To stand out from competitors in the competitive job market, it's crucial for recruitment agencies to have a strong lead generation strategy. Offering an excellent candidate experience and generating leads on your website for various reasons, will increase your number of finished applications. In this article, we'll explore three ways to boost your lead generation strategy.
First things first
In general, the ‘less is more’ rule counts for forms just like it does for a lot of other things. Don’t make your form too lengthy or complicated and don’t ask for too much information at once as this will hold people back from converting.
Taking the less is more approach will lower your bounce rate because unmotivated people or visitors who don’t trust you enough yet will bounce a lot quicker when having to share too many details.
Another important thing to keep in mind is to ask for an email address first; this gives you retargeting opportunities to contact the respondent later when they abandon your form. Ask for basic information like the name after the email address and then build up towards the other info you’d like to receive.
The amount of info you need usually depends on what you offer and how much information you need from your future applicant. If you need a lot of information for some reason and, therefore, a large form, it’s better to use different steps instead of one lengthy form at once.
1. The job alert
Finding the right job among a large number of job offers on staffing and recruitment websites can be difficult for applicants. They often don’t seem to find the right fit and tend to leave the website without returning later.
Launching a job alert and pushing it toward your visitors with clear call to actions is a great way to capture valuable leads and keep them engaged in your recruitment process. All you have to do is spread your subscription form across various touchpoints and make sure it stands out from the rest of your website.
Once someone has subscribed, send them relevant job vacancies to bring them back to your site and make them apply.
Absolute Jobs is a Belgian employment agency with strong expertise in recruitment and a specialization in employing skilled employees for bottleneck jobs.
Absolute Jobs wanted to be able to retarget job seekers that couldn’t find the vacancy they were looking for, this was the start of their job alert. They launched tailor-made email campaigns that visitors could subscribe to, to get relevant new vacancies in their mailboxes.
In order to do so, they implemented forms throughout various touchpoints on their website to make sure everyone was able to subscribe to the job alert. The very first CTA could be found on the homepage. This immediately shows the job alert form and gives visitors the first chance to subscribe to it. The form was also launched on the search page, the detail page of a vacancy, and was triggered by a pop-up when someone was about to leave the website.
Once a visitor has subscribed to the job alert, Absolute Jobs will start sending them automatic mailings starting one day after the subscription. These emails will include jobs that the algorithm matches with the subscriber’s interests and skills. All of this happens automatically and resulted in 70% of the subscribers clicking on one of the jobs in the job alert. Furthermore, 20% of these visitors end up applying for a job.
Being relevant to your visitors later on when you can’t immediately offer what they’re looking for, keeps you on top of their minds and therefore gives you a lot of opportunities later in their journey.
2. The simplified application form
A large number of application forms are too lengthy and require too much unnecessary information from the applicant’s side. Think of it as your first date with someone, you won’t ask everything straight away either because you will probably scare them away this way. As mentioned before, less is more.
Emminent Groep is a Dutch recruitment office that specializes in matching technical profiles with the right employer. They make sure an applicant is optimally guided towards a new job and matches with the vacancy, and the company they applied for.
Emminent wanted to see if they would get more registrations if they changed their application form when someone doesn’t have a CV or LinkedIn profile. They experimented with an A/B test to see if the changes they wanted to make had a positive effect on the conversion rate.
After analyzing the original application form they immediately noticed there were some bottlenecks that would make people leave the form without completing it. This made them remove the gender, current position, and motivation fields. After running the test, Emminent saw a spectacular increase of 21% in finished applications compared to their original version.
This once more shows that shortening your form often has a positive effect on the conversion rate. It's important to put your original and adapted form through an A/B test though, because this will enable you to learn from your data and if your changes have a positive effect or not.
3. The self-adapting application form
Let’s take the application form a little further and dive a little deeper into the self-adapting application forms that will make your company future-proof.
Instead of showing all your form fields in one lengthy form, it’s better to make your applicants choose their preference of application and automatically adapt your form to this. This will not only make your application flow a lot easier, but it will also hold fewer people back from completing it.
Televic is an international innovative company with headquarters in Belgium that is specialized in innovating 4 different niche markets. Because their markets are so niche, they require professionals that have strong knowledge of these industries, making the war for talent even harder.
To make this battle a little easier, they wanted to simplify the application process for their candidates.
This is why Televic decided to experiment with an adapting form to make it as easy as possible for candidates to finish their applications by only asking for relevant information and making the form as short as possible.
If a candidate selects that he wants to be contacted by phone, the form will automatically remove the email address field and vice versa.
The third option the candidate can choose is to link his LinkedIn profile to his application. By doing so, the candidate won’t have to upload his cv anymore because all the relevant information is on his LinkedIn profile anyway.
The new form that automatically adapts itself to the candidate’s preferences, gets completed twice as much as the original form. Making it easier for the candidates to finish the form with only relevant information not only benefits them, it also benefits the company because they now have twice as many applicants.
Get started yourself
As you can see, you won't need to reinvent the wheel in order to succeed and stand out from your competitors. Simply making a few changes can boost your lead generation immensely and lift your recruiting & staffing agency to the next level. x