A few employment brand life cycle metrics.

Today's Deploy webinar is over. People didn't throw tomatoes (that I could see), the questions were sharp, and I had fun.

One caller asked what he should measure about his company's employment site. I said accessibility. But he clearly wanted operational measures. Here are a few.

Conversion and Abandonment Rates.

Is your abandonment rate 95-98%? Nearly everyone landing on your career home page would rather be somewhere else?

Then your home page is the first thing to fix. The perfect search is useless if nobody uses it. You have to give people reasons to stay, give hope that they can complete their mission for this visit.

Once you start measuring CR and AR, go deeper:

• Rate by source of referral. 
• Rate by occupational category.
• Rate by browser version (you'll be surprised).
• Rate by geography (if you ask, IT should be able to tell you from which metro area people are connecting).

Goal Accomplishment.

Pick a user goal. For instance "find out if there are jobs for people like me here." You can measure the time it takes. The effort, in clicks. The abandonment rate as people try and fail.

Experiment. Try a change, maybe a "we're hiring n of X" link on the front page. How does this change user behavior? Are some people clicking on it, instead of leaving? Can you cut the time people spend before making commitments? Shorten the distance from entry to goal?

Pick 10 goals that lead to candidate behaviors you want. (Choose wisely, please.) And measure goal accomplishment over time.

Speed.

Most people connect to the net via dial-up, especially when looking for work from home or a library.

I just checked the career home page load times for 5 large US employers (2.8 million employees among them). 3 seconds is acceptable. 6 seconds is very slow. 9 seconds convinces a user your site is broken, provoking back-buttons or checking if the url is correct.

Over dial-up: 26, 20, 27, 26, and 14 seconds. Just for splash pages that don't let users do anything.

The same pages from your corporate office? 0,0,0,0,0.

Measure how fast every page on your site loads. Talk with your webmaster and ATS vendor about web site optimization. You can contract for reports that measure how fast your site loads, and how reliably, from different parts of the US or the world.

Make your site fast. Speed makes up for a multitude of sins, since users can afford the time to work around design problems.

Hope this helps.