By Pamela Chávez, November 2017
Think of your career channels as your online shop, and candidates as your customers. How many have made it to the check-out (and applied) and how many have abandoned their shopping carts?
Every year during a couple of weeks, we at Potentialpark wear the candidate’s shoes and evaluate thousands of career channels to find out if employers deliver on candidates’ expectations. We look at your career website, your social media channels, and experience your online application processes first-hand. We do all this on both desktop and mobile devices. Here are 7 successful (and less successful) examples of talent communication in 2017:
Content is still king
1. Accenture shows a very clear Employer Value Proposition throughout the entire career website. Although they have abundant content, they succeed in organizing it in a logical way and make it easy to navigate. 👍
2. Thyssenkrupp chooses more streamlined content in their global career website without compromising the information that is important to candidates. 👍
Career Matching tools to guide your candidates
You can see career matching tools as luxury items, or you can see them as a way to guide candidates through your different business areas.
3. UPS offers a career matching tool which extracts information from LinkedIn profiles and matches it to current job opportunities, down to percentages. This gives candidates the chance to evaluate how worthwhile it’d be to apply depending on how well their profile already matches the job opportunities. 👍
4. Morgan Stanley’s career matcher targets students and graduates. Using insights and data from employees and recent recruits, the tool matches skills and task preferences to three different areas where candidates might thrive. It’s not just the corporate team telling them they could fit in, it’s their potential colleagues! 👍
Sharing is caring: Using social media for emotional connections
5. Skanska’s Instagram profile goes beyond the pretty portraits and shows what makes their employees unique, in a way that balances strength and vulnerability. Because not all industries are photogenic and Instagrammable, but genuine people always are. 👍
Drawbacks
We get it, not everyone can succeed at everything all the time. Still, we had some basic expectations challenged this year:
6. Career websites with very little content 👎
We saw this more often with massive, multinational conglomerates who had less than the minimum career content required by young talent. For example, they showed only legal statements under their Diversity and Inclusion sections, or they overlooked contact information for career enquiries. Don’t leave your candidates in the dark!
(If you feel your career website might be suffering from a lack of content and don’t know where to start, here are 5 insider tips to improve it immediately, from our Talent Communication Expert, Julian Ziesing).
7. Time-consuming application processes (that are, also, not optimized for mobile) 👎
If you offer candidates a career website with useful information and great functionality, only to give them a shock with an applicant tracking system that is long, complex, and on top, not mobile-friendly, you’re all but forcing them to quit the application process.
This could be the case if your applicant tracking system requires filling up endless questions in each of the steps, it’s not possible to upload and view files, and candidates need to type again their experience and education in small, open text fields. Think of these examples through a mobile perspective and they only become worse. Pay attention to these issues now, as they could be costing you valuable talent.
Where do you stand?
Do you offer the same features as the successful examples shown here? Congratulations! You’re well on your way to communication that delivers on candidates’ expectations.
If you’re closer than you’d like to the less successful examples, we got your back! Data from the Potentialpark Study, included in our Talent Communication Report, helps you prioritize improvements and shows your performance compared to benchmarks. Let’s talk!
| The Potentialpark Study is the most comprehensive study of Talent Communication on the market. Every year we conduct a global survey to ask thousands of students and graduates about their needs and preferences. To find whether employers worldwide deliver on the expectations of candidates, we evaluate hundreds of employers’ career channels and assess the market performance. The employers we select to be in our rankings are either top performers from previous years or representative employers in our key markets. This allows us to keep our rankings relevant and with high quality. The results from this evaluation are collected in the Potentialpark Rankings. |