Articles 
First impressions count, to fourteen to be exact.
Reportedly, candidates spent an average of only 14 seconds deciding whether they were interested in working for an organization even before the pandemic began. This precarious statistic is unlikely to improve as companies compete in the “attention economy.”
The market is more candidate-driven than ever, filled with job seekers with more options and higher expectations. Their career searches prioritize company values, culture and authenticity, and it is up to HR teams to hone their recruitment marketing skills and deliver that message.
Given the competition for candidates’ attention and the substantial recruitment demands many face, a trusty content management system (CMS) can be your biggest asset in optimizing your recruitment marketing strategy and making your organization stand out from the crowd.
In this blog, we’ll review the capabilities that form part of our comprehensive CMS toolbox and that give you ownership of your employer narrative. With them, you’re empowered to put your content’s best foot forward and create a consistent candidate experience while having the agility to maintain your messages up-to-date autonomously.
Putting the Power in Your Hands to Tell Your Employer Brand Story
Historically, one of the biggest hurdles stemming from creating and editing landing pages (LPs) was to make a compelling impression while matching the dynamism of talent campaigns. Making changes required calling in the IT cavalry and often the vendor, so the time it took between conceptualization and execution almost rendered the process useless.
Fortunately, times have changed. Listening closely to our customers’ feedback and requests, we’ve expanded our CMS toolbox to allow them to be in control and make changes without requiring expert coders or our team’s involvement.
Landing pages (LPs) are a recruitment marketing imperative for many organizations in our customer base. Whether it is to promote events, encourage people to sign up to talent communities or deliver targeted messages to specific talent segments, they rely on LPs to maximize reach and conversion in their talent acquisition efforts.
As such, the more control they have over these pages, the better. This motivated us to develop and release our Landing Page Builder, which provides the foundation to create infinite landing pages using a themes library.
For context, a theme is essentially a new landing page skin built from a series of predetermined settings that encompass the layout, branding and multimedia elements designed for a specific recruitment objective. When it was first launched, the Landing Page Builder required using themes developed in conjunction with us at Avature.
While our teams are always available to help you create new themes, many organizations have in-house design teams and prefer to handle the process independently. To support that, we introduced our Theme Builder for Landing Pages, a functionality that grants you the power to own and design a variety of themes to bring your employer brand to life.
For example, themes can be built around International Women’s Day, Black History Month or Pride to showcase your diversity efforts. Adding videos of employees, senior leaders and HR team members sharing their experiences could be the deciding factor for someone choosing to work for you.
Having a wide range of customizable options, from texts and titles to colors, formats, sizes, spacing, backgrounds, images and links at their fingertips gives talent acquisition teams an advantage when designing pages to make that all-important impression.
Live previews also allow users to visualize their pages across desktop, tablet or mobile within the tool to ensure the content looks flawless regardless of the device candidates are using.
Consistent Recruitment Marketing With a Holistic CMS
The advantages of the Avature Landing Page Builder and Theme Builder for Landing Pages are evident! But what really packs a punch when it comes to showcasing an organization’s employer brand is consistency across all channels. So, let’s see the rest of the Avature CMS tools.
Tools to Update Your Portal Apps As Your Needs Evolve
Our Portal Content Management toolbox allows you to modify your career site (or any other Avature portal app!) autonomously and in real time. It is comprised of two individual tools:
- The Portal Content Editor, which is a one-stop shop that lets you make simple content and image updates to your Avature career sites via a centralized UI, enabling rapid deployment, agility and easy maintenance.
- The Page Builder, which allows you to incorporate brand-new content pages to your existing career sites, such as About Us, guidelines, FAQs, contact, corporate social responsibility and dedicated pages for different audiences.
With this toolbox, you have access to the content management automation required to modify or expand your career sites quickly, convey relevant brand messages at all times and appeal to new talent segments as your recruiting needs shift.
Just around the corner, we’ll be launching our most advanced CMS feature to date, the Portal Apps Builder. This game-changing tool will unlock an integral building experience that entails content, design, navigation and flow. Putting unparalleled power in your hands, the Portal Apps Builder will allow you to build sophisticated Avature portal apps from scratch. Watch this space for updates on the exciting release!
Email Campaigns That Leave a Lasting Impression
To leave a memorable impression when nurturing or reaching out to talent and ensure visual consistency with your career sites and landing pages, our CMS toolbox also includes a Theme Builder for Email Templates.
With an intuitive UI similar to the Theme Builder for Landing Pages, the Theme Builder for Email Templates empowers you to bring any dedicated email skins you want to life.
With the holistic Avature CMS toolbox, recruitment marketers can consistently elevate their employer brand across all touchpoints. This is exemplified by the ability to match landing page images with those used in LinkedIn or Instagram campaigns or design eye-catching themes for landing pages that also feature in email communications.
Importantly, with all these tools, you can grant different levels of permissions to ensure that only selected brand ambassadors can create or sign off on themes and other branded assets, further ensuring consistent messaging and visual identity.
Staying Agile in a Changing Landscape
In addition to keeping your branding fresh, CMS tools allow companies to react in real time to changing circumstances. The pandemic presented many scenarios that required recruitment teams to keep their content relevant, whether it was hiring freezes, the shift from in-person to virtual events, the need to connect with an increasingly remote candidate base or the subsequent talent shortage.
The pandemic might be over now, but today’s world of work is certainly a reconfigured one, with flexible and hybrid work models consolidating, an increased focus on skills and new generations joining the workforce.
These work trends are intrinsically tied to a revolutionized business landscape, where organizations are striving to adopt digital-first models and keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancements. These are all critical objectives for business success, and reaching them depends upon securing the best talent and skills out there.
In such a pressing context, attracting candidates, convincing them to join your talent communities or submit an application, and remaining top of mind for them becomes paramount. A robust CMS toolbox that allows your team to manage your brand narrative and visual identity across the entire recruiting journey can help you stay agile, relevant and competitive.
Fundamental market changes aside, candidates who regularly visit career sites and landing pages expect to find new and relevant information each time. A refreshed career site or new themes on your email and LPs can help deliver against this expectation, whether that is through a specific festive look and messaging or even through a theme that you can use for just 24 hours for once-a-year occasions.
Time to Create a Superior Candidate Experience
When attracting sought-after talent, CMS tools must match the energy of your organization’s innovation and the market in which you operate. Creative recruitment marketing runs through the most successful hiring strategies and has an impact from the moment a candidate comes into contact with your employer brand.
At the very least, your platform should have CMS capabilities that uplift your employer value proposition, as this could be the difference between securing or missing out on the candidates you need to drive your business forward in today’s challenging market.
