Is Your Website a Factor in Hiring?

Your website is out of date. Maybe you’ve tried to make the case to leadership (or maybe you ARE leadership) and the question you have to answer is: Where is the ROI in a website overhaul?

For some businesses, this can be very straightforward. The more transactional the products and services you have to sell are, the easier it’s going to be to show that your website can increase leads or sales, raise average sale amounts, and even shorten the time to close new work. Maybe it even opens up new verticals or industries that you’ve been trying to break into.

For other businesses, the website isn’t about driving “leads and sales” as it is about building long term relationships with clients and partners. You have to shape a conversation, build trust, reinforce the brand narrative you’re trying to sell.

But in both of these cases, as we try to consider the various use cases of different business models, we’ve fallen into a trap. We’re evaluating the value proposition and the first place our mind has gone is sales. Revenue. Cash in the door.

And that’s perfectly natural. Website projects, or any marketing effort really, can be expensive and take time and energy. It’s natural to want to look for the pay-off in dollars-and-cents terms.

But that’s not the whole picture.

In fact, most of the traffic coming to your site (>98%) is not seriously evaluating your company as a prospective client at all. Setting aside a large portion (~50%) that is bots and spam, the remaining traffic is a mix of:

• Window shoppers & tire kickers
• Vendors looking to sell you something
• Competitors
• Industry media
• Internal team members
• Students doing research
• Strategic partners
• That one office cleaning company
• AND job seekers

After prospective clients as a key audience, prospective employees may be the most important audience of the remaining traffic visiting your website.

They may want something from you (a job), but what they are giving up in return is not trivial. It’s their career – maybe years of their lives. Why would they choose you over thousands of other places to work?

The balance of power between employers and the workforce is constantly in flux. This was on display during the pandemic in a big way and in the ensuing hangover that followed, with stimulus chasing stimulus until the bubble burst. What usually doesn’t change however, is competition for the best talent. Especially as our workforce becomes more automated, it also necessarily becomes more technologically saturated, and requires more education or experience in order to thrive.

Gone are the days of walking out of high school and into a job at Ford to work the same spot on the line for 40+ years until you retire. Today’s manufacturing workforce is an increasingly skilled one, involving technicians, operators, and integrators that need to be familiar with highly specialized, advanced machinery and software alike.

As an agency working in manufacturing tech, much of what we’ve heard from our clients is that they are struggling to fill roles. More than that, the struggle to get the best people to fill critical skilled roles is fierce.

If I had to put this into buckets I would broadly generalize by saying:

• Manufacturers are struggling to convince the next generation entering the workforce that they want to work in manufacturing.
• Providers of manufacturing technology are struggling as they compete for a tight pool of qualified, highly educated/trained candidates (engineers, operators, techs, etc.).

Given that recruiting is clearly an important audience to address, I think the next logical question is: Is your website really a crucial factor in one of the more important decisions that job seekers will make about how they spend their career?

Is Your Website a Factor in Hiring?

The simplest way to frame it is this: We aren’t arguing that people will want to work at your company because they are excited about how great your website is. People will decide to work at your company because they are excited about you. The job of the website is to help get them excited about you.

As stated above, more time and energy in marketing is put into focusing on sales activity than recruiting, most of the research that I’ve seen about visitor behavior has been from a sales perspective. However, that research is almost unanimous in its conclusions, and those conclusions are as applicable to a recruiting audience as a sales one:

People are spending more time in the buying cycle researching you before they reach out.

They don’t come to your website to get your contact information, they come to your website to decide if they want to contact you at all. More and more of the buying cycle is occurring before the first touch point with sales, more of it is occurring online, and I think it’s safe to assume that the same is true of prospective employees considering employers. They are doing their homework before they decide if they want to apply.

So we’ve established that talent recruitment is an audience we don’t want to ignore. But we have multiple audiences to address and only one website. In practical terms, what does this look like?

Brand Messaging

Fortunately, there is a way we can speak to all of our audiences at once, and have the desired effect: Focus on the brand message.

By making a bold statement about who you are, what your mission is, and who you serve, you can simultaneously signal to your prospective customers that you’re passionate about them and their industry, while also communicating an inspiring vision to talent about why they would want to spend their life working at your company.

Too often, I talk to people in our industry, either in client meetings or tradeshows, and they say something to the effect of, “What we do is boring.” This is a mindset we need to reject if we want to attract the best talent (or the best clients)! What we do in manufacturing tech is not boring.

Speaking personally, when I decided to niche my marketing agency down into focusing on manufacturing tech, it was because we wanted to work with people in manufacturing tech who were doing cool things! The fact that we work with clients who contribute to building next generation electric vehicles, medical technology, and rocket ships (and yes, even chainsaw mufflers) makes me want to get out of bed in the morning.

There are many jobs where you can’t tie your work to anything tangible at the end of the day. In manufacturing we are building things. Exciting things! Useful things! Necessary things!

Injecting some of that excitement and sense of mission into your messaging is a great place to start. But from there, you need to put yourself in the shoes of a prospective employee and think about the kind of content you would want to see if you were them. You’re still selling, just to a different audience with a different message.

Take a hard look at your current website and how you’re presenting yourself, and ask yourself:

• If I was accepting a position here, would I be excited to tell the people in my life about it?
• Would I want to show off the organization I’m joining?

Your Careers Page Is Not For Job Listings

For years, every careers page that we built was simply a listing of open positions, and perhaps a link or form to apply to a position. While this is functional, it’s become less essential as more companies use software platforms as part of their hiring process, many of which contain listing pages and application portals. The old “job listing” page on your website has been replaced with a single link to the hiring portal the company is using.

Conveniently, this has freed up the careers section of your website to give you more real estate to focus on the “Why” instead of the “What”.

You need to talk to prospective employees about why they want to come work with you and be part of your team, and unlike the homepage, this is the place on your site where you can do so explicitly.

What you can say will be different from organization to organization, and it goes without saying that you can’t talk about programs or benefits you don’t have, so some of these things may be aspirational goals that you set for your company and culture.

This might include highlighting things like:

Employee Tenure

How long do people stay at your company on average? How long have the longest employees worked there?

Company Culture

This is a branding question. Do you want to frame your company as somewhere that values work-life balance, or would you rather lean into the idea that you’re going to work hard, but on exciting and groundbreaking technologies? There’s no one right answer.

Training and Upskilling Programs

Do you offer internships? Do you pay for employees to get training? Maybe you invest in other forms of professional development like sending your people to conventions or conferences. You can be creative about how you frame this as long as it’s also honest.

Employee Success Stories

We put a ton of effort into client case studies. Why not put the same effort into telling the stories of employee growth and success? Did you have an intern who has now been an employee for 10 years? Did someone start as a tech and now they lead a department? What does success mean to your team and your company?

Benefits Programs

This one is fairly straight forward, but we’re not suggesting you post salary ranges on the site unless you feel moved to do so. You don’t have to spell out all the details, but you can set expectations about healthcare options, life and disability insurance, and retirement plans, etc.

PTO is also a great one to lean into because it doesn’t require the same level of commitment as some of these other categories. You can simply decide what kind of policies you offer.

Also don’t forget there are lots of ways you can emphasize PTO: holidays, sick days, vacation days, etc. Do you offer paternity/maternity leave? (Great overlap on that last one with company culture. Are you family friendly?)

People Read Your About Page

Finally, recognize that stories matter. Even your company history. You may think no one reads it, but the “about” page actually is often the next place people go on a website after the homepage.

The story you have to tell will again vary based on the type of company you are.

If you’ve been around for 100 years, own the legacy: talk about the things you’ve done over the generations.

If you’re a start up, talk about what inspired you to start your company, how you’re disrupting the industry: talk about the things you’re going to do.

“About” content exists on more than just your about page, and how your sitemap is structured will vary, however other content that falls under this umbrella will include:

Management/Team Bios

I tend to favor a light touch here. It’s fine to have these, but unless you have some really exciting celebrity credentials to share, this is the one area where prospects don’t need to hear you talk more about yourself.

Just like when you’re writing a resume, you want to think about what someone else reading this would care about. Even though it’s about you, it’s actually about them, whether “them” is prospective clients or employees.

Client Lists

Sometimes who you’re working with or what you’re working on is as exciting as any other part of the picture. If you work with known brands on known products, this can be a huge motivator.

Timelines

This tends to be a UI element that we see companies with longer legacies lean into. Sometimes these are gratuitous and tacky, but if you have real information to share, and especially if they back up a comprehensive brand story you’re trying to tell, they can totally work.

Mission Statements

Your website should absolutely convey a sense of mission, a sense of purpose. But it should be baked into the messaging of your site on every page. If you need a couple paragraphs of corporate boilerplate to spell this out, you’ve probably failed.

These are not categorically awful, the vast majority of them earn little more than an eye roll.

Conclusion: Do You Pass the Cocktail Party Litmus Test?

If I were to try to encapsulate everything I’ve been trying to say in a single concept, I would frame it like this:

Imagine your ideal candidate is at a cocktail party or some kind of mixer. They’re meeting new people. They get through the initial pleasantries. There’s a pause in the conversation, and, hating nothing so much as an awkward silence, someone pipes up:

“So what do you do?”

Would that person be excited to tell a new acquaintance that they work at your company? Is it an easy story to spin into an enjoyable anecdote that someone else would want to listen to?

People will care about your story if you do. Enthusiasm is infectious. They want to work somewhere interesting, somewhere they can be proud of, somewhere they can tell people about.

Don’t deny them that. Let them be a part of something.