How to Get Candidates to Subscribe to Your Job Alerts

Pulling in a steady stream of new candidates to your database is probably one of the most important parts of recruitment marketing, but we all know how tough a task it can be in practice.

Here are some tips that will help you be more proactive in attracting more candidates to your recruitment website and subscribing for job alerts so you can begin warming them up into future placements.

1. Create a registration landing page

First things first – if you want to increase your number of subscribers, you need to give candidates a place to subscribe!

Start by creating a simple ‘landing page’ (essentially, this is just a web page with a form on it) where you ask candidates for some basic information in order to register and give them the opportunity to attach their CV too.

Here’s a good example of how specialist IT recruitment agency Be-IT do it.

2. Drive candidates towards that registration page

You then want to make that landing page really easy to find on your website. The more ways you push candidates to that landing page, the higher your chances of capturing their information, so include buttons on different pages of your website as well as your homepage.

For example, a ‘get alerts about similar jobs’ button next to your ‘apply’ button on a jobs page should do a good job at converting candidates who aren’t 100% sold on that particular role.

Use CTA (call-to-action) buttons that say something clear and relatable like ‘register me’ or ‘send my CV’ so candidates know exactly what the button is for.

Tip: If you have any website analytics available (this should be available as part of your recruitment software package), pinpointing which pages get the most traffic will tell you where you should add a button to drive candidates back to your registration page.

3. Make it easy to subscribe

It can be tempting to try to collect as much information on candidates as we possibly can from the word go, but this can put people off completing their registration with you. Research has shown that drop-off rates are high on long job applications, and the same goes for web forms.

The important thing is to get those subscribers in, so keep your registration process short and simple, or at least make some fields optional to fill out rather than ‘required’ fields.

Remember you can always gather additional information later down the line – on LinkedIn, for example, or when you speak to the candidate – and fill in the gaps yourself.

If you’re able to include the option for candidates to upload their CV too, this will allow you to pull in loads of information without putting off candidates with long forms to fill in – and the best part is, if you’re using good recruitment software, it will pull this information out of a CV for you and automatically populate your CRM!

4. Create content that gets you noticed

Creating your own original content that offers value to candidates is a great way to cut through the noise and get noticed by new candidates that are likely to not know your brand already.

Show candidates you’re the expert in their industry niche so they feel it’s in their own interest to register with you. For example, writing blogs, creating a video channel or hosting online events and webinars is a good way to show off your expertise.

Again, the important thing here is to be driving anyone who shows an interest straight back to your registration landing page, so include buttons or hyperlinks that keep pulling them back there.

5. Turn your social media audience into subscribers

Building a strong audience on LinkedIn is likely to be a big part of your recruitment marketing strategy, but are you doing anything to convert your social media followers into job alert subscribers?

Every now and then, try sharing your subscription landing page on LinkedIn and encourage candidates in your network to sign up for your job alert emails there.

This LinkedIn post from Carmichael is a good example of this. They explain exactly what the landing page is for, what’s in it for the candidate, and let them know that the registration process takes less than 60 seconds to complete.

6. Encourage subscribers to recruit more subscribers!

Getting your current subscribers to forward your job alerts to other candidates isn’t easy, but once you put the right steps in place, it will require absolutely no future effort from you, so it’s definitely a good system to have in place.

You basically just want to think about this in the same way you would approach a referral – ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get!’ – so start asking candidates to send your job alerts on to people they think would be interested.

So for example, you could add a sentence at the bottom of your job alert email template that says ‘Know anyone who would love this job? Click to send’ or add a ‘Share job’ button to the bottom of every job page to encouraging them to pass the job on to anyone they think would be a good fit.

Are you sending your job alerts at the right time? We analysed over 450,000 candidate applications to find out when candidates are most likely to apply for jobs. You can find out more by downloading the report below.