Employment branding is likely on your mind in the competitive job market. You are asking your co-workers as well as yourself, “What can we (the employer) do to stand out?” The answer is through content like blogs, videos, tweets, infographics and photos. Except that these activities are hard to quantify and demonstrate their value because they tend to be soft branding instead of converting activities.

Landing Pages Enhance Your Employment Branding

These “soft” activities are one of the many challenges that those in employment branding face. We know they work but we can’t explain why or how they might impact or improve hiring and recruiting. Google Forms might just be the answer to your candidate conversion woes. Google Forms might just be the employment branding “proof” you need.

Last week, Oracle set up a simple landing page using Google Forms (seen above) in order to customize their messages to invite candidates to a career fair which they have plans to be ongoing. With no paid social media reach simply sharing via their social networks, the Google Form netted just under 200 targeted candidates for a single role in one week.

Oracle’s landing page is customized uniquely to the sales role they are hiring for. I like how Celinda Appleby and her Oracle Careers team added a drop down box and bubbles to make the forms feel custom (see below) and not the traditional Google Form landing page.

I’m definitely a fan of landing pages. One of my favorite WordPress Plugins is Gravity Forms (Click here for example). You can embed and customize a landing page right into a blog post or page. You can take things a step further and zap the contact information into a CRM or email management system like Mail Chimp to continue the customized message that can be programmed and automated. You can use a traditional talent network or you can use marketing automation and messaging tech. At Workology, we also use Zapier to send contact information over to our email management system. Each landing page and form has a custom tag so that we can customize the message to make the engagement unique.

What is the ROI of a Recruiting Landing Page?

Your own custom Google Forms landing page might just provide you and your recruiting team instant ROI for your employment branding efforts. The Google Form costs absolutely no money. Candidate information imports into a simple Google spreadsheet. Even better the Google Form is evergreen which allows for recruiters to continue to grow and expand their talent pools even when they don’t have an active job requisition or opening. (Interested in learning more about Google Forms? Watch this quick landing page Google Form tutorial below.)

I’ve long been a fan of landing pages for candidate groups. Not only are they evergreen but if they are a page as part of your career site, they provide you with a standard page that doesn’t change making for much better SEO. Recruiters don’t have to worry about broken links because you are directing your recruiting efforts to a single page. It’s also one that you can update which makes it even more search engine friendly.

What’s the ROI of a Google Forms landing page? The jury for Oracle Careers efforts is still out. They will need to evaluate source of hire and turnover to understand the benefit for the long term. However, the no cost recruiting expense makes it appealing and definitely worth considering.