SEO For Recruitment: SEO Tips For Optimizing Job Listings to Lower Recruitment Costs

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Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting qualified people for a job. For some components of the recruitment process, mid- and large-size organizations often retain professional recruiters or outsource some of the process to recruitment agencies. Some organizations use employer branding strategy and in-house recruitment instead of agencies. Recruitment-related functions are generally carried out by an organization’s human resources staff.

How Companies Fall Short When Utilizing The Search Engines To Lower Recruitment Costs

Many large companies and small businesses fall short when it comes to utilizing the search engines such as Google for recruiting purposes. Most companies follow the same pattern when it comes to recruitment of new employees and it usually goes something like this. In general the stages in recruitment include sourcing candidates by advertising or other methods, screening potential candidates using tests and/or interviews, selecting candidates based on the results of the tests and/or interviews, and on-boarding to ensure the candidate is able to fulfill their new role effectively.

1. Open a position internally for the new person.
2. Post the job on an internal job board in hopes that there is someone internally that will apply, thus lowering their recruitment costs. These internal job boards are usually hidden from the search engines therefor provide little value for people searching for jobs in the search engines.
3. Head to LinkedIn or other social networking websites trying to solicit an employee. This has become more popular and actually has some positive benefits for lowering recruitment costs.
4. Posting the job on numerous low quality job boards that are not focused on the niche the business is trying to recruit for.

If you are going to post jobs on local job boards remember to post them on boards that are focused on your industry or position you are trying to recruit for. For example if you are trying to recruit a SEO Manager for your local agency I would suggest using a local job board for online marketing professionals.

5. When all else fails local businesses attempt to use the “bug guys” such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, or other national recruiting websites which not only are expensive and drive up recruitment costs, but also cast a net that is to wide for local business recruitment campaigns to be successful.

5 Tips for Utilizing Your Business Website For Recruiting

Job seekers are searching through Google and the other search engines more frequently to help them uncover jobs in a specific geographic location such as Chicago, Raleigh, or Syracuse. Companies are falling short when it comes to utilizing their own websites to generate recruitment leads at a lower cost and bring aboard quality talent. Below you will find some tips that will help your small business utilize its website to recruit new employees for free.

1. Create a careers section: On your local businesses website create a careers or jobs section, and optimize that section for your business niche + jobs or careers.
2. Create in-depth job profiles: Don’t skimp on the information you provide to potential candidates. These job opening profiles should include company background, contact information, job description, job requirements, any any other information that a job hunter would need to understand the job. Don’t forget to give them a way to apply online or contact you directly from that page.
3. Keep the in-depth profile unique to your website: Don’t just take the same job profile and syndicate it across multiple websites.

Tip: If you need to place your job opening on multiple websites it’s best to create a primary set of content for your website, then take a subset of that content along with some additional unique content, and use that on other websites. This follows the same principles as companies who syndicate content or operate inside a reseller model. Read more about SEO tips for syndication or resellers here.

4. Optimize Locally: Most job seekers are utilizing local modifiers such as city or state to search Google for jobs (such as content manager job in Chicago). This insight should help you when optimizing your job listings on page factors such as title tag, header tags, and even an opening paragraph.

Tip: Your job listings title tag should be formatted something like [position] in [city, state] at [company name] | Apply at [website name]. This title tag format will help Google and other search engines understand the relevance of the page based on search query and rank it accordingly.

5. Socialize Your Job Openin: Most companies have social profiles on Facebook or Twitter which can be utilized to spread your on-site job listing across multiple people. Twitter has also been known to help increase the speed at which content gets indexed (Read More Here). I would also suggest including a line toward the end of your update on Facebook or Twitter to say “if you know someone who might be a great fit please pass it on”.

Hope the above tips for optimizing your job listings to lower recruitment costs has helped, and as always if you need any help please don’t hesitate to give us a call.