Does your school have a web landing page designed specifically for your teacher recruitment?
Landing pages serve a very distinct purpose over a vacancies page on your website. Generation Z teachers in particular do not want to be hunting through navigation bars and clicking numerous links until they find the information they require.
This is why if you are looking towards updating your recruitment channels, a landing page is a step in the right direction. Here are some top tips!
1. How are potential candidates searching for teaching jobs?
Teachers that are hunting for their next international teaching job, or indeed just seeing what’s out there, will usually ‘land’ on your landing page after clicking through from an ad, a social media post, a Youtube video, or via a search on Google or similar places on the web.
Particularly with regards to the latter, a trend for candidates in finding their next teaching placement is often via a simple “teaching jobs in country x” Google search.
Whereas your homepage is designed for exploration and oriented to all potential audiences: students, parents, and staff – the recruitment landing page itself should be designed purely for conversion through the recruitment funnel.
Here, potential candidates want a snapshot of your school; and, more importantly, what benefits you offer. You have to bear in mind that often teachers are applying to multiple schools, which involves a process of plowing through tens, sometimes hundreds of potential schools.
So if their search on your website takes too long for them to find the crucial information that they require to even consider applying, often they will click off your website and look elsewhere.
With landing pages, you can avoid this, so long as the key information is there.
2. What should I include on my school’s recruitment landing page?
At the top of the landing page, you should detail a summary of the key benefits that your school offers. Location, contract length, salary, accommodation, visa information, and start dates are amongst the most important considerations for teachers at this stage of their application journey.
Now, salary information is an interesting one; some schools prefer not to mention salary information particularly at this early stage of the recruitment funnel. But often this helps candidates to filter those opportunities which are within and outside of their experience and career development plans.
However, there are many things that motivate teachers more than money. We surveyed over 10,000 candidates from our extensive community of international educators and found that two things came above financial benefits as factors influencing their decision to apply for a teaching job – travel opportunities and career progression.
The beauty of a landing page is that once a user falls on the page, they don’t need to click anywhere else to find the information that they want; they simply have to scroll down.
That being said, there is a danger of losing the candidate’s interest if the page is too long, so be careful with how much information you include. For sure, requirements and the job description should form the bulk of the middle part of the page.
Ensure to write a great description that gets job seekers eager to apply for your open positions. A summary of the school, its history, and its size could be worth mentioning, particularly if these are pull factors in getting teachers to apply.
So, you have your snapshot, the job requirements, job description, and a brief summary of your school; now it’s time to consider perhaps the most important part of the landing page – the call to action. This is the button, or buttons, that the candidate will press to be taken to another page.
Consider that this is a recruitment page, so directing candidates to your homepage may not be advisable. Of course, you would hope that a candidate does visit your website before applying, but at this stage after reading the landing page, the candidate just wants to learn about the next step of the recruitment process i.e. is it simply a CV and cover letter, or a specific application page.
Note that any more than two call-to-action buttons could adversely dilute the potential for getting the candidates to apply.
3. Increasing teacher applications with customized landing pages
Landing pages are important for any business, but they are particularly important when the aim is to recruit international candidates. This is because international teachers want to see that a school understands their needs and will be a welcoming place to teach. That is why customizing your page to the desired target applicant is massively important.
Depending on your recruitment strategy and requirements, you may want to consider having multiple landing pages, specific to the type of applicant you are looking to attract. For example, your landing page for U.S candidates may look different from the page for European candidates.
Localized testimonials from current or former teachers are always a winner. Visa-specific information also gives the impression that you will support the teacher throughout the sometimes difficult process of obtaining a visa.
Including your school logo on the page is important for two reasons. Firstly it makes the school and the job vacancies look official. Secondly, since you will be getting a lot of traction on the page, you want to capitalize on the brand awareness that increased traffic naturally provides.
Backing this up with some attractive images and a video, if relevant, could also bolster interest. But again, be careful in going overboard with the visuals; you want to keep the candidate focused on the vacancy and to channel them to the application form. A link to your YouTube video could lose the candidate completely.
4. How to build a simple landing page
There are software websites that allow you to build a simple landing page, with a mix of advanced features for schools with sizable budgets and also ones that cost less. A small budget does not have to prevent you from building better landing pages for international applicants.
Not all schools will have the digital expertise required to build effective landing pages. Not to worry – that’s where Teach Away comes in!
Whilst Teach Away is a teacher job listing site; we are a lot more than that. Our partner schools are able to build their own school landing page as standard with all subscriptions. Added to this, all partner schools feature on our country-specific landing pages.
Here, international teachers in our database, and external users clicking-through from Google searches, can fall on our country-specific landing pages. These pages provide a snapshot of the key information about being an international teacher in that particular country, alongside all the live vacancies that Teach Away partner schools have in the region.
Summary
- Ensure your landing page is lean, while containing all the crucial information that an applicant needs to know at this early stage of the application process
- Do include a snapshot of the key information and benefits
- Have effective call to action buttons; but not too many!
- Customise your landing page to the desired candidates nationality
- Testimonials can help to bolster interest
If you would like to learn more about how Teach Away can help you with your recruitment needs, contact our sales team today.