How to Attract Better Job Applications Through Your WordPress Site


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Your website is more than just a way to solicit new customer orders and leads; it’s a showcase for your brand, which means you can use it to recruit new talent for your team. Unfortunately, one of the greatest strengths of this recruiting strategy is also one of its largest weaknesses: the fact that your site is publicly accessible.
On the bright side, your brand and careers program can be made accessible to people all around the country — and even around the world — but that also means you may end up wading through hundreds, or even thousands, of applications that don’t meet even your minimum requirements.

What’s the solution? Alter your WordPress site in a way that naturally attracts better candidates from the get-go.

Flesh Out Your Careers Page

First, you’ll need to flesh out your Careers page with further details. This is the first place your prospective applicants are going to look, so it’s going to supply their first impressions of your firm.

On your Careers page, you’ll have two primary goals; first, to make yourself more attractive to potential talent, and second, to establish the type of company you are and the kind of candidates you’re looking for (which should ideally enable people to filter themselves out of consideration when it’s not a good fit).

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Accordingly, you’ll want to highlight your brand values and what it means to be on your company team. You might consider posting information about benefits and perks of the job, and you should definitely include some photos of your current team in action.

If you need some inspiration for your Careers page, Smart Recruiters has an exceptional list. Just make sure you don’t copy their or anyone else’s design. That should be unique to your brand.

Offer Application and Resume Templates

Your job in HR is much easier when everyone adheres to the same format: that way you can compare apples to apples. The problem is, people tend to submit applications that differ considerably.

Some may use an upload button you provide, but others will insist on cold emailing you, and everyone has a different way of showing his or her skills and past experience. If you provide your prospective applicants with templates, or at least guidelines on what to send and how to send it, you can mitigate this problem.

Start by using Hloom to give your applicants templates they can use for their resumes and cover letters, and detail the application process thoroughly. When you receive the applications, they’ll be tidy and organized, which should make it easier for the most qualified candidates to stand out.

Use a Careers Plugin

One of the advantages of using WordPress is the vast number of plugins that are available to you. Choose a good Careers plugin, and you’ll be able to attract better candidates and review them more efficiently. For example, the WP Job Manager plugin allows you to collect, organize, categorize, and review the applications that come through your site with ease.

Of course, there are other options too, so go ahead and try them out to see which one works best for you.

Provide Thorough Job Descriptions

Next, work on perfecting your job descriptions. You’ll want to be as detailed and thorough as possible, to explain exactly what the job entails and rigidly define the expectations you have for incoming candidates.
Obviously, you’ll want to make the job sound attractive, but you’ll also need to set proper expectations so only qualified candidates are apt to apply for the job. Finding that balance can be a challenge, so experiment with your wording until you find the best combination for attracting new blood.

Invest in Social Recruiting

Finally, consider further investment in social recruiting: the art of reaching out to prospective candidates through social media. You can find and pre-qualify candidates for your open positions using Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other platform of your choosing. Just let them know about the opportunity and direct them to your Careers page.
Because you’ve pre-screened them, you know they’ll be high quality, and you’ll have a chance to scale your efforts in the future to create a full-fledged talent acquisition strategy on social media. When you reach out to candidates, don’t use a cold template; instead, focus on the individual, and let them know what’s in it for them. Otherwise, they may not ever apply.

With the strategies above, you’ll be able to improve the average applicant quality substantially, and over the course of several hires, you’ll end up building a more talented, culturally fitted team. Of course, you’ll also want to be sure to update your strategy over time; your job descriptions may change, you may seek new requirements, and you may want to experiment with new recruiting strategies.

Take regular measurements of your results so you learn which strategies are most effective.


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