Preparing for a Fundraise? Get Your Careers Page in Order.

October 3, 2017

Announcing a new round of funding is an incredibly exciting moment in any company’s lifecycle. It foreshadows the continued growth of the company, accrues more credibility to the business, and of course drives more interest from talented professionals who may want to work at the company.

Unsurprisingly, this attention typically results in a massive traffic spike to your career site. Here is a graph that averages 4 companies’ traffic in the 3 weeks before and after a fundraising announcement.

*This data was compiled using NextWave Hire’s analytics platform. It was then de-identified and indexed to 1,000 visitors/week.

As you can see, there is a huge increase in traffic, about 3x the normal rates! In fact, I remember talking to a VP of Marketing last year after they announced their last fundraise. They were super excited because when they checked Google Analytics, they saw a huge increase in traffic. Upon a deeper look, they didn’t see any noticeable increase in leads. This was because almost all of the traffic went to the careers site!

Convert Your Traffic

The idea that a top investor is getting behind your business is compelling enough to convince people to come and check out your company. However, the best HR teams also realize that many of the people who come to your site after PR won’t be ready to apply for jobs. They’re more curious passive professionals than active job seekers.

There are a few ways to convert the more passive professionals who don’t have a resume ready. First, you can create a role in your ATS labeled “future employee,” and make sure not to require a resume to apply. Sometimes a title like this can be overlooked in the list of all your other open reqs. However, it’s definitely better than nothing, and simple to implement with your existing technology stack.

You can also throw up a form on the site that captures name, email and LinkedIn URL. Typically marketing can get something like this on the site pretty quickly. Just make sure to follow up with these candidates quickly and strike while the iron is hot!

The ideal solution is to have a talent community ready to route your prospects to the right recruiter/hiring manager in your organization, or start to automatically nurturing these candidates.

A talent community will help you start building out a pipeline of warm leads for your recruiting team to source directly through, or nurture over time. I spoke to a VP of Talent at a 400 person company today who hired a c-level executive after building a relationship with them for 6 months. The key aspect of a talent community is that this process can be automated and scaled across hundreds of prospective employees.

Get Your Site in Tip-top Shape

Career pages can fall out of date quickly. I find that marketing usually owns this part of the website, but that they are (understandably) too busy a lot of times to update these pages.

When hiring becomes a priority, definitely contemplate using a content management system that the People team can own. This can be something as generic as WordPress, or more specific to careers/hiring.

The point is, HR should be able to update the site and make any changes necessary in the days that lead up to the announcement. Remove testimonials from employees no longer at the company, add new ones that relate directly to open reqs, create landing pages for your key departments and offices…go nuts! This is your chance to convince talent they should apply to work at your company.

Indigo Agriculture’s  team was able to spruce up their site immediately prior to announcing their $156 mm Series D because they use a CMS that gives the People team the ability to update their careers page without having to go through other parts of the organization.

Trust me, there are always last minute changes to be made, and you want to have control over this page.

Capitalize on the Opportunity

Raising money usually means the People team is about to go into hyper drive as they work hard to grow the organization and put the new investment dollars to good use. My main advice is this: make sure you capitalize on the opportunity that a massive PR spike brings. This is a tremendous time to convert the right people into your hiring funnel – having the right careers page with the right calls to action in place is key. Good luck!

Founder & CEO

Phil Strazzulla is the CEO of NextWave Hire, a software company that helps employers attract and convert the right talent through enhanced career sites and talent communities. Previously, Phil was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners and received his MBA from Harvard Business School.