How to enhance your involvement with your candidates by strengthening the candidate journey and improving application success

Besides a well-forged website, there is more you can do to strengthen the candidate’s journey. Blogs can help strengthen the candidate journey by enhancing the involvement with your candidates and ultimately improving application success.

Blogs can have many purposes and entities, but the most important purpose is to create blogs that inform and inspire your audience. By thoroughly getting to know the needs of your target audience, you can create enhancing blogs for particular segments or industries. The Booston blog features can take various shapes. For example: blog feed, newsfeed, or showcasing what makes your organization or job great. Click here to get to know more about what you can do with your Booston blog features and which steps to undertake.

Achieving a strong candidate journey by using blogs can be realized with different strategies. For example: informing, inspiring, persuading, or activating your target audience. In this blog, we will not answer which strategy is best for you, but we will show you how you can set up and use the new blog feature. With our new blog features, you can display your blogs where they are relevant and strengthen the candidate journey.

(The tips in this article work for any system and are not only relevant to Booston. However, the Booston Dashboard is used in these examples. Check your system to find out how to set up the new blog features in greater detail. You do not have a Booston account yet? Do not worry, just contact us. We will work out how you can use Boston’s new blog features as soon as possible.)

In this step-by-step article, we will show you which actions to take to enhance your involvement with your candidates and strengthen the candidate journey.

• Preparation
• Set up the blog attributes
• Manage your blogs
• Set up a blog- & job page, and features
• Search Engine Optimization

1. Preparation 

Before you start using the new blog features, it is important to take a good look at your current content and possibilities. There are a few things you need to keep in mind: Which strategies am I going to apply? Which industries or categories can I distinguish? What categories can trigger and activate my target audience? Start by creating a strategy and distinguishing industries or categories. The plan all depends on the industries your jobs fit in, who your target audience is, what intrigues them and how you want to approach them. You can, for example, create overarching industries like marketing and sales or create categories like starting-, experienced-, and senior professionals. It is key to understand that you need to distinguish different target audiences so you can display your blogs to the right audience. Once you have defined your industries or categories, you can start following the steps and enhance your involvement with your candidates.

2. Set up blog attributes 

The first step is setting up blog attributes so you can connect your blogs to these industries or categories. You can easily add attributes with the press of a button. Log on to your Booston account and go to settings > attributes, then select blog attributes. In this menu, you can add your industries or categories and add a photo that fits the industry or category. By adding these attributes you are creating tags that your blogs can be tagged to. It will ensure that certain blogs’ industries or categories can be found easily on your recruitment website.

To connect your jobs to your blogs you will use general attributes. These can be found in settings > attributes. Use an attribute that contains all relevant target audiences. If necessary add additional attributes. If you are working with an ATS, you add attributes in your ATS and tag them to a job that is published to import them to the Booston backend.

Always make sure to index your attribute accordingly so Google for Jobs gets indexed with accurate and correct information. Go to settings > attributes and select your attributes. Index every attribute with the correct industry.

3. Manage your blogs

Next up, create a blog. If you already have blogs on your Booston recruitment website you can skip to 3.1.

Log on to your Booston account and go to content > blog, then press the create button to create your blog. Select the languages you wish to publish and press continue. At this moment you are ready to edit your blog.

First things first, page info. Set a relevant title that makes it easy to find on your recruitment website and search engines. Once you have chosen your blog’s title you can edit the main settings. Start by selecting an image, author, category, and keyword if necessary.

After finishing the setup, you can now create your blog in the main content. Once you have finished the main content it is time to publish your blog. To do so, press save. If you wish to publish your blog on a certain date and time, you can schedule the publication. To schedule the publication, press the socket wrench and set in the publication date and time.

3.1

Now your attributes come into play. In a subcategory of the main settings, you will find filters. Here you can select the attributes to connect your blog to jobs, in due course reach your target audience and display your blogs where they are relevant.

4. Set up a blog- & job page, and features

After creating your blog it is important to set up your blog page, job page, and features. Make sure you have completed all the steps above before you start setting up the pages. Without the correct attributes, the features will not work correctly. In addition, pages also must obtain side elements to show relevant blogs.

Imagine having a lot of IT jobs, it would be nice to show relevant IT content to potential candidates, right? By following the steps below, you will be able to show relevant content on your job pages. This can be accomplished by tagging IT jobs to IT content. With these features, you can strengthen the candidate’s journey and improve application success.

Start with setting up your blog page. This is a dynamic page that will generate all your blog pages based on the template that you configure in this step. Go to content > blog and press the settings wrench. Here you can edit your blog page according to your wishes.

An example of a blog page is shown below. The “Blogs list side” is key to showing other relevant blogs. To edit the page element, press the lock. In the menu “Blog presentation type” you can choose to show blogs with matching job filters. This setting only displays blogs with the same attribute tag, tagged to it, which will be shown in the side element. This ensures that relevant blogs are displayed to candidates, improving the candidate’s journey and improving application conversion.

When you have finished your blog page, it is time to set up your job page. Go to recruitment > jobs, press the socket wrench, and select the job page. Also, place the “Blogs list side” in the side element and repeat the settings as explained above.

Are both pages set up correctly? Your blogs will be displayed in places where they are relevant so you can enhance involvement with your candidates, strengthen the candidate journey and ultimately ramp up application conversion.

5. Search Engine Optimization 

Besides showing your blogs on your recruitment website where they are relevant, you also want your blogs to result in more traffic to your recruitment website. You can realize more traffic to your recruitment website by adding relevant titles and meta descriptions to your blogs. Meta descriptions are texts used on search engine platforms to increase the likelihood of getting candidates to click and go to your website, which results in a higher relevance on search engines which will boost traffic to your recruitment website: 

• Developers Google

"A meta description tag generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for" (Developers Google, 2021) 

Do you want to improve your relevance and ultimately your findability? Go to content > blog, select the blog you wish to add the meta description to, and press the socket wrench. Here you will find the search engine optimization options, including the meta description.

Do you want to know more about meta descriptions and how to create a quality meta description? Read this article about meta descriptions.

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