How to Create Content That Turns Interest into Job Applications

Define your employer brand

The general company trait that techies look for most is authenticity. Content that delivers personality, as well as information, will resonate emotionally. The best starting point is to think of your company as a person. What qualities do they have? How do they talk? What interests and motivates them? What do they find funny?

A good starting point is to organise employee focus groups to build persona and voice. This could potentially lead to the creation of an employee-led culture deck or manifesto that can be marketed to attract like-minded potential employees. Be bold. Don’t create a watered down version of an existing brand. Embrace your quirkiness and collective sense of humour. Stand for something.

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Build an employer branding hub

If resources allow, create recruitment-centric content such as unedited interviews with current employers, videos that show your office or press releases about socials and events.

Interviews should feature your employees talking about their journey at your company or feature human examples of how they have benefited from the culture of your business. For example, if you offer flexible working (surely…) feature what people are doing with the time previously spent commuting. If the time is being used to exercise or meditate or people are now getting the chance to walk the kids to school - that’s something people can relate to.If you can’t spend time creating your own content, leverage any content your business is already producing. For example, brief your marketing team to add in recruitment-specific call-to-actions into their collateral, wherever appropriate.

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Get tech specific

In addition to building a general employer brand it is also important to appeal directly to techies. Shout about your tech! In addition to communicating your stack, explain the projects you are currently working on, showcase the product and talk about your engineering practices. Similarly, we know that tech talent has an appetite for personal development. They are often self-taught and motivated by constant learning and development. Engineers are looking for opportunities that will help them learn and grow, so show them the range of professional development opportunities available to them whether that be networking events, educational opportunities, L&D budget and/or days or mentorship opportunities.

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Careers page

Your careers page is typically where you’ll drive your top-funnel leads to stir even further interest and encourage more job applications, so this should be bursting to the seams with the cool and relevant content mentioned above. It should be consistent, so wherever candidates come from it feels like a coherent journey. The link should also be on the nav bar of your homepage not buried in the footer next to your privacy policy (that nobody reads).

It is also where many candidates will take the leap and apply for your jobs, so make the application process quick and painless. If you’ve ever gone to buy something and left because of a long queue or slow loading link - you’ll know what I mean. Be easy to deal with.

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Job Ads, not Job Descriptions

Job ads are often the final step in moving candidates from exploring and evaluating your company to applying for your job, so if you are still hitting CTRL+C and CTRL+V you’re missing a serious trick. You’ve done all the hard work in driving traffic to your ad and now you get one chance to convert interest into a job application.

If your ad doesn’t differentiate your brand and sell your opportunity, you run the risk of falling at the final hurdle.

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Social media

Social media, used correctly, can be a powerful weapon in your talent attraction armoury. It can also be a complete waste of time and energy. Far too many recruiters see social as a free job board, endlessly posting vanilla adverts that nobody engages with. At its best, social is a tool for engagement - it helps you build brand awareness, create interest, nurture an audience and ultimately drive job applications. So share stories and content, but also get involved by engaging and interacting with your audience.

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Social proof

Over half of job seekers will visit Glassdoor (or similar) before applying for a role, to scope out a company. Given it is free to build a basic company profile, outline your mission and respond to review, it is a no-brainer to take it seriously. Take the time to respond to all reviews - positive and negative. It shows you take feedback seriously. Try to avoid sounding like a dumped 16-year-old, however unjust that one star review from the guy who never showed up might be! Encourage your existing team members to leave reviews without pressuring them or flagrantly trying to cancel out that negative review that’s just been left.

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Haystack

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself 😔 Techies tell us they love hanging out on Haystack for three main reasons.

• They are given highly relevant company and career recommendations based on unbiased data, often at companies they hadn’t considered, or even heard of, previously.
• Once they have discovered them, they get all the insight they need to explore and evaluate them as a potential employer.
• They also love the fact that the power of the next move is in their hands. They can follow a business, apply for a role, leave the app and apply elsewhere or simply do nothing. They will not be bothered and they will not be spammed the way they are on LinkedIn.