Why don’t ATS vendors build “SEO friendy” career sites?

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?