Now that we have yours…let’s talk about career sites.

Do you know which elements of your career site are getting the attention of your talent audience, and which elements are being bypassed by those you are seeking to attract?

Attention - /əˈten(t)SH(ə)n/ - noun: “notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important.”

Career site content must be intentional. Every aspect on the site should have a purpose and a goal, including the essential layout itself. For example, placing Military content on its own tab, rather than on the main page, sets the stage to capture the time and attention of the specific audiences who would find this meaningful – but first, the page must entice that audience to follow the navigation cues to arrive there. Imagine spending time creating valuable content and placing it on the tab, only to learn that your audience never encountered the tab to learn about all the great things you’re doing to support military-experienced professionals.

Let’s look at Home Depot’s career site.

Notice their Open Jobs section on the main content area above the fold. They’ve created this dedicated space to highlight specific jobs available in the geographic area of the user viewing the page. Are these capturing the viewer’s attention?

Check out the benefits section.  It’s positioned below the search function.  Are potential candidates reading it to understand its value, and the perks that The Home Depot provides? Or is it just a gaze as they move through the site?

And finally, still in the main content section, but below the fold is the opportunity to join the talent community and stay connected.  Any organization with this call-to-action has created it with the explicit intent to engage talent and continue to share their value proposition to prospective candidates - but is it seen?

What is interesting about any call-to-action is how we measure it to understand its effectiveness. We quantify the click-to-register rate, but that information is based only on those who gave that area attention. Those who bypassed the CTA are not factored into the equation, meaning we only have half of the story.

One of our recent clients engaged with HX Lab to apply neuroscience and understand the attention their career site was receiving from their talent audience. One unexpected discovery we were able to reveal was that while the Talent Community was a primary initiative with the organization, only 56% of those viewing the career site spent time in the Talent Community section. We also learned it took respondents in the study over 1 minute (73.8 seconds) to navigate to that section - and when they did, they spent an average of 4 seconds consuming the content.

Our client was able to use this data to adjust the content, imagery, and location of their career site elements in order to gain the attention needed to appropriately measure their talent community conversions, and more proactively attract the audiences they seek. 

Using attention metrics allows us to understand the full picture of the data.  It gives us insights to know if our talent audience is experiencing and engaging the content in the way it is intended, and ultimately, it gives us the data to make meaningful decisions to create a more impactful career site experience overall.

To find out more about how to capture attention data on your career site or other candidate experiences, check out our website: HireClix Human Experience Lab or contact: hxlab@hireclix.com