SEO Tips to Make Your Recruitment Stand Out From the Crowd
The latest in a long line of buzzwords in the world of recruiting new employees is “recruitment marketing.” This is a fusion of career recruitment and marketing elements commonly employed in search engine optimisation.
To some people recruitment and marketing sound like two completely different areas, but the fact is marketing experts are increasingly collaborating with recruitment professionals to develop ads for online job boards that have a new and very different impact.
make keywords count
Research has suggested that the same keywords and phrases that are popular in search engine searches should also be used in job ads. When a job seeker arrives at a job board, chances are they have done a search for the job they are looking for via Google first. To ensure your job ad reaches the right audience you have to employ this thinking into your ads so the search engines index them and they appear at the top, or very near, on the results pages.
So, if you have a fancy job title, it’s potentially going to struggle to work if your target audience is searching for a more common phrase.
leave it to the pros
Online jobs boards are saturated with information that can be both helpful and detrimental. Yes, there are a lot of job seekers out there looking for their dream role, but think of how many companies are churning out job ads that all sound the same.
A marketing expert will analyse the content of the ads and create something that really stands out from the crowd and includes those all-important search terms. This can help enormously when you have to fill a vacancy quickly or one that has been languishing for weeks with very little interest.
make the most of your company brand
It’s human nature that a job seeker will see a position they are interested in and then do a bit of homework on the company offering the job. This becomes even more important if it’s a company they have never heard of before and want to check out its credentials.
You should make full use of social media to make sure your brand is out there, and create a strong online and social media presence. If your company’s online presence currently consists of a couple of lines in an online local business directory, then your chance of attracting applications from the top talent are slim.
how marketing is best used in recruitment
Marketing is essentially a process which is employed to determine which types of message will most successfully motivate specific target audiences to act in certain ways. When you think about it, online recruitment works in much the same way, using terms that will appeal to readers and motivate them to apply.
For example, “Cloud Systems Administrator in Stockport” will attract job applicants, whereas “Head of Information, Systems, Cloud and Infrastructure” won’t because it’s not a term people would use when searching.
Recruitment marketing takes this to the next level by utilising marketing tactics to target specific audiences rather than the general public. Once an audience of specific job seekers is identified, the search terms people are most likely to use can be determined and killer job ads created. The content contained in the ads should rank high on the search engines, and also on searches within the jobs board themselves.
If early figures are anything to go by, combining SEO with your job ads could well be a match made in recruitment heaven.