.