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.
