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?

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.

What is a job search engine? Beyond Google and Yahoo!

Traditional organic SEO means (to put things simply) focus on mainly Google (organic) results and, if you have time, Yahoo (organic) results. It’s no wonder – if someone wants to find something on the web, we all know where people go first – it makes sense to focus your resources there. But what happens when they discover a ‘new’ search engine? (more…)

Workcircle endorses keyword-rich URLs with microsites

This article reproduced in part from Onrec, shows me an interesting, often debated concept – that of keywords in your domain name. Keywords in domain names have very little importance in actual ranking calculations – that’s been the case for years now. The positive effects people see are a consequence of sites linking to the domain using the URL as anchor text – link text containing keywords is what helps the domain rank, not the actual appearance of the keyword in the domain name. Our own blog is a great example of this. Google may well ignore the fact that ‘recruitment seo’ is in the domain name, but if people link to us, the anchor text is highly likely to be ‘Recruitment SEO’ – a valuable keyword to this site (since that’s what it’s about!). (more…)