The first digital project I ever worked on was building a career website for German engineering giant Siemens. Since then I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of corporate career sites and I am currently working with a number of my clients to help them optimize this area of their talent acquisition strategy.
My guest this week is someone who shares my obsession with career sites. Bas Van De Haterd is an independent consultant and entrepreneur based in The Netherlands. For the last 10 years Bas has run a major piece of research which audits the career sites of the largest 500 Dutch employers and he has a huge amount of insight to share.
In the interview we discuss:
• How to audit a career site
• The single simple thing employers could do which would improve their response rates by 25%
• Three areas which can be improved to give a better candidate experience
• How to optimize a legacy ATS system to improve the application process
• The balance between jobs, conversion and employer branding
• Bas also talks about the development of mobile and shares his thoughts on innovation in this area.
This episode of the podcast is supported by Metashift
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for the podcast this week comes from my own company, Metashift. We live in an age of digital noise and distraction. Cutting through to connect and engage with your audience is a real challenge. Talent attraction is a focus for everyone, but how can you be sure you’re getting the attention necessary to persuade the right people to join your company? Metashift is a talent attention consultancy and we can help you optimize your talent attraction strategy to stand out and be heard. To find out more, go to www.talentattention.com or contact me directly on mattashift.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 71 of the Recruiting Future podcast. My first ever digital project was building a careers website for German engineering company Siemens in the late 1990s. Since then I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of corporate career sites and I work with a number of my clients to optimize this area of their talent acquisition strateg strategy. My guest this week is someone who shares my career site obsession. Bas Van De Haterd is an independent consultant and entrepreneur based in the Netherlands. For the last 10 years he has run a major piece of research which audits the career sites of the biggest 500 employers in the Netherlands. It was great to hear his insights and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the interview. Hi and welcome to the podcast.
Bas Van De Haterd [00:01:57]:
Hi, glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:02:02]:
Well, my name is Bas Van De Haterd. I’ve been self employed entrepreneur for the past 10 years advising companies on how to recruit better with new technology, mainly digital technology, but always looking for the combination between online and offline and just creating value by thinking, usually thinking differently.
Matt Alder [00:02:28]:
I always approve of thinking differently. You know, I think it’s the only way to go. So you’re sort of most famous for this big bit of annual research that you do in the Netherlands into career sites. Could you, could you tell everyone a bit, a bit more about that?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:02:48]:
Well, it’s called Digital Verve, which translates in English as digital recruiting, which sounds kind of boring. But when we started this 10 years ago, it was really a thing, you know, do you need your own recruitment site? Was actually a question which was asked back then or are we relying 100% on monster? And what we did was it started with a frustration because there was research into the best recruitment Dutch recruitment site which always nominated a winner which we thought was really crap. And at that point we decided we can do this better because one of the things the old research did and they quit a few years ago was just look at the website. And we said, but as soon as you start applying, that’s when you lose. Most candidates, they just look at the site, does it have really nice pictures and does it have the information? But they don’t actually look at what’s it like to apply with this website. And that’s what we started doing. And at some point we said to each other, so why don’t we just really apply at the website and look if they respond to our application? Because that’s kind of a big thing. If you have somebody applying at your company, you might actually want to give him a response if he’s got a job or not. It turned out that was the most amazing thing in the first year. It turned out to be really, really bad. It has improved over the years. So that’s basically what we’re researching. And we figured out that there’s over a hundred items which make a candidate experience on your website.
Matt Alder [00:04:38]:
I think it’s really interesting and I’ve, you know, I found, I pretty much found the same stuff sort of working in parallel in the uk when people sort of previously thought about corporate career sites, it was, you know, how pretty the pictures, how good is the photography and really looking at, looking at it holistically and understanding the candidate experience and the user interface and the workflow is, you know, is absolutely, is absolutely critical. And you know, it’s great that you’re doing this piece of work to, you know, to highlight what good practice is and where people can improve. Could you give people an idea of the scale of the research that you do? How many corporate recruiting sites do you look at every year as part of the research?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:05:28]:
Well, pretty much we got all the major and more well known companies and organization in the Netherlands. Since we’re not that big of a country, that’s about 500, which varies from our government institutions to police and defense to, well, all the major corporations from Unilever to Philips to the major retailers. Just about. If you got 500 companies in your research right now you’ve got everybody who’s actually recruiting more than a few jobs.
Matt Alder [00:06:06]:
A year from all the research you’ve done and sort of in particular, I suppose this year’s, this year’s research, what, what are the, I mean, obviously without going through all 100, what are the, what are the key things? Do you think that the, the best companies are doing, are doing well with their corporate career sites. What are the, what are the three or four things that, that people should focus on if they want to have a dramatic improvement in how they interface with potential candidates?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:06:37]:
Well, that’s the thing, Matt. I don’t think it’s three or four things. The thing that’s done, really, our winners have no weaknesses in the entire process. Every year, again, we see a few companies who just hit all the spots, right. So they got good photography, they got compelling text, but they’ve got a really great usability flow. They’ve optimized the recruiting process itself and they actually have the process behind it working. So you get a quick response, you get a decent response. It’s all about mimicking what you would do offline. You know, the perfect offline experience that you get when you walk into a three Michelin star restaurant online. And it’s not one thing, it’s not just about the great pictures, it’s not just about a good video, it’s about a total picture. And whenever I start an improvement process with a company improving it, I always go to their weakest points and improve them. Those are usually the things they don’t feel are important at all. So I never look at the things that are already at. If you look at a scale from 1 to 10, D8 or above, I always go to the 5 or the 6 because that’s what people, really good candidates drop off.
Matt Alder [00:08:12]:
Absolutely. And I completely get the, the complexity, the, you know, the complexity in this. And I think, you know, it’s probably why so many companies get this wrong because there’s, there are so many potential points of failure. I suppose I can’t give you the.
Bas Van De Haterd [00:08:29]:
Top three points where they go, where most go wrong. First of all, it’s the communication about the procedure. Every company has written out, you know, how many interviews are you going to get, when are you going to get a response, etc, etc, in house. Just for some reason, under half of them in the Netherlands actually communicate this procedure. This year we were under 40%. So 60% of the people say please apply. But we’re not going to tell you when we’re going to reply to you, we’re not going to tell you if you get an interview, how many interviews are you going to get? We’re not going to tell you if you’re going to have to do some testing, etc. Etc. And it turns out that over a quarter of the applicants say if this is not on the website, I’m not even applying. Especially the better Educated. They want to know, how are you going to treat my application? Over 60% does not have anything on their website about this. The second part where there’s, in my opinion, a huge failure is the alert service in the Netherlands. Two thirds, 65% says, if I don’t have a vacancy for you right now, please go away. No, maybe I have a job for you tomorrow, but there’s no way to register to keep in touch. Now. That’s amazing for me. I mean, you’ve got somebody on your website and you just throw them away. And the third part where it goes really bad, and we all know the reason for this is the moment you push Apply and then you go into the ats. And it used to be that when you wrote a letter, the recruiter was doing all the work and typing it into the system. And now we just think, let the candidate type it all in. While there are so really good applications like for example, the text extraction of text kernel, it just adds it. You can use apply with LinkedIn. And yes, that’s still possible despite the fact that LinkedIn is frustrating the process. The candidate experience experience usually drops to below zero as soon as you press Apply. And that’s where in my experience with my customers, most really good candidates drop out of your process. Those are the three main areas where it’s where the candidate experience is easily improved.
Matt Alder [00:11:05]:
That’s really interesting in terms of the Apply because it’s something that I find when I’m working through stuff with my customers as well. And obviously one of the issues with this is ATS systems that have been built in a way that isn’t candidate friendly. In your research, are there companies who’ve taken this kind of sort of legacy ATS experience and enhanced it to improve the candidate experience? They haven’t changed their ats, but they’ve. They’ve done things to enhance the, the kind of. The basic experience it offers.
Bas Van De Haterd [00:11:44]:
Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve seen a lot of really good examples and then I see a lot of really terrible examples. Well, one of the most, and I hope I’m not making people angry right now, but one of the most terrible ATS I’ve found is Telayo when it comes to the candidate experience. Yet I’ve seen a couple of companies who say, okay, so Telayo demands a login function. That’s something which is. Well, in webshops we, you know, drop the first, you need to create an account and login before you can buy anything. About five to 10 years ago. So we can’t ask our candidates to do that. So I found that one of the companies from the Netherlands, actually Taxkernel, has now built a system where you can just upload your resume and it does all the manual actions that you need to do for Telayo. So it actually creates an account, it randomizes a password in this account, it sends you all the information and it just goes through the motions that Teleo wants a candidate to do. So if even the worst candidate experience ats, if it’s possible to automate the process in a candidate friendly way, it’s possible for all of them. One of the things I at some point did with one of my clients, they had also very candidate unfriendly ats which needed to be in an iframe situation where you lost all visibility and you just went from a really warm, nice website where you felt at home to, well, the back end of a computer system. And what we did was we literally mimicked the fields in this from the ATS that we needed to have. We rebuilt them in a new field on the website and we just pushed them one by one to the ats. It wasn’t rocket science. We just said, you know, this is how it looks like. Okay, and here we can make it the way we want it to look.
Matt Alder [00:14:06]:
Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think one of the biggest problems is people don’t always appreciate that if your ATS gives a, you know, a terrible candidate experience. But you can’t move on from your ATS because, you know, it’s your recruitment system or it’s, you know, it’s not something you can change, that it can be enhanced. And I think, you know, it’s great to hear that, you know, there are companies in the research and people that you’ve worked with who’ve done that. One of the other areas that’s certainly problematic, you know, in the US and the UK and Australia and various other kind of places that I’ve done research into is mobile. What are you seeing with the mobile interfaces or versions of these career sites in the Netherlands? And how is that changing over time?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:14:57]:
It’s really amazing. Really great question. Because last year we found that I was very happy because for the first time half of the corporate recruitment sites was actually accessible on mobile, which didn’t mean it was really well accessible, but it was accessible. This year, over 85% of them is accessible. So we’ve seen a huge increase between in the year 2016 and now. I have to say we’ve also seen a lot of new recruitment, corporate recruitment sites being launched this year. But those who weren’t launched have made their website responsive. So now over 85% is accessible. It doesn’t mean you can apply at them because over half of them still has the traditional application system in place, which means it doesn’t work on mobile because you on an iPhone, if you want to add a resume, it opens your photo roll your picture role, which doesn’t work. So you need to adjust the application process, which is really cool because in 25% of the Dutch corporate career sites, the system actually recognizes is the fact that you are on a mobile system and adjusts the application system accordingly.
Matt Alder [00:16:25]:
I think it’s great to hear that. I think it’s great that there’s more mobile uptake and it’s great that people are understanding that apply process now. I think that the Netherlands is probably ahead of lots of places, you know, lots of other places in the world with that. So it’s interesting to hear, interesting to hear what’s happening and what’s being done. Another question for you based around the sort of types of company that you talk to. So in terms of companies who are doing career sites really, really well, is, is that decided by sector? Is it, you know, people who have skill shortages or the public sector, you know, are there particularly sectors who are doing better than, than other sectors?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:17:17]:
Yes, there are, but it’s usually instigated by one individual. Let me explain the winner from our with the research. We also have an award. The winner of the very first award actually won it six years later with her new company as well. She used to be at Reid Business. That was the winner of our very first award and then she won it with one of our electricity network companies. They were way behind. She came in, she decided we need to make a really good candidate experience because we are going to face shortage. Not even at this point, but we are going to. And what happens was that all the competitors, they won our award, all their competitors started looking at them and we seen them all improve. And this is exactly what happens every time somebody comes into a company, they build a really great experience and all of their competitors, the direct competitors, start saying, wow. But now they’re the greatest. Now we know what to look for. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this research and especially the award is so important. We give credits to the ones that are really, really good and not just based on what we think is good, but based on genuine research, which is good. And from that point we put the spotlight on them. And every year again we see that their Competitors are catching up. Maybe an interesting fact as well. The first year we did this, we don’t bring out lists on how well everybody did, but we do have a list on the back end. The first year, Nobody scored a 7, even a 7. I think a 6.5 on a scale from 1 to 10 was the highest number we actually saw. This year over 80 companies in the research go above a 7 and over 20 go above an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10. Because we’re all looking at the very best companies and we’re mimicking the really great things they do. And some companies just completely mimic the winners and then they don’t. They forget their own company, they forget their own culture in it. And a few really great ones look at what’s good from this, what’s our culture and how do we match it.
Matt Alder [00:19:52]:
That’s absolutely fascinating because it really sort of mirrors what I found over the last 10 years, that a lot of innovation, a lot of excellence is driven by the same individuals. And they do it time and time again when they move, when they move from different companies into different industries and really kind of raise the industry up with them. So, you know, it’s great that you’re, you’re doing this research and having these awards and sort of bringing, putting a spotlight on those people and really just trying to make the industry, industry better. I think that’s, that’s, that’s fantast. So, last question, Innovation. What, you know, what’s happening that’s, that’s different this year? What, what are the trends? What have you got your eye on? How do you think career sites are going to be developing in the future?
Bas Van De Haterd [00:20:43]:
Well, the thing I’ve seen most is we are putting the vacancy in the center of the career site. As far as I’m concerned, the question does it need to be an employer branding site or does it need to be a conversion driven site? Is over. It’s going to be a conversion driven site simply because analytics show that between 80 and 90% of your visitors never see anything else but the vacancy. And what we’re seeing right now from the very best, from almost all the nominees for this year’s award is that they put their vacancy in the center of the site, but they put their employer brand name around the vacancy. So we’ve got one of our greatest web shops who actually says here you can look at your workplace and they give you an inside street view with Google now you can walk around in the entire company. They’ve put up pictures, they made a video per Vacancy we’ve got. What I said was in the beginning, you know, the procedure, it’s almost never communicated. Yet the ones who are doing it great made actually visuals about the procedure. So they not only wrote in an enormous amount of words what you’re going to happen, they said step one and they made a picture and a few words. Step two, a picture and a few words. So those are things we’re seeing happening right now. And those procedures are also communicated, not in a different section, but with the Vacancy. So what I’m seeing is that the Vacancy is really coming to the focus point of we’re building our employer branding around the vacancy. And the other really cool things that have popped up this year were a few really nice cultural tests. Do you fit with this company? And then not some standardized, we bought it from a third party supplier test, but things that are really specific for this company. In the Netherlands, Vodafone now has a really, really cool one, Armor Port winner from last year, which is a very small mental health care company, but they have their own cultural test. So what I’m seeing is, and I’m really happy about that as well, budget isn’t a constraint, but the people behind the system who are actually willing to take the risks say, listen, this is our company, this is our culture, and this is how we do it. One of the nominees to wrap this up with is the Dutch Auto Club. They’re not a big company. They don’t have a lot of money. They didn’t spend, I think they spent less money on their recruitment sites than on LinkedIn recruiter seats. Yet they built a really great experience because they actually thought about the experience up front and they thought about what is our culture, what do we do? We help people move on with their mobility, we fix the cars and that’s how the. And you just, you feel the enthusiasm about, about helping people on their websites and that’s really cool.
Matt Alder [00:24:09]:
Bas, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bas Van De Haterd [00:24:11]:
Thank you for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:24:13]:
My thanks to Bas. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes, Stitcher or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
