First impressions count, to fourteen to be exact.
It was reported that even before the pandemic began, candidates spent an average of only 14 seconds deciding whether they were interested in working for you. A slender figure that is unlikely to have got any longer as we now find ourselves in the midst of the Great Resignation.
The market is more candidate-driven than ever and is filled with job-seekers with more options and higher expectations. Their career searches are honing in on details such as company values, culture and authenticity, and it is up to HR teams to tell that story.
Given the competition for candidates’ attention, alongside substantial recruitment demands many are facing, a trusty content management system (CMS) can be your biggest ally to optimize your recruitment marketing and make your organization stand out from the crowd.
The good news is that Avature has launched new capabilities as part of its holistic and comprehensive CMS offering that give you even more ownership of your employer narrative. It enables you to put your content’s best foot forward and helps create a consistent candidate experience, all while staying on your toes for whatever the market throws at you.
Putting the Power in Your Hands to Tell Your Employer Story
One of the biggest bugbears that historically stemmed from creating and editing career sites and landing pages (LPs) to make a compelling first impression is that it didn’t always match the dynamism of talent campaigns. Making changes required calling in the IT cavalry and often the vendor, and the time it took between idea and execution almost rendered the process a nonstarter.
Luckily times have changed. Now there are many systems that allow users to be in control and make the changes they need without the need for expert coders. This is good news, but recruitment teams still felt like their campaigns could be more fluid and creative so wanted more tools to make this possible.
Theme Builder for Landing Pages, the latest addition to our CMS suite, does just this by giving users the power to own and create a variety of themes that help bring an employer brand to life.
For context, a theme is essentially a new landing page skin, built from a series of predetermined settings that encompass the layout, branding and multimedia elements, designed for a specific recruitment objective.
Previously, customers would use Avature’s Landing Page Builder which enabled them to create as many landing pages as they liked, but using themes that had been developed in conjunction with us at Avature. The Theme Builder for Landing Pages grants you even more independence and creativity, as now the theme creation process is also in your hands.
To give an example, you can build themes around International Women’s Day, Black History Month or Pride to showcase why diversity is so important to you. Adding videos of employees, senior leaders and HR team members sharing their experiences could end up being the deciding factor for someone choosing to work for you.
Themes can also allow you to proactively target a range of different audiences with tailored content. Suppose you are building a recruitment campaign to attract specific groups, such as students or veterans. In that case, the landing pages can be adapted to appeal to those audiences.
Having a wide range of customizable options, from texts and titles to colors, formats, sizes, spacing, backgrounds, images and links all at your fingertips, puts talent acquisition teams on the front foot when designing pages to make that all-important first impression.
Live previews also allow users to view their pages across desktop, tablet or mobile within the tool to make sure all the content is making the same impression regardless of the device candidates are using to view it.
Consistent Recruitment Marketing Campaigns Across A Holistic System
The advantages of the Avature Theme Builder for Landing Pages are clear! But what really packs a punch when it comes to showcasing your employer brand, is consistency across all channels. So let’s see how this feature fits into the Avature CMS panorama:
- Portal Content Editor – allows you to make changes to your career site or any other portal in real-time. This tool is a one-stop shop that lets you make content changes to Avature portals via a centralized UI that enables rapid deployment, agility and easy maintenance.
- Landing Page Builder – provides the foundation to create infinite landing pages using your themes library to build full-blown lead capture pages.
- Theme Builder – brings any theme you want to life through intuitive UI. It empowers you to build and manage branding themes for all the pages you create within the Landing Page Builder, helping you create multiple branding skins and deliver targeted content to take your recruitment initiatives to the next level.
With this holistic toolbox at their disposal, recruitment marketers can elevate their employer brand consistently across all touchpoints. For example, matching landing page images with those used in Twitter or Instagram campaigns or designing eye-catching themes for landing pages that also feature in email communications by harnessing the soon-to-be-released Email Theme Builder.
Importantly with all these tools, you can grant different levels of permissions to ensure that only selected brand ambassadors can create or sign off themes and other branded assets, further ensuring a consistent message is delivered.
Staying Agile in an Ever-Changing Landscape
In addition to keeping your branding fresh, CMS tools allow companies to react in real-time to changing circumstances. The pandemic threw up plenty of scenarios that required recruitment teams to keep their content relevant, whether it was hiring freezes, the shift from in-person events to virtual, the need to connect with an increasingly remote candidate base, or now the subsequent talent shortage. CMS tools let you stay agile, relevant and competitive.
Fundamental market changes aside, candidates that regularly visit career sites and landing pages expect to find new and relevant information on every occasion. New themes on both email and LPs make it easy to achieve this. Whether that is a specific festive theme that can be used exclusively for a month, seasonal messaging that changes every three months or even a theme that you can use for just 24 hours for events such as International Women’s Day.
Time to Create Your Own Award-Winning Candidate Experience
When it comes to attracting sought-after talent, CMS tools must match the energy of your organization’s innovation and the market in which you operate. Creative recruitment runs through the most successful hiring strategies and makes a splash from the moment a candidate comes into contact with your employer brand.
As a minimum, your platform should have CMS capabilities that empower your employer value proposition. So sing it from the rooftops, build the themes to accompany your campaigns and make an exciting first impression. Doing so could mean the difference between securing or missing out on the candidates you need to drive your business forward in this challenging market.
