Dos and Don’ts of Your Institution's Hiring Portal
What’s the most important website in your recruiting strategy – your own web. Is your employment site designed for desperate job hunters or does it appeal to terrific hires? Does it reinforce your institution’s brand, or communicate all the wrong messages?
Take our quick challenge:
Start on your institution’s home page.
Click the link for prospective students – you’ll probably like what you see.
Now go back to the home page and click the link for jobs – if what you see makes you wince, you’re not alone.
A top-quality faculty and staff is a key competitive differentiator for any institution. Yet at most colleges and universities, employment recruiting is perceived as an administrative chore rather than an important strategic investment. Nowhere is this more evident than on college and university websites, one of the most visible communication channels for your institutional brand.
How can you make a dreadful jobs site into one that sells your jobs to the best possible hires? It just requires thinking from the perspective of the candidate rather than the recruiter. And following Inside Higher Ed’s 10 dos and don’ts of effective job recruitment websites:
DO
Create an obvious, prominent link to your jobs from your institution's home page.
Communicate your institution's "brand." Use your "prospective students" page as a model – many of the same qualities that attract students will attract employees.
Put smiling faces of real employees on your jobs home page.
Lead with the most compelling reason a great hire wants to works at your institution – this can be anything from your location to your benefits to your culture, but really sell it.
Feature your most interesting jobs prominently.
Treat even your lowest level jobs as important – sell the groundskeepers as enthusiastically as the development directors.
Make faculty jobs as easy to find as staff jobs – even if they're not in the same database, provide clear links and instructions from your main jobs page.
Sell every job! Start each posting with a clear, concise and compelling statement of why candidates want this job!
Use language that creates a candidate focus – label the link to your application "I want this job" rather than "apply now"
Use technology to be polite – acknowledge receipt of applications, keep applicants informed as the search progresses, and remember that a polite rejection is vastly preferable to be kept hanging.
DON’T
Don't hide your jobs in confusing navigation or behind cryptic labels ("jobs" is a better link than "Join the team").
Don't communicate your ATS's brand. Don't make your applicant tracking system your recruiting page – remember that the FIRST thing great hires do is explore, not apply.
Don't use clip art! (it's ALWAYS obvious.)
Don't lead with off-putting legalese – at this point, you don't have applicants, just prospects. Save the mentions of drug testing, criminal background checks, and campus crime statistics for later in the process.
Don't treat all jobs as equally compelling – nothing is more off-putting to a senior applicant than seeing a job list with custodians and VPs lumped together.
Don't consider ANY job a commodity – every hire (even those custodians) has a contribution to make to the success of your institution.
Don't assume that no one's coming to your site to search for faculty jobs – they are!
Don't use internal job descriptions as external postings or treat a database view as a publicly available job list.
Don't treat candidates as data entry clerks – ask only for what you really need at each step of the process and keep things simple.
Don't use technology to commoditize your candidates – personalize email messages and make sure message templates can be adapted to unique requirements.