The quality of inbound applications can be very low for the average careers site.  There are so many people out there who are just looking for a job, and they are spamming their resume in hopes someone will give them a chance.  Without mechanisms for attracting and converting higher quality Applicants, your HR department can expect to get a lot of noise and not a lot of signal.

Unfortunately, the harder to find Talent is flying under the radar.  They don’t even have a resume many times, and probably aren’t going to apply into your ATS, even if the application is easy to fill out.  That is of course, unless there’s a reason to apply like in depth employee testimonials or microsites.

Engaging Top Talent

Instead of assuming top talent is going to apply simply because you have job openings on your site, you should contemplate converting your career site traffic into live chats, talent communities, or offline meetups.  This is a very different call to action than getting people to apply to a job, with very different results.

The key underpinning of content marketing is to provide value to your audience as a means for building a relationship with them.  The mentality of someone who signs up for a hackathon or virtual meetup with your sales team is someone who wants to further their career.  They are thoughtful about what’s next.  This is the type of person you want to hire.

The Data

The key hypothesis we are making is that the “job seeker” who is attracted to content that will help them network and further their career is also the person who we want to bring on to the team.  We can see this play out in the data.

What we see is that a typical hiring Funnel has 225 applicants for every 5 interviews and 1 hire.  That means we only want to interview 2.22% of applicants who apply.  Let’s contrast this to a funnel that drives job seekers to a high value piece of content – like a live chat with an engineer on our team – which sees a funnel with 25 applicants, 5 interviews, and 1 hire.  That means we are interviewing 20% of applicants, nearly a 2x increase over the 2.22% from inbound.  And, because we have less applicants, we don’t have to spend as much time reading resumes!

For more, check out our Whiteboard Wednesday video below.  Also, a big shoutout to Brazen for supplying us with this funnel data!

The post How to Engage Top Talent (hint: not job descriptions) appeared first on NextWave Hire Blog.