SEO in Job Recruiting

I recently wrote this piece for an internship position I am interviewing for. I had to write it semi-quickly, and needless to say, I am quite proud of it. It's all about using Search Engine Optimization for job recruiting. Although I am training myself in SEO, this came as a beneficial report even to me. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to leave any comments or questions for me!

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a common term that seems to be surfacing more and more as of late. So what is it exactly? SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's natural search results (what appears under Google’s recommended results, not the results that are paid for on the side). The more frequently your website appears on search engine sites (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.  SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Most companies and organizations use SEO for their blogs however, it can be beneficial to use it for job descriptions and advertising. The primary goal in job recruiting is to drive increased traffic to your career site and reduce your dependency on expensive paid job boards.

There is a specific recruiting SEO Optimization Cycle that starts with reviewing hiring needs, your keyword search, the site creation and submission, the creation of talent landing pages, job optimization distribution, candidate capture and delivery, and, finally, traffic and ranking reporting, before starting back at square one.

 Review of Hiring Needs

A true optimization process needs to start by defining what your hiring needs are for the next 12 months, not just what jobs are open today. For example, if you are accepting Spring 2013 Internship applicants and it is October, it is best to have the application available as soon as possible. This way is most beneficial in receiving a greater volume of applicants over a longer period of time.

 Keyword Research

The most common way to use SEO is by publishing a number of different articles on your website that can include any number of keywords that are relevant to the position you seeking to hire, and this will be identified by the search engine when they carry out a scan of your site, which will often lead to a higher ranking among the results for people Googling or browsing Bing for one of those terms, specifically. Your primary goal is to not only have the occurrence of the keywords more frequent, but to have more applicants clicking on your page and applying for the position. 

 Site Creation and Submission

There are many aspects to creating a comprehensive SEO career micro site: logo, colors, navigation, keywords, daily sitemap creation, back linking (from your career site and other strategic sites online to increase your popularity). Your content should include meta descriptions, short phrases that describe your content. Most meta descriptions contain 1-2 sentences, are less than 160 characters total, use action words, use keywords about the content- yet don’t over-use keywords, as you still want the sentences to make sense to your candidates. 

Even better SEO for your site creation, you can use keywords that help with searches, and those searches can help bring traffic to your blog. Be careful, though – you might get dinged in the search engines if you try to use a keyword not in your content. This would be similar to keyword stuffing, which you also want to avoid.

If you are using your own photos to promote your business, you might use a watermark (copywright) to prevent people from using your images without permission.

Did you know sites like Pinterest use the alt tag in photo descriptions for pins? Use these tags wisely and in such a way that helps you better describe what you have written and also how your photo relates to your content. You can also use Twitter to post links using hash tags with your keywords.  For example, the keywords I am looking for right now are “recruiting” and “social media,” a tweet from your company may read: “Not sure how to survive in the #socialmedia #recruiting era? Here is the perfect guide: http://on.mash.to/OJyFyR (via @mashable).”

 Creating Talent Landing Pages

Candidates often do not type your company’s name into Google or Bing when looking for careers. They typically search for a job based on location and job function or title, i.e. “Erie Public Relations Practitioner,” “Los Angeles RN.” 

If you aren’t showing up on job searches like these, stop hiding and get found online. Your candidate search has to require landing pages, meaning, when they type their specific search into Google, Google will find the pages that match that search. By having “Talent Landing Pages,” your company will be provided with a recruiting platform that helps you deploy an interactive recruiting strategy that beats job boards like Monster or FindHire. Your company is branded with your custom URL, current logos and style, and it has the ability to capture passive job seekers via e-mail capture or RSS feed.

 Job Optimization and Distribution 

Optimizing your jobs means including your branding and navigation into every job, along with inserting the top searched key words. You’ll also want to automatically distribute your jobs to classified sites, and powering your email and RSS feeds to your internal and external community.

 Candidate Capture and Delivery 

Redirecting candidates into your Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, is one of the most important steps. Job postings inside your ATS are invisible to search engines and can’t be found by the candidates you want to reach. Not only do you want to land candidates directly to your “Apply Here” page for the specific job, but you want to know where they were referred from online (essentially to see where you are getting the most hits from). Also have easy job agent tools to capture passive candidates that aren’t ready to apply just yet, so that they can return in the future. These tools would be asking for the e-mail address so that they can receive more information of other open positions in the future, or give them the opportunity to save their resume on the site, so when they are ready, it’s already saved in your online database.

 Page Ranking 

Now that you have your jobs “indexed” on Google, your next and most important step is to make sure you get ranked in order to win traffic, and make your SEO strategy a success. Where do you need to be ranked to win? Only 75 percent of candidates will not go past page two in Google search results, and the first five search results yields 82% of all the clicks. Most candidates won’t even scroll to the bottom of the results. 

It is crucial that you measure the elements of your online strategy, but do know what sources are referring the best quality candidates to your career site, and where you rank. SEO providers should be able to provide you with monthly or weekly reports of where your keywords are ranked on their search engines, along with exact visitor and applicant tracking.