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?
Thoughts on the Social Recruiting summit in NYC
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.
The future of newspapers and comic strips?
Using Machinima in Your Recruitment Marketing Videos
Video is a great tool to engage with candidates & users on the web. A recent BusinessWeek article discussed how online Ads are starting to really become effective, when attached to a video. More and more, you see companies leveraging video in all aspects of their business.
Using video or other multi-media content in your recruitment marketing will become much more common over the coming years because of the ease with which to create content, and the much lower price point.
I still think when a lot of companies hear “video” , they think big dollars, a big video shoot, and a lot of complexity. And to be sure, that still is very common for many corporate/career site videos. But it’s our belief that companies can & should utilize freely accessible tools to create much more homespun videos/presentations that are more authentic and are better targeted at their intended audience.
Although a career site video can help pitch a company, most of these are done with traditional marketing language, are highly polished and focus on the “company” messaging. They are never targeted at a specific job category, or candidate type…and therefore often are ineffective. People don’t want to be pitched to…they want companies to be authenticate and to provide them “behind-the-scenes” type of content. They would much rather prefer a hiring manager walking around with his video cam, and talking to the candidate about what the jobs about, instead of hearing the corporate message. Corporate folks shudder at such a thought! But times are changing…
This blog post is about using some of those super inexpensive tools to create compelling, targeted and authentic content that candidates will resonate with, will appreciate, and which can help your brand. The purpose of these types of videos isn’t to create one or two…but to create dozens of specialized, highly focused videos that can sit on your blog, link to your social network accounts, and even be linked to individual jobs.
One such process is called Machinima . Machinima, at a high level, is the use of real-time three-dimensional (3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate computer animation. This is becoming increasingly popular because the graphics engines are so powerful and the toolsets to create the animations freely available. Instead of hiring an expensive video crew…you can create quick animations that can be highly targeted and that speaks directly to your target audience. To be sure, this is NOT for everyone.
Before you dismiss it …understand that it’s already being used by major international corporations for both product marketing AND recruitment marketing. For example, below is a commercial done by Toyota based on the game World of Warcraft – a MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) for their Tacoma truck. WOW has over 10 million online players.
Also, Microsoft has created a series of Machinima recruitment commercials based on their Halo Series. And there are many other examples. With the arrival of the Wii, there are more people playing video games then ever before…and Machinima is a technique that be used on all of them to create almost any type of animation sequence you want.
As an example of using machinima for a recruitment marketing video, we put together this short example to showcase how easy and cost effective it can be to differentiate your company and create a very targeted web commercial. As a preface, if you’re looking to hire technical people….software developers, IT people and or tech gurus…referencing/using World of Warcraft is a great way to engage with them. Even if they don’t play, they most likely know someone who plays or at least knows what it is. This technique leverages their interest in WoW to better position your company and brand. It obviously wouldn’t work for executive types! 
These are examples of things you can do today, without spending lots of money, to better engage with candidates and to differentiate your company. You need to be blogging about your jobs, you need to be on the social network sites communicating with people and you need to be putting out compelling content that gets candidates talking to you and engaging with your company.
If you’re doing anything in the recruitment marketing video space…I’d love to hear from you and see what you’re going!
Facebook….the next place for business and recruiting
The New York Times put out an article, How to Market Your Business with Facebook . It shows how companies are increasingly flocking to Facebook to position their business in front of the 300 million + users…and why not? There’s a lot of business to do there! And, I would also chime in with, a lot of recruiting.
I think we’re at the early stages of this revolution…and things are changing quickly. I’m reading the book, Socialnomics, and there is a chapter that discusses how a 22 year old recently got a job at Google…who had NEVER used email! I found that shocking…but with the rise of social media….things are changing quickly and business’s better adapt. When you plug yourself into this space with a tool like TweetDeck, it becomes easy to understand how the new generation of kids are communicating…and it isn’t over email!
Some Stats
· 300 million+ users on FaceBook
· 1.4 Million facebook “pages” that collect 10 million fans every day
· The average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site.
Facebook business case
“Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.”
Facebook business case
“Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their martial status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends. “
Facebook business case
“Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be
redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, it’s fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000”
I love my Iphone 3GS, but….
This new Ad campaign by Verizon putting the Iphone on the island of misfit toys, circa the original Rudolph Christmas cartoon, is classic.
The point of the Ad: Iphone is great,BUT, it belongs with all the other misfit toys because of the poor AT&T network.
I guess AT&T didn’t think it was too funny, cause now there’s a law suite against Verizon to pull the Ads, another bad mistake from AT&T. Just in case no-one saw the Ad before, the lawsuit virtually guarantees that the Ad will be seen…way to go.
So, although AT&T has a better phone on their network with the IPhone, Verizon is definitely winning the Ad wars.
Experiments with recruitment marketing commercials
We’re pretty excited about using video in recruitment marketing….we believe video and multi-media “web commercials” can have a significant impact on how effective a job advertisement is. I think companies need to be more creative and willing to reach out to passive candidates using video and messaging that will resonate with them.
A web commercial, however, doesn’t need to be some high-end video production that costs thousands of dollars. Companies can leverage readily available, free tools, that can generate exceptional multi-media content at almost zero cost. The roadblock is just understanding what’s possible, and a little creativity in creating the commercials!
Here’s one example of a type of web-commercial we’d use at SmashFly to try and attract a web developer, if we were actively looking to hire one. The key attributes of this type of web commercial is that it was very cheap to build (small royalty cost for video) and very easy to put together (30 minutes of basic editing). We love this Christopher Walken video…and for basically no money, …we have something that’s WAY more engaging than putting up some list of job requirements . We want to engage with our future employees, inspire them, get them excited about working with us, and convey that this is a fun, exciting place to work.
I’ll be putting up other experimental web commercials over the coming months to help inspire people who are thinking about using this type of technology in their own recruitment marketing strategies.
CareerBuilder’s pitch: Technology is key to attracting top candidates
I get email promotions from CareerBuilder on a regular basis…(as well as from many other job boards). Their latest one, received today, talks about how technology plays a critical role in helping companies attract the best candidates. I couldn’t agree more! Now, more than ever in the history of trying to hire the best candidates, technology is THE key differentiator between successful companies and those that fail.
In fact, we believe companies need to dramatically change their recruitment marketing strategies to leverage technology at every step of the recruitment process. We’re not saying that technology removes the human interaction..quite the opposite. What leveraging technology does is remove all the “process” and administrative steps for companies, so that they can focus on what matters…building relationships.
And, on a personal note…having worked with many of the major job boards…CareerBuilder, IMHO, is the BEST major job board in terms of technology solutions.
Hey, an email marketing campaign that actually worked on me…..go figure.
Technology jobs still in slump
The Wall Street Journal has an article about how the jobs in the technology sector continue to slump. That’s quite disappointing…I think we’re all hoping/expecting jobs to get created based on some of the latest GDP numbers. You can read the article here: http://jucy.tw/R98M
From the article: “In fact, Silicon Valley counties such as Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco continue to report a drop in employment in tech sectors such as computer manufacturing, software and Internet-related fields. There was some modest job growth locally during the recession, but it was in areas unrelated to tech, such as health care.”
(From Wall Street Journal)
Here’s hoping that Q1/2010 will show a steadily rising chart line!
Emailing Blog entries is fun
There are two “Killer Apps” that we use almost all day long. These aren’t exciting new tools….they’ve been around for a LONG time.
They are….drum roll please:
1. Email
2. Snag-It
I know, I know…how boring is that right? They may be boring, but the combination allows us to communicate ideas , identify bugs, and convey solutions very quickly and very easily. Snag-It is just a FANTASTIC tool! I just couldn’t do my job without it, and it’s greatly reduced the amount of back and forth email we need to send to customers, prospects, or colleagues. Why? Because trying to explain something in words takes far too long.
For example, I could try to explain that job boards have slowly been declining in impact, while web 2.0 tools have been rising….but by grabbing this image from Lou Adlers site and putting in a few arrows with comments….the idea is immediately conveyed.
What I’m really excited about now is these 2 killer apps, combined with our new blog and it’s ability to receive blog postings via email. Outlook is a GREAT email client that allows constructing HTML messages very easily and quickly. Now we can see use that, in combination with SnagIt, and our Blog to publish RICH information unbelievably fast.
You gotta love technology! …or at least we do.
