Using Your Website for Effective Workforce Development

The YellowPages reports that 30 percent of consumers automatically strike a business from consideration if they don’t have a website. To that same note, potential job seekers will write you off as well. Even if someone has heard about your company’s open position outside of the internet, not being able to find your company in a quick search on their smartphone – like an address or contact information – may have potential job seeker writing you off before they ever even see your job description.

Pew Research reports that 79 percent of job seekers used online resources in their most recent search for employment. This includes doing research on companies who are hiring to ensure the job(s) they choose to apply for will be a good fit for them, their skill set, and their financial needs. Greeting these potential employees with a solid sense of your company’s culture and brand – along with clear directions about how to apply – will go a long way to make sure you’re tapping into today’s web-savvy pool of job seekers.

Celebrating employees on your company’s website will improve your employee relations and company culture. By celebrating individual employees and/or departments you are showing your employees that you value them and that you want others to know about their success because that means success for the company. Having an employee bio section on your website, sharing employee achievements and celebrations through a blog or newsletter, and/or highlighting an employee of the month per department on your website can go a long way toward improving company culture. It also helps the rest of the employees get to know the people being highlighted. Happy and valued employees are more likely to be invested in their job and their quality of output. This will also show job seekers that if they apply and are hired on at your company, they will be valued too.

Revisit your company’s overall marketing strategies toward job seekers to determine if a new website will be used to drive – or simply support – those efforts. What you want the site to communicate to job seekers and how you want them to respond when they visit should be top of mind throughout the redesign process.

In terms of WFD, the most important thing you need to have on your website is a career opportunities page. This page should list all of your currently available positions, including job descriptions, details about benefits, and clear directions for how to apply. According to 2019’s Job Seeker Nation Survey, the top two places for candidate to actually submit their applications are employer career sites and online job boards. Don’t miss out on today’s tech savvy job seekers!

The best way to communicate positive company culture through your website is by showcasing your values. How you value your customers, your employees, and your community should be readily evident on your site. Emphasize positive partnerships with your customers by adding a section that highlights customer reviews, posting photos from customer appreciation events, or producing articles or videos about specific projects. Highlight your current team with staff bios and photos, posts from team building or employee appreciation events, or news about employee achievements and recognition. Including a section that features charitable events or local volunteerism show your customers, employees, and community that they are valued. Doing all of these things will improve your company culture, and it will also let job seekers know that being an employee of your company means they will be valued.

Making sure that job seekers understand what components are and why they are important is key! If someone doesn’t understand what your company does, they may be less likely to apply. Your site is a great place to explain the benefits of building with components by linking into SBCA’s Framing the American Dream (FAD). FAD tools and resources are available in this CM Toolbox for SBCA members to use to promote the benefits of components in your market. Linking to SBCA’s Best Way to Frame site content may also be useful. For any questions about using SBCA’s website or its online resources, please contact staff.

Having a plan to regularly update certain sections of your website – a calendar of events, careers page, company newsletter, or a blog – will ensure that you are giving readers and job seekers a reason to return regularly to your site for important information. Plus, search engines want to provide users with the best experience possible by delivering the most accurate and relevant search results. Regularly updating and maintaining your website content is a good search engine optimization (SEO) technique because it shows search engines that you’re keeping your site content up to date for visitors. This is of the upmost importance for WFD purposes. The higher you are in a search the more likely job seekers are to visit you website.

“Websites are not intended to be static but instead a dynamic tool for marketing your business. We know regular web updates positively impact our search engine ranking so we have a few areas of the website we update consistently.” – Heather Smith, Marketing Coordinator, Wilson Lumber