Recruiting for jobs online is much like selling products online. If the job description sells itself, you should be able to get higher qualified applicants, traction within social media, and traffic to the jobs in job boards. Job description duplicates can be found all over the web, and when searching for a job, finding the same job posting from numerous different sources doesn’t help to sell or entice potential candidates to apply.
I have been in the online marketing industry for over 10 years. The first part of my career was spent at an e-commerce company. I then moved on to an advertising agency, working with e-commerce and B2B companies, and I now work at an Executive Recruitment and Consulting firm.
In the past at my former agency, I had worked with a recruiting firm client, so I understood the industry landscape from an SEO standpoint. What I didn’t foresee was working with many new channels of advertising that relate to the recruiting and job placement industry.
I was previously familiar with LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and Indeed. MaxHire, ATS, and other acronyms, on the other hand, I was not. It was a bit of an eye-opener had worked on similar things in the past.
I had been working with shopping search feeds to shopping search engines such as Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and Become.com. (I worked with Michael Yang, the founder of Become.com, in 2004 as the company was just starting, and also worked with Brian Smith at Singlefeed as they were getting going.) The reason I bring this up is because of product XML feeds going to these shopping search engines. Recruitment marketing uses the same types of feeds, XML feeds for Jobs.
Recruiters are in the business of selling jobs online, just as e-commerce is in the business of selling products online. Whoever sells/markets the best product or job is fully taking advantage of the tremendous opportunity that is the Internet.
Through optimization of job feeds and by creating job postings that do a great job of selling the job, recruiters can become more and more visible to prospective candidates. Not only do they sell the job, but they also show up for the proper keywords when searched for on job boards and search engines.
These job postings are just like products, in that the idea is to sell the position or products, not the category. These postings take users directly to the job from outside sources. Ideally, the corporations selling the position or the recruiters pitching the position have brand awareness in the marketplace so that aspect of the job has already been sold.
Recruiters also use other channels to attract talent for the jobs that are available. This takes time and effort. Combining an inbound strategy of driving applicants back to the website, while also actively searching out candidates, creates for a potent combination to fill jobs with highly qualified candidates.
Inbound Applications + Reaching Out to Prospects = Success
