A careers site is a key part of your talent acquisition strategy. It’s a hub for job vacancies and can attract candidates by giving them a taste of what it’s like to work for your organisation. Developing a careers website that hits home with your target audience is a major undertaking and serious investment—but the potential payoff is huge. In this blog, we’ll look at ways to track performance that will help you develop a careers site that does its job—to establish you as an employer of choice.

I want to see ROI on my careers site

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Setting performance goals for your careers site

What’s the goal of your careers site? Do you want to attract more applications, improve the quality of applications or improve candidate experiences? Perhaps you want more search engine visibility so that your career opportunities are seen by a wider audience? Establishing clear goals will enable you to focus your efforts on implementing effective ways of measuring performance.

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Using an ATS to measure careers site performance  

Your ATS keeps track of the number of applications you receive. Keeping track of this number can be useful in measuring the impact of changes to your careers site. For example, over time, your ATS data might tell you tell that regularly updating your on-page content or updating the visual identity of your careers site results in more applicants.  

What if increasing the quality of applications is your aim? You might try to achieve this by producing more detailed information about working for your organisation or by using authentic content to give candidates more realistic expectations of what it’s like to work for you. If your ATS is anything like GeniusATS, it will be able tell you where in the application process applicants are dropping out. If you find that fewer applicants are dropping out at the suitability questions after you added quality-driving content to your careers site, you can assume it’s having the desired effect.

Candidate experiences are a little more difficult to measure with an ATS because they don’t always end in an application. They can just as easily result in a social media follow, like or interaction. But what if there is no tangible result? That’s where Google Analytics can help.      

I want to see ROI on my careers site

Using Google Analytics to measure performance

Integrating your careers site with Google Analytics gives you detailed data on how your careers site is performing. It tracks journeys on your site, tells you where your traffic comes from and shows you how visitors interact with your site. This insight into candidate behaviour can be useful in assessing aspects of careers site performance, like candidate experience, that can’t be adequately measured by applications, social media activity or other ‘tangible’ outcomes. Some of the most valuable Google Analytics metrics for assessing the effectiveness of careers sites include:

Visitors: The number of visitors your careers site attracts is a good indicator of whether it is doing its job. Google Analytics can also tell you both the geographical location of site visitors and the online source—so, organic search, paid search, email, organic social, referral and others. The number of visitors a careers site attracts is an obvious measure of its popularity and success.  

Dwell time: This is how long visitors stay on a page on your site, and it’s a good indicator of the quality of content on your careers site. You’d expect pages with videos or written content (blog posts, for instance) to rack up longer dwell times from candidates spending time consuming content. Short dwell times on content pages might indicate that your content isn’t engaging. Longer than expected dwell times on pages without content could indicate that you need to make your candidate journey easier.

Bounce rate: A bounce is when a user visits one page of your website and leaves. A high bounce rate generally indicates that your careers site is not giving candidates the kind of content they would expect to see. Your recruitment marketing partner can help you to develop better site experiences as well as content to engage users.

Conversion rates: This is often the all-important metric for recruiters. Your ATS will tell you how many applications you receive, but Google Analytics can give you deeper insight by giving you the conversion rate—the number of applications received compared to the number of site visitors over time. This can tell you if your careers site is appealing to the right audience. High traffic and low applications could indicate that your site is attracting candidates who learn they aren’t suited to careers at your organisation once they look a little deeper. The problem could be your content, or it could be that your site is being advertised to the wrong audience—a recruitment advertising partner can help you make media choices that will bring the right audience to your site.  

I want to see ROI on my careers site

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Getting candidate feedback on your careers site

Who better to tell you about how your careers site is performing than the candidates who use it? Especially if your goal is to improve candidate experiences. You can get their feedback by creating a feedback survey for new starters. Businesses usually conduct surveys like this within the first week of a candidate’s start date, sometimes with a follow-up survey after five weeks.  

Your survey is an opportunity to ask candidates about the whole onboarding experience but, with carefully crafted questions, can be especially useful in assessing the effectiveness of your careers site. You might want to ask candidates if their experience of joining the company matches with the one presented on the website. Or whether the content on site helped them acclimatise to their new role. This is also your chance to ask about anything you could do with your careers site to improve their experience.  

Asking new starters about their recruitment experience is another way to gather valuable candidate feedback. Providing anonymity with this will help you to get candid responses that could be highly valuable in the future development of your site. By asking candidates for their views on your careers site, you’ll signal to them that their thoughts matter—which, in itself, enhances their experience.

I want to see ROI on my careers site

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