Three employment webpage updates to improve your hiring

With 1,200+ schools seeking over 20,000 professional, continuing, and online staff in the past year and 54% of staff considering leaving their jobs, finding (and keeping) qualified candidates can be a major challenge. As a professional, continuing, and/or online education leader, what can you do to your employment websites to stand out from your peers and ensure you’re attracting capable candidates?

According to a Chronicle of Higher Education poll, 78% of schools received fewer applicants for open jobs than the previous year, meaning finding qualified candidates is becoming increasingly difficult.  Further, employer demand strictly for professional, online, and continuing education staff has grown by 2.79% from January 2024 to July 2024 as more schools are looking to hire roles like their next instructional designer or online administrator. But for many schools, the employment website isn’t aiding in their pursuit of new hires. Through EAB’s Employment Website Audit, our team has found that colleges and universities typically fail to make compelling arguments to prospective applicants. It has become increasingly difficult to communicate why applicants should want to work for the institution as schools struggle to compete with higher paying private sector jobs and an increasingly remote work model.

Here are three things you can do to enhance your employment webpages and improve professional, continuing, and online education staff hiring.

1. Highlight available DEIJ resources and accomplishments to recruit a candidate pool that is more diverse

The latest research confirms that there is a link between diverse organizations and financial growth. For example, companies in the first quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity were 33% more likely to experience above average financial growth than companies in the fourth quartile, and 21% more likely to see above average financial growth by quartile for gender diversity. However, schools’ employment webpages aren’t incentivizing diverse applicants to apply. Across all the employment webpages I’ve audited, schools consistently perform poorly on how welcoming their employment pages are to applicants with diverse backgrounds.

So how do schools alter their employment websites to incentivize diverse applicants to apply and to differentiate their institution from their peers? To stand out from competitors, all employment webpages should prominently feature employment-specific DEIJ progress beyond typical compliance-focused statements, including data on staff demographics and retention. Additionally, employment websites should advertise institution-wide DEIJ updates by prominently linking to the school’s primary DEIJ website when possible. While some schools may no longer actively recruit diverse candidates given policy changes, professional, continuing, and online education leaders can still enhance their inclusion efforts by offering valuable resources like:

Even without dedicated functions to monitor DEIJ progress, leaders can effectively communicate their commitment to inclusion by promoting these resources and crafting clear, meaningful inclusion statements that still attract wide range of prospective applicants.

2. Advertise intangible benefits to differentiate yourself among universities with highly standardized tangible benefits

While schools can improve upon the way they market themselves as a valuable employer to diverse professional, continuing, and online education applicants, all applicants can be better incentivized to work for an institution through intangible benefits, not just the traditional tangible benefits.  There’s no doubt that advertising traditional tangible benefits like health insurance and retirement savings are important, but many universities offer similar tangible benefits. Institutions should focus on differentiating themselves from competitors, which often comes from their intangible benefits.

Prospective applicants often value intangible benefits just as much, if not more, than tangible benefits. Two intangible benefits you can highlight when designing your employment webpage to appeal to candidates are:

Consider writing blurbs that talk about the history of the local community, any local awards that have been won, and highlight schools, restaurants, parks, transportation details, and other extracurricular opportunities. Highlighting these neighborhood details can help prospective applicants envision living in the area and may specifically incentivize working professionals with families to consider employment more strongly. Additionally, employment webpages emphasizing that employers have work-life balance is important for all prospective employees.

3. Embed a Talent Network feature to start building a talent pool for future job openings

While the employment website can be a great resource to attract prospective employees now, it can also be a place to organize interested applicants for future job openings. Encourage the creation of an institution-wide talent community, or what Builtin describes as a “cohort of people who would be exceptional candidates for your company, but present circumstances prevent them from joining your team.”  Advertise your talent community prominently on the website with a large “Join Our Career Network” button to stand out to the professional, continuing, and online education population who are seeking out career development specifically. This will create a pipeline of potentially interested candidates to make it easier when jobs do open and  allow schools to be less reliant on completely unknown candidates. The specific and targeted recruitment of employee personas can expand the employment pool and prevent the loss a prospective candidate by widening their job options.

While it might be tough to pull off, I’d encourage collaboration with your colleagues to start dialogue around institution-wide talent networks for everyone’s benefit.

Overall, as employer demand for professional, continuing, and online education staff has grown in the past six months, and schools are reporting more and more difficulties in the hiring process, the employment webpage will continue to play a big role in staff recruitment. Making your web presence more desirable for diverse applicants, emphasizing intangible benefits like the local community, and encouraging and promoting a schoolwide talent network may allow your team to hire the necessary staff to be successful.