You WANT people to apply to your jobs, right?

You know, it’s really easy to be a writer and a consultant. I can tell you how bad your job ads are and how you need to increase candidate experience and like in this article, how truly easy it is to change your career site. But I’m not you. My deadlines deal with articles, white papers and campaigns; your deadlines are focused on quarter-end results, filling requisitions and letting candidates down day-after-day.

But (you thought I was going to let you off the hook eh?), you still have to try. Here’s why, because there are more inexpensive, simple to use and effective tools than ever before and vendors are throwing them at your doorstep. While not all of them are created for both agency and corporate recruiting functions, nearly all of them can be “hacked” to do so. Let’s get started with simple career site changes for 2013:

 1. Get rid of tired stock photography

Everyone knows you got that picture from istockphoto and you didn’t even look very hard because it’s in the “most popular” bin. Obviously, I get that many organizations can’t afford professional photography, but custom graphics and interesting photos of your workplace are better than pictures of people who have never set foot there. If you’re fighting for the best talent, put your team out there or a picture of your great offices or your city skyline or your front office. Anything to prove that you are even remotely trying is the key here.

2. Email resumes

Okay maybe you can’t get rid of the cumbersome ATS your predecessor bought 10 years ago, but you CAN make it possible for applicants to send you their resume via email. Nearly every system now offers email submission and resume parsing, some for free. Get it and use it. I guarantee you are missing out on applicants who simply will not spend 45 minutes on your drop-down menu, social security number asking for, radio button, 1998 career site. Trust.

 3. Put it out there

There are very few things worth fighting your IT department for. This is one of them. If your jobs page, link, text, site, micro-site, portal is not seen immediately on your homepage (send the home page link to ten intelligent friends, ask them to “look at the new job you posted, if all ten can’t find it within three clicks, you lose) then you must insist on a stronger emphasis and more direct path. 

4. Get your video on

There are so many free options for video creation out there, I am not going to list them here. Suffice to say, you should get ready to make a video. According to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report, 105.1 million Americans are watching online videos every day. Another recent study showed 56% of people  are watching online videos at least once a month on their mobile devices. Why not yours? It’s a cheap and effective way to brand your company. If you can’t add video to your career site, see if your company will let you distribute via social.

5. Speaking of social

With five generations in the workforce by 2020, social sharing is not really a nice to have anymore. You have no idea if your next best candidate will come through traditional methods or through social (and if so, which channel). While you can start to predict which jobs make the most sense for which channels, that’s easier to do with data to help you make your decision and you can’t do THAT until you start using all the channels available to you. plus, allowing your internal employees to share the jobs in any way they so choose only widens the amount of people you’ll attract.