We’ve already covered how visitor engagement and personalization lift career site performance. In this final part of the series, we’ll look at the last — and often most powerful — piece of the puzzle: job notifications.
Done right, job notifications can dramatically increase conversion by keeping your candidate audience informed and engaged with the most relevant roles.
Not every great candidate finds the right job on your site today — but they could tomorrow. Job notifications bridge that gap, ensuring you don’t lose high-quality candidates just because timing isn’t perfect.
Even more importantly, text is the ultimate user experience. It’s how people naturally communicate, and it’s where they’re most likely to see and act on your message. Job notifications make your career site an active, ongoing channel for keeping candidates updated with the most relevant opportunities.
To maximize conversion, your job notifications should be designed around four key principles:
1. Lead with Text (But Keep Multi-Channel in Play)
Text messaging is where people live. Alerts delivered over SMS are opened and acted on at much higher rates than email. That said, a multi-channel approach — text, email, and WhatsApp (in markets where applicable) — ensures you reach candidates wherever they’re most comfortable.
The key: make text the primary channel.
2. Behavior-Driven Cadence
Rule-based campaigns are an outdated method of driving the best engagement. The best alert systems adapt automatically to each person’s behavior:
Candidates who frequently open and click should continue receiving regular alerts.
Candidates who stop engaging should automatically receive fewer alerts.
Ultimately, candidates with no engagement should be unsubscribed automatically.
Best practice: Automatically unsubscribe more people than will unsubscribe manually themselves. This prevents fatigue and keeps your notifications valuable to those who truly want them — and most importantly, keeps you out of spam.
3. Relevant and Compelling Job Matches
Relevance and clarity are everything. Candidates should only see alerts for jobs that fit their profile, interests, and motivation to act. That means:
Use information candidates provide directly (e.g., job type, location preferences).
Layer in behavioral data, like the jobs or content they view most often.
Highlight what matters most — job title, location, pay, and benefits — in a short, punchy message.
Use short URLs that take candidates directly to the job page, reducing friction and encouraging immediate action.
The tighter the match and clearer the message, the higher the conversion rate — and the stronger the candidate experience.
4. Conversion-Focused Targeting by Role Type
Not every role needs more applicants. Conversion-focused notifications should give you the ability to dial up or down application flow based on need.
For example, if entry-level roles already have a steady stream of applicants, alerts should automatically deprioritize those jobs. Meanwhile, alerts for hard-to-fill or high-value roles should receive more visibility, frequency, and urgency — ensuring your system drives incremental conversion exactly where it’s needed most.
Well-executed job notifications directly impact the most important conversion metrics for your career site:
| Metric | How Job Notifications Move the Needle |
|---|---|
| Lead Conversion-to-Apply Rate | By sending timely, relevant alerts, more captured leads return and complete applications. |
| Career Site % of Applicants | More of your overall applicant pool comes from your own site, reducing dependence on job boards. |
| Visit-to-Apply Rate | Candidates who return via notifications are more likely to apply, lifting your overall visit-to-apply performance. |
When notifications are primarily text-based, behavior-driven, and focused on highly relevant jobs, they can significantly increase your conversion rates — often doubling or tripling the number of leads who turn into applicants.
Across this series, we’ve shown how to turn your career site into a true conversion engine by focusing on the metrics that matter most:
Visitor Engagement — capturing attention early.
Personalization — tailoring the experience to each candidate.
Job Notifications — re-engaging leads with timely, relevant opportunities.
Together, these elements help you maximize the value of your career site traffic, generate more high-quality applicants, and reduce dependency on expensive external sources.
Your career site already has the potential. The Blueprint shows how to unlock it.
Not sure how your career site is performing today?
Dalia offers a free audit to help you understand the quality of your career site traffic and identify opportunities to reduce reliance on low-performing sources like job boards and programmatic networks.
Learn more about the free audit →
Your audit will include:
A breakdown of your current applicant sources and their conversion to hire.
Insights into where you're overspending on low-quality volume.
A customized plan to improve career site conversion and drive more applicants and hires with your existing traffic.