It is fun working with employers furiously engaged in the battle for talent – especially those with a “try and learn” mentality. They have a keen sense for risk & reward – which means they understand their problems, have clear objectives, and can measure their applied effort and results.
Let’s start with a common problem – getting traffic that visits a career site to actually register or apply. Dr. John Sullivan’s organization found that 92% of first-time visitors to a career site don’t apply. You spent all that money to get them there, and they vanish without a trace.
So let’s say the objective is to double that conversion rate. There are a number of elements an employer can apply, several of which I’ve blogged about previously. Perhaps one of the easiest is adding Live Chat to your career site.
Live Chat is currently deployed by thousands of organizations as a sales, marketing, and customer service tool. It’s become ubiquitous within our daily lives, as we IM constantly. It’s a proven, stable, cheap technology. Yet Live Chat isn’t used extensively within the recruitment field….in fact when I visit major vendors of live chat functionality, I rarely if ever see employment application examples.
OK – so recruiting organizations are a little slow to adopt technology. That said, here are three examples of employers that have deployed live chat – and each deployment is a unique approach.
1) ATS Help Live Chat – this is a service offering from ATS vendor HR Services, and is designed to assist applicants with any questions regarding the HR Services ATS. Client HCR Manor Care deploys it after a candidate has entered the apply process, so the application is really designed to improve the conversion rate of applicants that begin the apply process.
2) Hiring Q&A Chat – Schedule-based: This version of Live Chat is really menu-driven, and is probably not available when you need it. A good example of this approach is Lockheed Martin, which offers a complete menu and schedule of chat topics – you can for example speak with a recruiter about nursing jobs in DC, but only once a week from 4-6 EDT….
I’m not ready to negatively judge this approach, especially given the breadth of open reqs, hiring locations, and divisions at Lockheed Martin. So this approach will help with the objective, but lacks the ‘me –now’ mentality of IMers.
3) Hiring Q&A Chat – Live: This is what many job-seekers would expect when they click on a “Live Chat” – immediate answers to their questions, and Rackspace is an excellent example:
Because ‘try & learn’ leaders set objectives and measure results I wasn’t surprised when the Director of Recruiting at Rackspace was able to provide the insight:
a) how many chat sessions are generated per day? probably 20 – 30 a day
b) what is the visit or visitor: chat ratio? 50:1
c) how many recruiters handle chat? One presently
d) how many concurrent chats can one recruiter handle: About 3 max. It goes up to 4; response time is slower when it is more than a couple.
e) anything anecdotal to share about the value of live chat on a recruiting site? I get a lot of compliments on chat and the website. People seem to feel like they are getting a chance to talk to someone from Rackspace. I think it helps them with understanding our hiring process.
I can echo that past comment, having deployed Live Chat on not just career sites, but on a large job-board with hundred of thousands of visits monthly. The instant response permits a personal, human touch, and instantly builds credibility.
Your expense? Live Chat monthly is cheap – so why not pilot it on your career site and see what it does to your candidate capture rate next month?
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Peter Brasket is a co-founder of HotGigs, and leads the Jobs2Web career site and search engine optimization project.
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