By James Chittenden
It’s not just a “Careers” page; your website can be a great help in hiring new employees. Use your page to capture the imaginations of customers and candidates alike. Candidates who appreciate your brand and feel at home on your page will be more likely to consider a career with you. Let’s make some minor changes so that your website helps you hire employees.
A website attracts customers and even investors but can also be an excellent job recruiter. When looking to hire employees, be just as welcoming as you would be to paying customers.
How your website helps you hire employees
Before putting out the online “help wanted” sign, consider if the friendly message you are putting out when you post a job matches the reality in your business. You can control your website and any communications you send. However, you cannot control employee reviews or former employee reviews on job sites such as Glassdoor. Nor can you control media coverage. Simply put, if you are a bad employer, you can do little to protect your brand.
Your website always provides clues into the culture of your startup or small business.
Treat applicants with respect. Many employers require applicants to:
- complete applications on a company page, duplicating a resume
- submit a cover letter
- reveal salary expectations
- answer questionnaires
- complete aptitude or personality tests
All of this requires a great deal of extra work from applicants before the employer will even look at an application. To make matters worse, many employers simply don’t respond to the applicant after requiring all of those extra steps.
The applicant could also be a future customer or partner, and will not forget this poor treatment.
As a small business, you don’t have the luxury of alienating anyone through your hiring process.
First of all, take a look at who in your business is doing the recruiting.
You are asking for trouble if you have a toxic manager in place. A manager is one of the most critical hires for a small business, so do it well.
ZipRecruiter published an article on how to hire a manager that suggested how the conversation should go. Getting a feeling for the experience of the manager is important, of course. Another important question is how the last firing they were responsible for happened.
How your website, and a good job site, helps you hire employees.
In our day and age, almost all candidates have social media or online footprints. Go ahead and search, just like they are searching you. You may find negatives about them online or in public records aggregation sites, which may or may not be accurate. Allow the candidate an opportunity to explain.
Job boards can help you find good employees. Indeed is the largest job board in the United States. Some 3 million businesses post open jobs on Indeed, and it contains more than 200 million resumes from job seekers. You can post unlimited jobs on Indeed for free. Use Indeed when actively seeking applicants. Indeed is also suitable for businesses that need to recruit on a tight budget. It is like the Google of job boards.
If you are trying to find good employees for a small business and need something precise, you may need a more specialized job recruiter online. So if Indeed is like the Google of job boards, ZipRecruiter is like the Cadillac of job sites.
Recruiting sites allow you to link your website, upload your logo, and describe your business when you post a job.
What is ZipRecruiter?
We have covered much about how to hire a manager. ZipRecruiter is a service that distributes a job listing to over 100 job boards instantly. Additionally, it captures data from your candidates from all of these job boards. It eliminates the need to gather and filter applications from multiple job sites, and the interface and app are simple and easy to use.
The site aggregates jobs and automatically updates job advertisements from multiple internet sources. ZipRecruiter makes it easy to view by consolidating the jobs it in one place. ZipRecruiter also is a job search engine and powerful resume search tool.
One Click Advisor researched and reviewed ZipRecruiter and its capabilities in detail, which can be read here.
And finally…
Welcome to One Click Advisor! We would be remiss if we didn’t give you a brief tour of the site and what it can do for you. The free Business Builder is a consulting session, solving your business plan questions in minutes. Your challenges and opportunities can be sorted into one of three areas.
Marketing, because it brings in the customers. Start or continue that plan here.
Operations, because it keeps your customers. Start or continue that plan here.
Finance, because it is the scoreboard. Change the “score” and explore financing here.
Your website helps you hire employees. Use your website to engage and welcome them, and reputable job boards to find them.