The Senior Living industry is suffering from a workforce crisis. Due to rapid expansion and more people retiring to assisted living communities, companies have to pay more to find quality personal care aides and support staff for their facilities. And many are not doing themselves any favors with their career web pages.
According to case studies performed by Akamai and Gomez, 40% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Google provides a helpful tool to measure page speed, giving any page a score between 0 and 100, with 90 and above considered fast (0-1 second), 50 to 90 moderate (1-2 seconds), and below 50 considered slow (3 seconds and above). In our survey of the top 125 Senior Living companies, we found that 41 companies had slow desktop loading speeds on their career pages and a whopping 93 companies had a slow mobile career page load time! They are missing out on dozens of applicants that are simply clicking away in frustration!
Mobile Recruitment
We’ve stressed a number of times that modern recruitment marketing requires a strong mobile strategy, which is why it’s so disappointing to see that mobile career page speeds are so incredibly slow. In fact, our survey showed that not even one Senior Living company had what would be considered a “fast” mobile career page, and our #10 entry was getting dangerously close to the bottom end of “moderate.”
Considering that 89% of job applicants think that mobile devices are crucial to the job hunting process, not having an optimized mobile career site is causing you to lose candidates that would otherwise have completed an application.
The best way to ensure that your mobile recruitment page is as fast and responsive as possible is to keep it as basic as possible, which includes minifying your code, reducing scripts, and either eliminating or lowering the quality of your graphics. The other option is using a system like Talentify that will generate ultra-fast loading landing pages for your jobs.
Desktop Recruitment
On the other hand, it’s impressive to see so many Senior Living companies with reasonably fast desktop pages. Of the 125 companies that we looked into, all but 42 of them have pages that were rated “fast” or “moderate.”
This dichotomy isn't surprising. Many companies across industries are stuck in a desktop mindset, designing their websites to attract people primarily working from home computers and not considering that a specialized mobile page can be served on the mobile side.
However, this still becomes a problem when the competition for quality candidates is so high and the cost of bouncing clicks can add up very quickly. Much like on mobile, it's important to make sure that your career page is as minimalist as possible, even if it means using a simplified version of your website theme.
Why You Should Care
That all being said, there’s very little reason why a career page should be anything other than blazing fast if you want to capture as many quality applicants as possible.
The worst part? This is one of the easiest ways to help combat the workforce crisis! And that workforce crisis is only going to get worse, so it’s a good idea to fix these small problems today before the crunch really begins.
We like to keep things positive around here and not shame anybody, so we won’t be posting the top 10 slowest page speeds, but if you’re with a Senior Living company and would like to know how you rank, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to share our research with you.
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