3 Lesser Known Ways to Improve Your Candidate Attraction Strategy

Are you prepared for a second “great resignation”? During the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented amount of people quit their jobs across 2021 and 2022, and experts think it will happen again.

With this in mind, we thought we would take some time to discuss what factors convince candidates to choose an employer, and how best to appeal to these motives.

Research by Resume Builder  shows that employees have a host of reasons for leaving their current position, the top four being;

Pay is too low – 56%

Want better benefits – 44%

Too stressful – 43%

Lack of advancement – 40%

What does this tell us about what’s motivating candidates today? The balance of reward to demand is key across all of these. As you might expect during a cost of living crisis, workers are feeling the pinch, with higher salaries and needing to pay bills being the significantly highest factor.

Other forms of rewards besides wage are a concern, however, in terms of both other benefits and career advancement. With benefits typically relating to health and wellbeing, finance, professional development and work-life balance, we see here the same anxiety reflected that people aren’t receiving what they need. Without clear opportunities and pathways for advancement, a new job opportunity becomes the answer instead.

This means the next question is, how do you demonstrate to your candidates that your role is rewarding, and that you can offer a supportive and accommodating working environment? Unlike salaries, these are more intangible factors that are harder to clearly communicate over a traditional job description.

Here’s three lesser-known ways that we’ve tried and tested to improve candidate attraction, which could become effective new additions to your talent attraction strategy.

1. Dedicated Landing Pages

So, you’ve invested some serious time and budget into your careers site and jobs search. Why would you create new destinations for potential candidates on top of that?

At Enhance Media, we design content and user experiences based around the stages of the candidate pipeline – brand awareness, consideration and conversion.

Your careers site needs to support and appeal to candidates at whatever stage they are, whether they’re still forming first opinions, gathering detailed information or facing obstacles to applying.

Worried about menus becoming unwieldy? While your landing pages can sit within the site, they don’t have to be discoverable as part of the standard user journey.

By creating dedicated landing pages, you can target candidates at the ‘conversion’ stage with eye-catching content to bring to life benefits and key job features in prominent positions on the page.

• You might use a ‘priority job’ landing page as the destination of an ad campaign on social, expanding on the key attractors that were teased to candidates to get their attention.
• For a wider scope beyond one priority role, ‘Job hub’ landing pages can also be considered. Aligned with search pages, these list all current roles for an entire location or area of work, but with additional icons and callouts to feature key incentives and candidate priorities.
• Dedicated landing pages can be especially important for ‘DEI-targeted’ landing pages. Rather than the generic careers site pages that might lose interest, bring potential underrepresented candidates directly to curated content about DEI initiatives, employee resource groups and relevant benefits that will make their experiences feel seen and acknowledged.

With dedicated landing pages, you are positioned better than ever to turn traffic and interest from highly-engaged candidates into long-lasting conversions through both conversions from listed roles, as well as valuable talent pool sign ups from those candidates not yet ready to apply.

2. Interactive Experiences

Go beyond the standard job descriptions with footage of the team and work environment – all brought together as an interactive experience that immerses candidates in future roles.

Video is at the core of digital content, and with interactive video you can go further to surprise and delight viewers with something they won’t see with other employers.

Interactive experiences for recruitment could include:

• Interactive job descriptions that go through the role information, benefits and company culture where users can click to see more.
• Office tours where potential candidates can take charge of exploring the working environment and discovering desirable amenities and design.
• Branching path content – in a video about your roles, let users identify as early careers, experienced professionals or leadership and serve dedicated content based on this.
• Quiz videos where users can discover an identity by engaging with questions such as ‘What’s your leadership style?’.

This content represents a way to connect candidates to authentic and diverse voices in your organization, as well as connecting applicants directly to a very real understanding of your place of business, company culture and the kind of work they can expect to be doing.

This gives candidates a great feel for your role, as you are able to show them all aspects of the job in a way that is lacking from traditional text-based job descriptions. In turn, you can expect to see more applications from highly engaged candidates.

3. Responsive Career Site Elements

You’ve already aced the careers site content, with everything from benefits pages to employee testimonial videos. It looks great across both mobile and desktop. Information that candidates are desperate for like flexible working support is on there, and you’ve got underrepresented demographics referenced and featured the whole way through.

How do you go one step further to really stand out with the top tier of employer brands? Put candidates at the literal heart of your career site experience with web elements that they trigger to transform and evolve. Turn your careers site from a static hub of information into a truly immersive experience that responds to candidates as they progress.

Spark wonder and delight with user-triggered animations that quite literally demonstrate what you’re trying to tell them – that with you, their actions make a difference.

Responsive web elements could include:

• Transforming the mouse icon larger, smaller, or into something new as users hover over page elements like videos or blogs.
• Page elements fading in or unblurring as users scroll.
• 3D models that can be rotated to reveal new details.
• Non traditional scrolling that changes direction or scale as users progress.
• Preview hover states that go beyond just a color change to preview snippets or compelling imagery from the prospective page.

All of the above have to be balanced with accessibility and are most effective when tied into the themes and personality of your brand. Take a look at some of the examples below:

• Life at Canva
• Dunelm Careers
• Invoke Studios

Whilst your careers site is already at the heart of your digital recruitment, adding an extra level of finesse and immersion with standout details to even just the homepage of your careers site can take it from a place to host job descriptions and get job information to being the epitome of your employer brand.

As well as bringing across the personality of your employer brand, responsive elements like this can enrich the candidate experience of exploring your careers site to increase candidate buy-in for more enthusiastic and motivated candidates.

How Can We Help?

At Enhance Media, we can help you with every step of the recruitment process. From our award-winning social media management services, to our ground-breaking HireCast Interactive Video, through to our experienced team of web developers, Enhance Media can provide you with the technical expertise to help you and your team create effective recruitment campaigns.