More jobseekers using social media in the USA

Fascinating report into the current US job market sparked my interest. I’m usually careful about reblogging or assuming that what goes in the US is relevant to my UK clients, but this report By Jobvite (PDF) contains lots of food for thought.

It stands to reason really when you understand that referrals are still fundamentally the most common way to secure a new job.

Young professionals build their networks faster and generate more referrals online (when compared to previous generations still using more traditional methods) and social media is the arena for that networking more and more.

The astronomical growth of social networks has created a new way for companies and candidates to connect online.   Nielsen calculates social network traffic grew by 43% from June 2009 to June 2010, and social network activity is now the single largest activity online, dwarinng online games, email and search. And Americans are now turning to their social networks to find jobs.

• 44% of all job seekers cited referrals and/or social networks as the source of their most recent job, compared to 32% for job boards (note, respondents could select multiple options).
• 18% of respondents ages 18-24 and 19% of respondents ages 25-34 used social networks to find their current job, compared to 9% of those 35-44,  4% of those 45-54 , and 1% of those 55+.
• Extrapolated to the national adult population, approximately 14.4 million US American job seekers would credit online social networks for their current/most recent job.

Read the report here

Completing the loop: What are you spending your money on?

It sounds a simple question, but how important is SEO to your recruitment website?  I honestly don’t know.  Did you expect me to?  How could I possibly know – you haven’t shown me the figures… so I can’t say.

You do have the figures… don’t you?  Don’t you?

If you’re putting any effort into marketing your recruitment company you’ll have some good idea of the cost of using various channels

• SEO
• Pay Per Click
• Social Media Optimisation
• Email Marketing
• Other online advertising or sponsorship
• Print media, newspapers, directories, Yell.com, etc etc.

… but it’s not about costs – is it.  If expenditure was about cost we’d all live in the woods under tarpaulin.   It’s about value.  What’s the value to your recruitment website of every pound you spend on any of the channels

And I’m not talking about value of a click – those are just flattery.  Surely you’re measuring your marketing in terms of a good CV or ultimately a placement.  What’s worth most to you – a click from Google on some long-tail search, or one of the 500 hits your site just sent out from its email alerts.

• What’s the best source of good CVs?
• Which keywords are generating the most placements?

If you’re asking those type of questions, you’re on the right track.  Job Aggregator Indeed.com have spruced up and modernised an old marketing phrase relating to the Four As of Advertising and in their white paper remind recruiters how they can only have true control over ROI for marketing if they think like a CFO and observer the four A’s:

1. Assign
2. Automate
3. Analyze
4. Adjust

I won’t go into it verbatim here, but I’m particularly keen on the “Automate” angle of recording marketing expenditure – and am currently helping a client to do this.  We’re looking at

• Providing full referrer information in a consultant’s application email (Source of click, keywords typed (if search) etc.)
• Providing a linkback to the Recruitment Database (in this case the FXRecruiter website also doubles as the database)
• Full custom reporting system that can pull application and referrer data from the database into easy to view graphs and spreadsheets.

Basically, it’s about filling the gap that currently exists between spending your money on marketing and getting good candidate CVs through the door and getting paid for making placements.  And recruitment is all about filling the gap – right?

Job Description Template

I’ve had a couple of queries about my post on the SEO template for a job details page – in particular about the job description and title itself, so wanted to expand on that a little. (more…)

Recruitment Websites “by design”

One of the common problems we have to overcome is ‘design’ not really being about ‘design’ at all – but being about visual appeal.

I posted this earlier today on the Reverse Delta blog but thought it worth posting here… though I guess I’m preaching to the converted here if you’re reading a blog about Recruitment SEO!

Flash and SEO – understanding the balance and implications.

We understand the importance of the Brand – all companies need to keep careful control of how they come across to their audience – and the importance of presenting a good image to your audience – whether clients or candidates – on your website is very high. You only get one chance in many ways.

Visually, your site needs to do the job well, and we must accept that one of the big tools in ‘grabbing’ people is animated, (usually Flash) graphics in some way. There’s no avoiding it… things that ‘move’ tend to work. (Within reason – we’ve all been to sites that are way, way too annoying before!).

The problem is, of course, that Flash is effectively a graphical interface – the words or messages in Flash are not indexed by Google or any search engines. They’re ‘empty’ words as far as SEO goes. So does that mean you should be avoiding Flash for your new recruitment website? Well… not really, but you do need to get the balance right. (more…)

How should recruiters deal with truly Free Job Boards?

With a massive pressure to reduce costs, it was a sort of inevitability that some big firms were going to club together and produce a truly free (well almost) super-job board. ‘United We Work’ was set up earlier this month in the US by the Fortune 500 companies.

“We believe that if we can break those [cost barriers] down, it may stimulate an employer to hire now instead of waiting six months,” said Jason Kerr, founder of QuietAgent, the technology developer behind the website.

The site, (at UnitedWeWork.org), won’t compete directly with online job board giants CareerBuilder and Monster – job seekers don’t search and apply for specific positions; rather they complete a standard résumé. It’s an interesting experiment in the US where unemployment is currently 10%.

With so many big firms putting their weight behind the new board, it’ll be interesting to see the level to which (if at all) traditional job boards are hit in the US.

Tweet your jobs… the easy way

I’ve seen so many articles recently about complex mothods of getting your jobs ‘fed’ onto Twitter.

It’s so simple and there are a few sites / providers out there with vested interests giving people all manner of complex advice about how to automatically display your jobs on Twitter.

It’s so simple to do and I feel the overpowering urge to tell you how before someone else tells you a more complex way.

1. Get the URL of your jobs RSS feed no RSS feed? Get a new recruitment website!
2. Create the Twitter account that you want to use (five minutes’ job!) to display the jobs
3. Login to that Twitter account
4. Go to pingvine.com or twitterfeed.com and submit the RSS feed (i.e., paste it in), and authenticate it.
5. Bingo… one more channel to get your jobs to the world – using the world’s fastest-growing search engine – Twitter.

Oh… and don’t forget the bit that people so often miss out on… PRMOTE YOUR CHANNELS – make sure people know they can digest your content in whatever way suits them.

Free versus Paid

Just stepping outside of the SEO loop and into the wider world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), I thought it was time to post something about the use of Adwords in helping to market your recruitment website. (more…)

This is a democracy – use your vote

Just wanted to clear something up for a client who didn’t fully understand the use of ‘nofollow’ links when adding comments on blogs etc.

As we all know (surely!) a link to your site is generally a very good thing.  A link with good anchor text is generally even better.  This is because Google et al will understand what is at the end of that link to be summarized by the context of the anchor text.  (“Click here for Marketing Jobs” is good “Click here for Marketing Jobs” is not) (more…)

Gain some insight!

It seems one of the most fundamental things, but do people search for “Jobs”, “Recruitment” or “Vacancies”?  It’s about time we buried this one – so many of my clients come from hardcore recruitment backgrounds and as such can get a bit bogged down in industry terms, rather than thinking of terms that people actually search for. (more…)