Boost Your Talent Attraction: Mastering Career Site Traffic KPIs

In today's competitive talent market, attracting the right candidates is more crucial than ever. One of the most effective ways to do this is by optimizing your career site.

Talent who apply to your career page are 3.5x more likely to be hired compared to applicants on job boards, so by driving traffic to your career site, you are able to give your employer brand time to shine and to convert more talent applications.

This guide will walk you through the importance of driving traffic to your career site, setting up KPIs, and measuring them effectively.

Why Focus on Your Career Site?

According to our KPI Guide across 549 KPIs in 17 different industries, talent leaders stated that improving career site traffic is their #1 focus.

Career site traffic is a direct reflection of your brand's visibility and reach in the talent market, in fact 52% of candidates first look at the company's sites and social media to learn about potential employers before applying.

Prioritizing your career site traffic can also lead to:

1. Enhanced Employer Branding: Your career site is the perfect platform to showcase your company's culture, values, and mission. It gives your employer brand a chance to shine and attract the right talent.
2. Control Over Candidate Experience: Unlike job boards or recruitment agencies, your career site allows you to control the candidate experience from start to finish. This ensures a consistent and positive experience for potential hires.
3. Cost Savings: By reducing reliance on paid job boards or recruitment agencies, you can save up to 20% on hiring costs.

Building out Your Career Site KPIs

Determining your KPIs for the year involves a strategic approach to align your organizational goals and objectives with your overall employer brand. 

To create 'SMART' KPIs that are:

• Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve
• Measurable: Ensure that the KPI can be quantified
• Achievable: Set realistic targets
• Relevant: Ensure the KPI aligns with your company's goals
• Time-bound: Set a timeframe for achieving the KPI

Follow this 7 step process to define, measure and refine your career site KPIs:

If improving career site traffic is a core focus for you this year, some examples of KPIs you could set are:

1. Increase traffic to career site from organic search by x%
2. Reduce bounce rate on site by x% 
3. Increase unique visitors to the job page on the career site by x%
4. Ensure average time on site is above x seconds/minutes
5. Increase traffic from hard to hire talent by x%

For real examples of KPIs for career site traffic by 549 leaders across 17 industries, download our 2023 KPI Guide.

20 Ways to Measure Your Career Site Traffic

Measuring your results is the heart of an employer branding program. Without understanding what is and isn’t working, it is difficult to make improvements. 

Once you’ve established your KPIs and goals for the year, rather than focus on all metrics that are available, it’s recommended to focus only on the key metrics that align with your company’s goals.

Some of the metrics you can use to track your Career Site KPIs are:

1. Total Traffic - total number of visitors to your career site
2. New Visitors - total number of first-time visitors to your site
3. Returning Visitors - total number of repeat visitors
4. Bounce Rates - percentage of visitors who click away from the site after only viewing 1 page
5. Average Session Duration - average amount of time a visitor spends on the site
6. Page Views - total number of individual pages viewed by visitors
7. Pages Per Session - average of the number of pages viewed during a session.
8. Traffic Source - where the traffic is coming from (e.g. organic or paid search, direct traffic, social media, or referrals)
9. Conversion Rate - percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as applying for a job
10. Click-Through Rate (CTR) - percentage of visitors who click on a specific link vs the total number of visitors
11. Exit Rate - percentage of visitors who exit the site from a specific page
12. Top Landing Pages - most common entry pages for visitors
13. Top Exit Pages - most common pages from which visitors exit the site
14. Mobile Traffic - number of visitors accessing the career site via mobile devices
15. User Demographics - information about the age, gender, location, etc. of site visitors
16. User Interests - identify the interests of visitors based on their online behavior 
17. Job Application Completion Rate - percentage of started applications that are completed
18. Social Media Traffic - number of visitors from social media platforms
19. Employee Referral Rate - number of visitors referred to the site by employees
20. SEO Ranking - search engine ranking of the career site for relevant keywords

3 Concrete Steps to Increase Your Career Site Traffic

Career Site Traffic KPIs are indispensable in enhancing your employer brand's visibility and reach.

By implementing the below concrete steps, you could see a significant increase in your career traffic and reduce your reliance on paid platforms.

1. Website referrals: Referrals are a crucial source of traffic for businesses. Organic search, which includes website referrals, drives 51% of all website traffic. As part of your referral strategy, include links back to your site from as many channels as possible, including:

• Job Ads on Job Boards
• Company Profiles & Review Sites
• Social Media Profiles
• ATS Candidate Communications

2. Optimize Your SEO: Approximately 70% of job seekers start their search on Google, and over 25% of people click the first Google search result compared to a 2.5% click-through rate for the 10th position. To ensure you get noticed by job seekers, you need to optimize your career site and individual job pages (on-page SEO) and build up your site’s authority (off-page SEO).

3. Introduce Interactive Elements: Incorporate chatbots or live chats to answer potential candidates' queries in real time. 98% of candidates indicated they planned to apply to the company after interacting with employees based on a live chat.

For 15 more concrete steps to increase your career site traffic check out our full strategy plan which is free as part of our 2023 KPI Guide.