How to Attract the Best New Talent to Your Company this Hiring Season

To attract the best employees, you need to capture the attention of this year's most talented college graduates. Job boards and campus recruiting are two great ways to spread information. But to reach the widest pool of job seekers, you also need to maximize the one resource that every company has at its disposal: your company website. A website that is coherently branded, contains solid information, and is easy to navigate gives young job seekers a good first impression and can even predispose them to want to work for you.

Use your website to promote your brand

If producers decided to make a film about your company, what Hollywood actor would play your CEO? What genre would the film be? Would it be a romantic comedy or a period drama? What’s the soundtrack like?

You get the idea. According to talent maximization expert Roberta Matuson, "attraction trumps recruitment time and time again". HBR's poll of 15,000 millennials supports this idea: the number one thing young people look for in a company is "people and culture fit" – much more so than salary.

Related post: Does Your Website Effectively Reflect Your Brand?

Think of your website as projecting your company's identity and telling its story. Images, color, layout and font need to be consistent so that your brand is both recognizable and stays with your viewer. Create personable, engaging profiles of your employees – or, if you’re a larger organization, your leaders – so that the culture and work environment are part of the primary focus.

Make sure the site is easy to navigate

A few years ago, it was popular to construct websites that held their viewers hostage with disabled back buttons and large popup windows. Now these features are understood to be cardinal sins of web design. All features like this do is irritate the viewer, who will simply close the browser and start all over again, making a mental note not to return to your site. Ouch.

Keep distractions to a minimum. You want to construct an appealing website that prospective job seekers not only want to explore but also immediately know how to explore. You can accomplish this goal in the following ways:

• Make your company information easy to access by adding a professional-looking "contact us" form or button on every page.
• Streamline the content on your site so that viewers can load it in under four seconds.
• Include a clear navigation map on your header or footer. Visitors should never have to click at random to find their way around the site.

Don't forget the bells and whistles

We said to streamline, we know – but there are a couple extras that aren’t actually extras at this point. If you’re going to attract young talent to your company, you must have these two things:

• Mobile-ready design
• Strong social media presence

Related post: 4 common pitfalls of mobile web design

A report by beyond.com states that 77 percent of job seekers are using mobile apps to locate jobs. Not having a mobile-ready site is almost as big a mistake as not utilizing social media to advertise and promote your company brand. The number one way that millennials learn about great companies to work for is recommendations from friends; and social media is one of the main ways that friends stay in touch. A mobile-optimized site and a solid social media presence will drive the traffic you want straight to your website.

When you’re trying to attract new grads to your company, remember that making yourself visible is half the battle – so use your website wisely, and you’ll be receiving applications in no time.