Unlocking the information that candidates really care about when considering a new position

Here at Code For Cash, we are a 3^rd party tech recruiter, which means that we are basically running a funnel.

Based on my background as a growth and revenue engineer at Lookout (which my colleagues turned into a $1b+ company 🦄), I know that the recipe for success is systematically testing tactics for optimizing each segment of the funnel.

Here’s a table of some of our open campaigns:

As you can see, we are running a weighted average conversion rate of 3.06%– plenty of room for improvement.  Through tons of iteration, I have grinded landing page conversion rates up from 0.5% to 10%+ – it’s all about kaizen.  Improving, getting more traffic, talking to the customer base, rinse and repeat.  I know it’s possible to improve because I have the successful experiential reference points.

So we recently bore witness to the Twitter activity of @jenistyping who was early employee and Head of People at Lever, and we were impressed…the radar went off, the alarm bells in my head started ringing: we should be paying attention to this.  So we got in touch and Jen made a referral to Peoplism.  Liz Kofman-Burns did a quick (hey, we’re bootstrapping!) review of our processes and came up with the following recommendations regarding information that we could include on each of our landing pages:

1. URM candidates (but everyone really) wants to know: Will I belong? Is this a place where I’ll be treated fairly? How do I know that?
   1. Some ways to answer this are: getting an inventory of the team’s personalities and interests; understanding whether the company has historically been promoting from within; checking out the company’s Glassdoor presence; measuring employee tenure by reviewing LinkedIn profiles of current employees.
2. What’s the impact the company has on the world?  (An evidentiated huge priority for millennials).
3. What colleagues are they going to be interacting with day to day, and who benefits from their work?  i.e. what is this role’s impact on their colleagues?
4. What are the growth and learning opportunities for everyone in the company?
5. What’s work of this position like day to day?
6. What are they going to be doing in 6 months?  In a year?
7. What specific skills and values are you looking for? What will candidates be evaluated on?
8. What are the interview questions?
9. What is the interview *process*?
10. Clear delineation of absolute hard skill requirements vs. nice-to-have
11. Any compensation hints or guidelines

So, step one of improving our conversion rate is rewriting the stories we’re telling on the landing page to include the aforementioned information.

A lot of our clients are startups, “reassembling the airplane in the air.”  So it’s not always possible to provide absolute clarity regarding these topics.  But we’re going to systematically provide as much information as we have, and when we’re limited, we’re going to be clear about that.

Another improvement that’s almost always an easy win is to give the landing pages a facelift from the design team – doing the work of design improvements shows people that you care.  Here’s a preview of what the new design looks like:

And one of the secrets in the digital community is that your content is not your content – it’s the title and the thumbnail image.  So we’re going to be careful about what thumbnail images we provide our various landing pages.  This is the guide we’re following to keep a strong technical handle on how our preview images render. 

Yes, a well-run funnel is only as good as the quality and relevancy of the people entering… we are not gonna speak to our experiments regarding this yet.

Thanks for staying tuned.