Konnekt decides to engage passive visitors for better visibility

When faced with the challenge of trying to increase the visibility of vacancies and attract the right calibre of talent effectively and more efficiently, recruitment agency Konnekt decided to take the leap of faith and try to activate passive visitors who were already on its webpage, Business Malta learns from Lee Smallwood Cassar, Chief Marketing Officer at Konnekt.

“Once you build a brand and get everything in place, you are left with people, and you need to make decisions,” Mr Smallwood Cassar offers his take on the importance of doing human resources well, talking at the fourteenth session of HR Network Series on 1 March 2018, organised by Salaries in Malta. He says the big challenge is to make people see how an organisation works, who does what, and where the company is headed.

Growing into the largest recruitment firm in Malta since its 2007 establishment, today employing more than 45 people, at the end of last year Konnekt aimed to increase its visibility for job seekers.

In 2018, Konnekt saw unique visitors of its website exceeding 270,000, registered more than 13,000 new candidates and had more than 65,000 jobs posted online. Four months after tweaking the website a tiny bit, they saw an 11.41% rise in new users, increased new registrations by 99.36% and increased new job applications by 17.9%, Mr Smallwood Cassar shares the figures.

What did Konnekt do? When a potential candidate arrived at their website to learn more about a job posting and then decided to leave the page, before they could actually leave, a pop-up window asked them why they were leaving without applying. The pop-up window containing a static image also linked jobseekers to the subpage where they could upload their resumes and could register with the recruitment firm. This increased new registrations by 2%, Mr Smallwood Cassar says.

Konnekt’s marketing team decided to ride the wave and replaced the static image in the pop-up window with a funny video, accompanied by a form for people to complete. This led to a 4.5% increase in contacts for recruiters to work on, according to the marketing chief. Konnekt also learnt that the form would work well with generalist roles, but not with finance and legal candidates, who seemed to be wary of tackling another form.

Mr Smallwood Cassar appears to be conscious about how consumers using different devices behave. While the pop-up window in the big screen is easier to swallow, in a mobile screen it is intrusive, and search engines would also rank such pages behind. As such, instead of a pop-up window, Konnekt used a sticky bar at the top of the browser.

Considering this as a test, Konnekt learnt that people keep changing their behaviour constantly, they are more open-minded and ready for trying new things and that keeping in touch with people by regular updates can pay off. The big take away of this test, as Mr Smallwood Cassar concludes, is that there is potential in the visitors that a website already has, which needs to be used before one would run and try attracting new visitors.