How many of us actively browse Netflix to find something to watch? Most of us just browse the top sections Netflix recommends and start watching one of the shows or movies they push over there.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. 75% of Netflix consumers watch something the platform recommends instead of browsing the whole platform until they find something themselves.
Netflix isn’t the only internet giant that became big by recommending the right content. Think of brands like Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, and so on that all thrive on recommendation systems.
Let’s take a closer look at how we can implement valuable recommendation strategies in the recruitment industry and what their successes are.
What’s the use of it?
Using recommendations gives you the power to provide some kind of direction to your visitors. The job hunting experience can be quite intense, especially when browsing job boards or recruitment websites. There are an immense amount of vacancies available, which often overwhelms visitors and makes them bounce.
We can easily compare this to Spotify for example.
There is a ton of music released on the platform each week, which makes it next to impossible for its users to stay up to date with all the new releases.
To battle this, Spotify introduced the Discover Weekly playlist that gets powered by AI and recommendation systems to make it a lot easier for its users to find new music that matches their interests.
Giving your visitors a sense of orientation benefits your conversion rate and improves the customer experience and engagement with your brand, and makes you stand out from your competitors.
On average, introducing recommendations on your website results in a 10 to 30% higher conversion rate.
Make your job hunt easier
Imagine you’re a marketing manager that’s browsing a recruitment website for a new job and all you get to see are logistics vacancies. Only a few vacancies match your interest in marketing and you have to keep scrolling until you find them.
What a waste of time, right?
I already hear you think: “Oh that’s not us. We have already implemented filters that make it easier for applicants to filter through all our vacancies.”. I have to agree with you on this one, however, these filters are often too broadly defined and aren’t tailored to someone’s specific profile.
Just like Netflix and Spotify, you can recommend the right jobs that match someone’s interests and profile without making it hard for them to find these. The AI algorithm will automatically analyze their profile and what they’re looking for and link the right vacancies to them. This makes it a lot easier for your applicants to get closer to their next job and simplifies the recruitment process drastically.
Improve your vacancy page
The first way to implement recommendations in your candidate’s job search is by adding them to your vacancy pages. Doing so allows you to guide them toward other relevant or similar vacancies if the one (s)he’s looking at isn’t a match. This often keeps visitors engaged because it’s easier to explore other relevant vacancies and they won’t have to go back to the search overview this way.
One of the recruitment companies that does this well, is ASAP. It’s a fast-growing staffing company with over 80 offices spread over Belgium. They experienced a high bounce rate from their job pages whenever someone didn’t apply. To fight this, they decided to implement recommendation boxes which resulted in a 29% increase in applications.
Make your search page more relevant
Another useful implementation of recommendations in the recruitment industry is implementing them on your search page. If your visitor didn’t interact with a specific vacancy, it might be interesting to show similar vacancies on the search page when they decide to continue their search.
This once more fights the struggle of having to go through all vacancies again and brings them closer to relevant vacancies from the moment they go back to the search page to continue their job hunt.
Aglitas is a Belgian recruitment expert that implemented this strategy on their search page to simplify their candidate experience and make it easier to interact with relevant jobs.
They decided to show recommended jobs at both the top and bottom of their search pages, which resulted in 7% of all visitors interacting with at least one of these jobs and 22% of them applying to one of them.
Stop your applicant from leaving
Now what if your visitor doesn’t feel like browsing your website again and decides to leave without converting or without applying to one of your open vacancies? This might feel like a loss you’re going to take, but none of us like losing, right?
One more way to implement recommendations in order to keep your visitors engaged is by implementing them in a pop-up that detects exit intent. This pop-up will reveal itself at the time your visitor is giving a signal of leaving your website and will try to convince them to stay a little longer by showing them relevant open vacancies they might not have noticed before.
Start People is a recruitment company that is part of RGF Staffing and uses this strategy to keep visitors engaged on their website. Using these pop-ups increases the number of people that look at other vacancies by 10% and 46% of them end up applying to one of the recommended vacancies.
You’ve got mail
I have one more way to use recommendations, is by implementing them in your mailings. Set up a job alert that visitors can subscribe to across various touchpoints on your website. This allows you to retarget them later on with emails and send them relevant new vacancies to keep them engaged even when they have left your website.
Absolute Jobs is a Belgian recruitment company that does this very well. They offer their visitors to subscribe to their job alerts throughout various touchpoints across their website and send them relevant jobs later on in their mailboxes.
These targeted job alerts on average have a 70% CTR of which 20% of them end up applying to one of the jobs.
Don’t hesitate, it’s your turn now
As you can see, recommendation strategies don’t only work for internet giants but hold a huge potential for recruitment websites as well. They allow you to guide them, push them toward a relevant job or keep them engaged a little longer.
Start experimenting with these implementations and I promise you’ll see your conversion rates increase in no time.