The latest installment from our white paper on helping companies improve the search engine optimization for their career sections on the company web site:
Tip #5: Registration on your site should be optional, not mandatory
We all love metrics. Knowing who is looking at what on your site is an incredibly important part of understanding not only your candidates but the characteristics of your site’s traffic. That’s why a lot of websites, including both JobDig and LinkUp, offer registration options so visitors can create accounts on a website. But if you do offer registration and individual user accounts, it is critical to make sure that registration on your site is optional. Forcing people to register before they can browse job listings might, and most likely will, result in your site turning away passive jobseekers and blocking search engines from indexing your site. As well, forcing people to register prevents people from being able to easily bookmark specific jobs.
We are not saying that you should not offer registration on your site. Registration is a very important feature that many jobseekers look for and utilize. And once you are at the point where the jobseeker wants and needs to fill out an employment application, it makes perfect sense to require registration. Since it is useless to have search engines spider your application forms, there is no harm in keeping them out beyond that point. Remember, too, that you can always entice people to register by offering additional features and functionality that are not available to non-registered users.
Passive jobseekers like lurking around and not being seen – they are sometimes afraid that registering on a site will alert their current employer and create problems with their current employer. And with 60% of those employed considering themselves passive jobseekers, that is not a market segment you should alienate.