The digital recruitment world can be a daunting realm for employers. Compounding the matter is determining what constitutes a successful talent acquisition campaign. With so many industries across so many mediums, it’s easy to get lost in the muck. Luckily, we have done the dirty work for you by compiling online job applicant conversion rates from 286 career sites across 20 industries over the past year and a half; moreover, we broke that information down even further to include the particular medium of online traffic they’re coming from to give you ideas on how to take your recruitment to the next level.
Ignoring Bots
To ensure that the data we compiled is truly reflective of potential applicants, we added filters within Google Analytics that excluded traffic with visit durations less than five seconds. This safeguards the data from any “bot traffic,” which is when pseudo-visits are received from search engines’ algorithms when they’re indexing a site.
Where Are They Coming From?
Traffic mediums determine the type of visits your career site is getting. In addition to industry, we broke down conversion rates by the type of traffic they come from. For this, we used four primary mediums: organic (search engines), paid (PPC, CPC, CPM), referral (job aggregates, corporate sites, etc.), and social (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al.). Each medium is distinct not only in how they send traffic to a site, but in creating meaning behind users’ habits. (For example, paid traffic tends to have some the highest conversion rates across several industries, which is a result of keyword targeting.)
Who Are We Focusing On?
As stated previously, we’re looking at 286 career sites across 20 industries, and each industry is different in the type of applicants they attract. The retail industry tends to have the highest conversion rate, but that is largely due to the fact that they focus on a broader range of applicant skills, thus widening the talent pool. Conversely, the technology industry tends to have lower conversion rates given that the skill bar is typically set higher than other industries. (Note: The service industry has no data for the social medium due to non-existent samples.)
What Does This Mean?
The old saying “time is money” has never rang truer than now in the recruitment landscape. Any process that efficiently obtains new and useful talent should also be a cost-effective one. Challenge yourself to see where your industry’s strength lies while also giving yourself a leg-up on the competition. Are you truly aiming, or are you just shooting in the dark?
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Hi Guys,
We are runing a similar career site audit in Hungary for our Clients (we are the largest job portal in Hungary). We aim to highlight to our HR clients the importance of good career site on desktop and increasingly on mobile.
Could you please share with us some detail regarding the methodology you used? Did you also measure the application churn depending on the application time on the particular sites?
Thanks for your reply!
Daniel
Can you articulate what data sets were used for the conversion calculation? For instance, views to application start, views to application completion, application start to application complete??
Straight Google Analytics across a few hundred career sites.