On this blog, we’ve said about 1,000x how often recruiting is like Marketing.  And, while we strongly believe that to be true, there are some interesting differences between the recruiting and marketing functions that we’ve noticed over time.

One major difference is that marketing takes advantage of A/B testing to drive more Conversion Rates through the corporate website.  On the flip side, HR is reticent to change the careers site, or doesn’t have the ability to do it in the first place.

We actually did a short study of a select group of companies that showed marketing is very aggressive in making both small and large changes on the corporate website.  Some of these changes are as simple as adding a customer testimonial video (ostensibly to see if that content will convince more potential customers to buy), and some are as large as re-creating the entire site.

HR and Talent Acquisition on the other hand is making fewer changes overall.  And, when they do make changes, it’s almost always huge overalls of their site.

Here are our hypothesis as to why this dynamic exists:

• Marketing tends to be more data driven, and therefore is more adept at discovering and measuring changes that will drive incremental value.
• Inbound leads for marketing are some of the highest value and convert to customers are very high rates.  Inbound candidates for recruiting can be great leads, but many times it’s referred and sourced candidates that convert to employees at higher rates.
• Many HR teams do not have the ability to change their career site as marketing owns it.
• Marketers core competencies include creating and managing websites.  This isn’t the case for HR.
• Marketing has way more resources than HR.  Creating a video is a small part of their budget, and they may have a team that focuses on just that.  HR on the other hand may have little discretionary budget, and even less discretionary time.

Despite all the reasons this dynamic exists, we still think it’s important for HR and talent acquisition to make more of an effort to update and A/B test their career sites with the goal of adding more people into their ATS and Talent Communities.

We’ve seen tremendous gains in the conversion rates of our customers after A/B testing something as simple as what part of a call to action is underlined – stay tuned for a future Whiteboard Wednesday that will cover some of this data.

The post HR vs Marketing: How Often Do We Update Our Website appeared first on NextWave Hire Blog.