Recruitment Marketing Innovation, Technology and Ideas

This blog post is not meant to disparage or downplay the value of the new breed of SEO recruitment companies that have sprung up over the last couple years. I’m referring to companies like Jobs2Web, OptiJob, DirectEmployers , and others. These companies are providing a very valuable service to their customers. The gist of the service is that they scrape the jobs off of the company’s existing ATS career site (which is poorly setup for SEO), and then republish the jobs into a NEW career site they host on behalf of the companies. Then using the core principles of SEO, they perform both “on page” and “off page” SEO techniques…such as creating optimized landing pages and other things that allow the jobs to be properly indexed in the major search engines. This in turn provides the company more traffic from Google, and the other major search engines. For some companies, it’s an extremely effective tool.

Having spent 10 years at BrassRing where we built both the ATS functionality and the Career Site functionality, I’m a bit surprised that the ATS vendors haven’t been on top of this very hot trend. Let’s face it…the job data comes from THEIR system! They are creating a career site for their clients so jobs can be found and candidates can apply. It’s completely in their power to create more optimized sites. The fact that a separate company is coming in, scraping the jobs off your career site, and then re-building the career site AGAIN so that candidates can properly find your jobs is far from an optimal solution. The question is, why aren’t ATS vendors updating their career site technology to be SEO friendly? I mean, this is low hanging fruit. SEO is clearly a hot topic for a lot of companies, and right now, their only solution is to pay another vendor to optimize the jobs that already exist on their existing career site. Heck, ATS vendors could probably charge more for an SEO Friendly career site….at least in the short term until everyone is doing it.

I know, I know…ATS vendors have a LOT of different projects, limited resources and probably no SEO expertise in-house. But honestly, this is one of those hot features that wouldn’t require a lot of additional effort. Hire yourself and SEO expert. And then re-format and optimize your current career site for the search engines. This isn’t rocket science.

IMHO, this isn’t a matter of if, it’s when. ATS vendors WILL start building their career sites in this fashion because the market is clearly demanding it. And looking at the trends..it’s only going to increase in importance. Taleo, Kenexa, PeopleClick, SilkRoad, Virtual Edge…who will be the first? Time will only tell.

What do you think? Doesn’t it make sense that you have *one* career site for your candidates to interact with?

On Monday 11/16….there was a social recruiting summit in NYC that was focused on how recruiters can leverage social networking tools to better recruit candidates. As everyone knows, social media is all the rage these days..and there is a never ending stream of articles and blog posts about how companies should be leveraging these tools to reach out to their users and candidates. Here’s another one.

I didn’t actually attend the event, I watched live stream, and was using TweetDeck to follow the live tweets using the #socialrecruiting hash tag. Also, I was only able to listen in to the first presentation from Fred Wilson in full…I had work to do the rest of the day…

But some quick comments on Fred’s presentation, because I thought it was very interesting, and very useful info. First, something that’s not talked about enough, but which Fred hit on multiple times…is that companies need to leverage a blog to talk about their job opportunities. Everyone is so fixated on FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn, that you almost never hear companies talk about leveraging a blog to reach candidates. As Fred rightly points out, one way of thinking of Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn is as  notification systems. You use those social networks to let people know about a new opportunity, but they aren’t the right tool to publish a lot of content. What is? A blog. A powerful combination is to create a blog, where you both publish your jobs, but also talk about your company and the opportunities…and then create links from your social networks back to your blog.

So, start blogging about your companies opportunities…people will find you, and start subscribing to your RSS Feed. Next, start leveraging your social networks to “notify” people about those opportunities, pointing them back to your blog. A nice benefit of this approach is that your blog can become a FREE SEO site for you. Make sure you register your blog address under your companies domain name, so you get all the good SEO juice. So, you can use wordpress (like we do) to create a free blog, and then point blog.<yourcompanydomain>.com to wordpress. That way, you’re still leveraging your brand, and all your jobs and blog postings will be picked up by the search engines and blog search engines…and you’ll starting getting candidate traffic from both Google AND from Blog search engines because you’ll be building SEO Authority for the types of jobs you’re hiring for.

Some other interesting facts I didn’t know.

· Indeed is the most searched job board on the Internet….more than 10 million searches per month. They should be part of your recruitment marketing plans…whether it’s just getting your jobs listed for free….but I’d also recommend using their sponsored jobs …at least for those difficult to fill positions.

· Check out Tracker.com …a very useful site to find people and start directly recruiting directly.

· LinkedIn is the world’s online structured resume database. I think this is a VERY Powerful tool. I want to comment on this one more.

LinkedIn … how you can use it

One of the things we do very well is measure a job ads performance in terms of “views” (how many viewed my job), “apply clicks” (how many clicked the link to apply) and “applicants” (how many people who clicked on the link, actually completed our online submission process and became an applicant in my ATS).

We have hard data that shows, on average…most companies don’t get better than 15%-20% conversion rate from people clicking “apply” to getting into your database. Think about that for a moment. You spent $250 on a job ad, and let’s say 300 people view it, but 100 are *somewhat* interested…and click apply. When they land at your ATS System and see they need to create an account , they quickly lose interest and only 15-20 of those 100 people will end up in your ATS db. That’s not good. If it was me…and I spent that $250 for the Ad, I’d want as many of those 100 people as I could get into my system.

So, first, make it EASIER for those 80-85 people who surfed away to at least connect with you in some fashion. They were interested enough to click the link, but hey, they’re busy and for every question and form you put up in front of them, you drop people. Some of these people may not be qualified, but many ARE, and just don’t have the time to fill our your 15 forms. But here’s where LinkedIn comes in. Make it very easy for that person to , at minimum to stay connected with your company (business card info) and ask them for their LinkedIn profile URL (which most people will do) then you now have a link to their active resume! You now have the ability to research each lead, research their background, see who their connected to and decide if they just might be the perfect fit for this job, or another job. You’ve gone from losing 80% of your recruitment funnel leads, and by using LinkedIn, makes it possible to stay connected and build relationships with people.

If you’ve got that active LinkedIn profile URL in your recruitment marketing system, as the person changes jobs, updates their linkedin profile, etc…your recruitment marketing system is constantly being updated….until it finds a new job that you’ve just published, and it automatically makes a match and notifies the recruiter.

Powerful stuff..and something we believe all companies should be actively doing.