A website's natural performance is a function of the strength of its brand in the web environment. As is the case in most competitive environments, some brands are stronger than others. In order to make a website function properly, it needs a  flow of the right kind of traffic at the right level or volume. That traffic is then processed by the employment subset of the overall site for a net yield. We'd call the difference between the stronger and weaker brands the "handicap" just like golf.

There are many factors that influence the net yield of resumes from an employment section. How well the traffic is routed to the employment section (or how prominent is the link to the jobs page) significantly influences the percentage of traffic that can be converted into resumes. Neither Coke nor Pepsi offer jobs on their home page! 

The design of the employment section itself, from friendliness to the availability of jobs to the ease with which an initial relationship can be established to the way the company is described as a work environment influences the rate at which traffic can be converted into resumes.

In the end, however, the productivity of an employment site is a function of the traffic it processes. 

There are many ways to increase traffic to the employment section of a website. Traditional traffic building tactics are widely discussed. They amount to making sure that your website is well placed in search engines and directories like Yahoo. 

In reality, there is no real substitute for purchasing traffic outright.

In order to properly compensate for a brand's handicap, the organization must be able to articulate its goals numerically. Precisely how many resumes do you want the website to produce. Although the vendors of employment section surrogates (Job Board In A Box Companies) rarely say so, the employment section is simply a tool that must be fed traffic. It, in and of itself, only processes traffic. It can not create it. Most employment sections of a corporate website could use more traffic.

How much traffic you need is a relatively simple calculation that begins with the question "How many resumes and of what type do you require to make staffing function properly?" Multiply that figure by the inverse of the website's production rate. 

If a website gets a resume from ten in a thousand visitors, then you'd need ten thousand visitors to produce one hundred. It has an inherent production rate of 1%. The inverse of 1% is 100. If you need 1,000 resumes then you will need to produce 100,000 visitors over some amount of time. Typical search engine marketing will only help a tiny bit.

Some of the Job Board In A Box companies offer direct e-mail (spam) marketing that can produce additional traffic. The problem with this approach is that it actually erodes the value of your brand over time. Most users are irritated by unsolicited email and that negative quality actually makes success harder over time.

The best idea is to purchase traffic (usually through advertising). Most decent advertising agencies, including RecruitUSA, TMP, Hodes, Advance and HodesIQ can help with traffic acquisition. A good Job Board In A Box company will have working partnerships that help you manage the fact that your brand will generally have a traffic handicap.

  John Sumser

Workstream Recruiting Systems - Make the right choice!