Three Ways Google Gets Evil with Sidewiki

There has been a lot of talk about Google’s new Sidewiki…a tool which allows anyone to comment about a web page, virtually ON the web page itself in a sidebar. These comments and postings are only available to people who have the sidebar installed but, no-doubt, Google’s hope is that more web surfers will use this as part of their pursuit of socializing and democratizing the internet. That sounds well and good, but just isn’t the case. Excuse me if I don’t indulge in a list of HR messaging pros and cons to Sidewiki. Frankly the issues at stake are much larger than ‘What do I do if someone posts something negative in Sidewiki next to my web site?’ and ‘How to I utilize this as a social media tool?’ Even allowing for the most socially enlightened usage of this technology, the simple fact is that allowing random people to place commentary on a web site they do not own is illegal. This is why hackers who hijack web pages and change them are charged with criminal activity. 

Maybe I’m being too subtle, perhaps a touch understated. This is Google-enabled property damage. Your web site is the wall and Google is passing out spray-cans. This almost makes  Microsoft’s ’Smart Tags’ look good. For those who don’t recall this little bit of technical brilliance, Smart Tags was a new feature around 2001 in Microsoft XP which allowed Microsoft to highlight content on web pages with links to Microsoft and its partners. In other words, Microsoft’s web browser would be able to place links on your web page content without your knowledge or consent. There’s nothing quite like that warm glow you get knowing that some third party can leverage (translation: monetize) your content as an advertising channel — or considering the prospect that any fool with a Google application can comment, slander and advertise almost right on your web site (think blog comment spam or signature spam — point in case, I just deleted a blog comment from this site promoting auto insurance).

Consider just these three of the many ways this tool can be abused:

• Competitors or disgruntled former employees can visit every page of your web site and post lies about your employment experience, hiring practices, etc.
• Job seekers and candidates could mistake Sidewiki for a company endorsed and managed tool, posting pri­vate information or details you are unable to effectively correct or remove.
• Have a target hiring audience? So do your competitors and a wide variety of advertisers, Congratulations! Your site has just become their new marketing channel! I’m sure you can’t wait for some technical training service to start spamming your I.T.-related career pages with messages about how they can help them gain valuable skills for the job market. (Come on…I can’t be the only person who thinks this way.)

Back in 2004 Google made it very clear they intended to be different, that the company was guided by different stars and their core philosophy could be summed up as “Don’t Be Evil.” 

In a Letter from the Founders titled “An Owner’s Manual for Google’s Shareholders” you can find their approach stated as follows:

DON’T BE EVIL

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

 

Sidewiki doesn’t live up to the promise to do good things for the world. It opens up another channel ripe for abuse not only by those seeking to make malicious remarks but also for those who will use this space to promote completely irrelevant commercial messages and spam. It all depends on how much market penetration and use Google is able to generate — the more users, the higher the potential for abuse. While I am all for pro-active brand monitoring online, having to consistently police your own web presence so you can alert Google that you want something removed (which they may or may not act on) is just another daily task most IT and HR departments simply do not need on their plate. 

 

Google has a little legal wiggle-room to play with when it comes to Sidewiki. Technically the posts aren’t actually ON your site but rather posted in an application that ‘rides shotgun’ right next to your carefully crafted brand and message. No doubt Google is counting on this to provide them the legal room they need to sidestep any claims that Sidewiki promotes or enables illegal activity. And let’s face it, Google has the position of power here. As Chevy Chase might say: “I’m Google and you’re not.”

 

So what can you do in the meantime? There are some tools which can block Google Sidewiki, but rumors already abound that doing so may damage your search engine rankings. My advice: take control of your Google sidewiki content. As the owner of the web page you have the opportunity to have your content appear at the top of all posts. This is a great location to take control of the conversation by recognizing your audience, pointing out important site content or functionality (and even link directly to it!), you can even introduce Search Engine Optimized keywords since Sidewiki is indexed by Google. Check back soon (or subscribe by RSS) to find out how easy it is to set this up…heck, I might even post a video showing you step-by-step!

 

Remember, there are appropriate locations online for people to engage in dialogue and express their opinions about your organization. Your branded social media sites or profiles are appropriate places for such communications, like the Wall application on a Facebook page. To reap the benefits of social media realities you should get involved with discussions in these environments, especially those which are critical or negative, and use them as opportunities to promote your value, share success stories, clarify mis-conceptions, address grievances and provide solutions. This proactive attitude allows for you to build a reputation as a transparent and responsive organization. It also doesn’t involve random people spray painting on your web site.

 

Don’t Be Evil? Don’t Be Ridiculous.

 

Kevin B. Hawkins

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter

How do I continuously increase my following on Twitter?

I was skimming through the Q&A section of LinkedIn when I found the following question which cuts right to the heart of the ‘Twitter dilemma’ for many users. It was titled: ‘How do I continuously increase my following on Twitter?’ It read:

 

 I have been put in charge of our Twitter account. Our following is slowly increasing, but I still haven’t got the hang of it. Is their any secrets to getting an ample amount of followers without paying for them? They always seem to unfollow me and I feel like I’m wasting valuable time. 

 

My reply:

 

You say that you feel like you are wasting valuable time because your followers seems to unfollow you. Their actions are a direct reflection of their engagement with your message (or lack thereof) — if someone unfollows you it is a sign that they feel that YOU are wasting THEIR valuable time. Gaining a following on Twitter is about more than just racking up large numbers or using bulk follow-unfollow software to bulk-up your following with random unengaged followers. Gaining followers on Twitter requires balancing a few distinct elements. Here are some tips to make sure you are engaged with the right audience and more likely to keep them following your every tweet.

 

1) Develop a bio which clearly distinguishes who you are and contains keywords relevant to your target audience — words they are likely to use in searches.

 

2) Search for the people whose topical tweets relate to your areas of business and interest. Follow them. Pay attention to the topics which most engage their audience

 

3) Begin a cycle of engagement. Post links to articles of interest to your core audience, leverage the power of the people you follow by RT’ing relevant posts, @reply to people and engage in micro-conversations, link to your own company’s content and press releases (but not too much). Remember to use #hashtags and words which are likely to be searched by other tweeple. A nice linkbait-crafted Tweet doesn’t hurt either to help you catch someone’s interest.

 

4) Measure, measure, measure. There are a lot of tools available which provide quick and easy tracking of any links you tweet. HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com) is my favorite, allowing you to both shrink long URLs as well as track statistics on how many people clicked on any given link. This is a great way to tell what topics engage your audience and which ones leave them cold.

 

5) Don’t be afraid to unfollow people. It’s a Twitter reality — sometimes you follow someone who just doesn’t add value to your Twitter experience. Maybe they don’t ever Tweet about anything of interest, maybe they overtweet and make it impossible to view other people’s tweets, maybe they are just spamming the heck out of you every day. Use unfollow to groom your audience, shape the quality of the people you listen to and that will influence the quality of your following.

 

You can’t remove the ‘social’ from ‘social media.’ Prove yourself to be a valuable information resource for your audience and you will gain followers – engaged followers. Get involved with other Twitter ‘influencers’ (people who create and promote content and already have strong followings) and you will show that you are committed to more than just placing advertisements in the Tweetsphere – this will give you reputation and credibility which translates into followers of value.

Kevin B. Hawkins

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter

 

 

Are Mobile Job Alerts Turning Job Seekers into Pavlov’s Poodle?

Still not sold on the need to use twitter, email or mobile job alerts to engage candidates? What if a simple mobile TXT campaign could make a potential candidate get excited, fill them with anticipation and even, pleasure? Would you use it then?

Imagine this: you are Pavlov’s Poodle and your Twitter Alert, TXT message notification, incoming wall post notice (along with other social media ‘incoming content’ cues) are all bells triggering a behavioral response. Triggering, in fact, your brain’s pleasure centers and creating a loops which virtually assures continued engagement. In “Seeking. How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.” Emily Yoffe reveals some amazing research shedding light on how the acts of searching and finding trigger pleasure centers in the brain. Remember those studies with lab rats who would ignore food as long as they could press a button to stimulate their brain’s pleasure centers? Well — essentially we’re the rats and Google is the button. One of many such ‘buttons’ like mobile phone TXTs, Tweets, emails, etc.

According to the results from some researchers, it isn’t even the act of getting a reward which is the most powerful element in this phenomena. The acts of wanting and seeking or EXPECTING new information can become more addictive and pleasurable than actually getting the information in question. So you sit down to search for one item of information and find yourself still online an hour later performing search-after-search, caught in a loop where the act of seeking is just as important and fulfilling as actually finding what you are looking for. This is called a seeking/wanting system and if you’ve ever felt a shiver of excitement or anticipation at the incoming tone for a TXT message, tweet or email you have experienced the phenomena first-handed.

So let’s go back to our would-be candidate, the job seeker who has requested to be notified whenever a position fitting their criteria has been posted or when an article specific to their interests is available. You’re already providing them convenience — providing information to them in the media and format they have requested through the device of their choice. All great reasons to take advantage of this technology. But if researchers are correct in their findings, you are also ‘priming’ your job seeker: getting them excited, triggering anticipation pleasure in expectation of a ‘reward’ as you ring the bell. Would these be worthwhile emotions to tap into and engage right before they read about an job opening specifically related to their career goals? That would be pretty powerful stuff, and is very likely exactly what is happening every time someone gets a mobile (or other social media or email) career-related message.

I’d leave my job to work at this place.

Did that title get your attention? Good. This is all about grabbing attention. This is about a video you HAVE to watch…all the way through to the end. I’ll give you the link in just a bit. First, some back story:

The other day I received a call from an associate engaged in recruitment video marketing. He had just read my recent post “Do You Have The Best Job In The World?” and we got to talking about the power of video to reveal culture, work experience, and how it can help job seekers self select whether they are appropriate for employment in an organization or a particular career. Our discussion reminded me of a video I stumbled across some time ago which I’d like to share with you. You may have seen it before (it’s about two years old), but it’s certainly worth another view.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times. IMHO our aim should be to make people salivate with desire to work someplace.  Create desire…point at opportunity. Make your pipeline a throng of people wanting behind the red velvet rope. Now I’ve said it one hundred and one times.

Of course if you can make your message social media friendly and viral too…well, all the better.

If you’re bored of recruitment videos that remind you of a PSA spot on ‘local cable,’ or something out of a show on The Learning Channel or Discovery, I have an example of the recruitment video cure. Let’s make something clear: the difference between what this video HAS and DOES NOT HAVE is not an issue of who wrote and produced the video; rather, it’s a result of what the company was willing to reveal about itself. The company had to “get out of its own way” and allow a shift in communication from corporate mission to authentic revelation. The two are not mutually exclusive. One is just less formal than the other.

This video has no:

1)      Talking Heads
2)      Description of Work
3)      Voice Overs
4)      Company Stats

In other words, none of the ubiquitous hallmarks that make you feel like you are being sold or lectured to. 

Check it out now:  http://ow.ly/i1Yy

What it does have:

1)      A great soundtrack
2)      Work Environment – and a fun one at that, complete with a ping-pong table – you get to travel the office through the song
3)      Co-workers who aren’t afraid to be silly or have fun
4)      Good production value…no shaky camera or bad lighting
5)      Sly pop-culture (like the SILF t-shirt)
6)      FUN
7)      Just when you feel like you’re watching a music video, the sound shuts off and you get the employees singing and the aftermath of the shoot. They are real and you get to see them that way
8)     A link to an annotated Flikr photo of the people in the video, with each person identified

The company is Connected Ventures. They run Busted Tees and College Humor (hence the very Gen Y staff). The video was shot in one take. ONE. The first take, even.

The bad thing…their careers page is ONE PAGE linked to brief, underdeveloped job descriptions. Also, there is no sign of this video…or testimonials…or photos (through Flikr which would be awesome with this audience)…or example projects…etc.  Oh and the link on their video goes to a 404 File Not Found message — the result of an orphaned  social media campaign. This is something for us to keep in mind for any social media/bookmarking campaign. Just because an initiative is over doesn’t mean links (or potential link juice) go away. A branded 404 “Page Not Found” would be useful here to say the least, even if it isn’t specifically recruitment focused.

Why does this video work? I’ll steal a line from Jeffrey Gitomer: People hate to be sold to but they love to buy. And this video gives the passive (and active)  candidate something to BUY. They can buy the workplace (some wide-open, sunlit places complete with a ping pong table), they can buy the casual (t-shirt friendly) dress code,  the can buy an employer who is willing to have fun on video and and employees who aren’t afraid to get on camera and act silly. Without telling you anything specifically, the video tells you a lot about Connected Ventures.

Not every place is a Connected Ventures…many are the exact opposite. But if you can open up to DISCOVER and REVEAL even just ONE powerful Employment Value Proposition which is vibrant, realistic and RESONATES with your ideal candidate, you can use it, share it and benefit from it.

There is a lot of talk about corporate transparency and corporate ethics and responsibility. Transparency can also be used to attract and communicate, but you might have to loosen your tie a little bit and let your workforce, your environment, your inner voice speak up and say the things that can not be expressed in a brochure and corporate mission statement. Give that a try and you might be amazed at how job seekers (both active and passive alike) respond, they might even say:

 

 

 

Kevin B. Hawkins

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter

What you need to know about job seekers’ search engine habits. Part II

In Part One of this blog, I took a look at the keyword search habits of job seekers looking for career opportunities on search engines. I identified the keywords an active job seeker uses as belonging to four different categories, each with distinct traffic volumes and specificity of intent:

• Core Search Terms
• Position/Job Title Terms
• Location Terms
• Hybrid long-tail phrases

I also discussed the power that job boards typically wield on search engines by leveraging content and confirmation — the vase amount of content they have which allows them to sculpt keyword focused presence (and search engine’s love big sites) as well as a confirmation of value through internal and external links. To put it plainly: they are large, they target job family and location hybrid search phrases and they attract lots of valuable links. So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by job seekers using search engines? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts?

Pay Per Click: The quick key to leaping past the job boards and get seen by your audience.

Pay per click (PPC) campaigns can provide traffic for highly competitive Search Engine terms fairly quickly. However, this is a marketing strategy which does require an ongoing budget to maintain effectiveness. PPC marketing has the advantage of being quick to implement, tracked and modified for continually improving effectiveness. Most important in this case is that PPC gives you the opportunity to have your name and opportunities seen by job seekers on search result pages which are often dominated by the job boards. While developing an SEO strategy for exposure in the Organic (non-paid) search results can take a long time, PPC results are immediate and can provide great intelligence on what keywords and messages resonate with your audience.

Sometimes people dismiss PPC because you have to pay for it while SEO is ‘free.’ This is a misleading argument — you may not have to pay by the click for your SEO Organic traffic, but you certainly are not going to have a competitive, targeted, successful Search Engine Optimized site for ‘free.’ Both strategies involve expenditures of time and money. Both require constant maintenance and attention for success. Both have their place in a well rounded search marketing strategy.

The great benefit of utilizing PPC is that you can see results immediately, determine which keywords and ad copy perform best and compete (with relative ease) against sites dominating valuable ‘Core Search Terms.’ Case in point: The search phrase ‘Nursing Jobs’ will return 24M results in Google. Even Monster isn’t in the Organic/Natural Top 10 — but they are on the first search results page. Where do they show up? In the PPC listings. If they can do it, so can you. Just be certain to continually track and optimize your campaigns for the best results by conversion or you could find yourself getting underwhelming ROI — sure impressions are free, but clicks aren’t and you want to make sure those clicks are QUALITY and drive a specific conversion.

Your Brand: The long-term engagement solution.

One trend which we have noticed time and time again for candidate engagement is the power of brand in relation to job search. Brand is a powerful intent search term, prequalifying the job seekers interest specifically in your organization as an employer. Typically this equals out to more traffic, more traffic who has already identified you as an employer of interest. The question is: where do you want this audience to go? To a job board listing? To a job board aggregation? To a specialty site completely disconnected from your career site? No. You want this traffic to be arriving at your career site where they can discover job opportunities, learn about your culture, view employee testimonials and engage with your employment brand.

A survey conducted by CareerXroads and CareerJournal.com (The Wall Street Journal’s executive career site) revealed that 72% of the respondents indicated that it was ‘very likely’ they would visit a company’s website to seek more information before they applied online for a position. In fact, 92% of those surveyed went so far as to indicate they were ‘very likely or likely’ to visit the corporate website to obtain more info regardless of where they first heard about the opening. So why, as an industry, do we spend so much time sending them everywhere else except the place they consider most valuable?

Now, if you aren’t noticing any brand related searches for your company, you have a brand awareness issue. Brand awareness can be built through the development of an engaging employment brand and the extension of branded, employment value proposition rich media to educate your target candidates about your company as well as your opportunities. As seekers become aware of your brand through exposure on social networks, in trade publication, in branded job board postings, and other outreach methods (such as the PPC strategy mentioned above), you build employment brand awareness. As employment brand awareness grows it can drive branded search engine engagement. The key is that SEO is a long term strategy, just like your employment branding. Both are ways to grow and measure your target audience’s recongition and knowledge of you as an employer of choice as you extend the concepts of crowdsourcing to your employment messaging.

The Trifecta: Branded Long Term Multi-pronged SEO/SEM

Ultimately you want to merge the power of your brand name with high volume job search terms as well as long-tail job search terms and drive this traffic to pages which are integrated with your career site. These highly targeted pages may not drive huge volumes of traffic on their own, but they drive engaged traffic. In the e-commerce and product marketing worlds, SEO strategists refer to a tactic which involves so-called “buy words.” What is a buy word? Something which changes intent and connotes the searchers current frame of mind is one of taking action, specifically action to buy. For instance, when someone searches for “performance sneakers” they could be looking for information, possibly even researching for some kind of school paper. However, the searches “find performance sneakers” or “cheap performance sneakers” and especially “Adidas running sneakers on sale Cleveland” highlight a searcher with a very specific purchasing intent. Hence, “buy words.”

Your brand, your name, is a crucial buy word and one you should leverage in both the pursuit of Organic and Paid search engine exposure. Don’t take this for granted, there are plenty of job boards and specialty sites who dominate page one listings for searches containing specific brand names. The development of a robust, brand inclusive, SEO/SEM campaign helps position you for the immediate future to extend brand and gain clicks through PPC while taking the time to grow a strong Organic SEO strategy geared towards long-term exposure.

So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by search engine job seekers? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts? Share your search engine optimization and marketing experiences.

Kevin B. Hawkins

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter

Do You Have The Best Job In The World?

It’s a short week with the upcoming Fourth of July holiday, so this week’s blog will be brief. Next week look for ‘What you need to know about job seeker’s search engine habits. Part II.’

 

It’s likely that you have already heard about the ingenious ‘Win the Best Job in the World’ campaign created by Tourism Queensland to help promote travel and, well, tourism to Queensland and Australia. In case you haven’t heard about the campaign, it began in 2008 and offered the following glamorous job: feeding fish, cleaning the pool and posting weekly blogs about the experience. 34,000 people applied for the job. Did I mention that the job pays around $150,000 and provides housing in a $5m villa on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef? Did I mention the daily oppportunities for snorkeling, sailing and island-hopping? Yes, it seems likely that the position of ‘Island Caretaker’ could indeed be ‘The Best Job in the World.’

 

So how do you attract 34,000 job applicants? First of all, aside from the attractive compensation and housing, Tourism Queensland provided their target audience a clear idea of the traits they were looking for and the skills needed for success. According to the organization, in addition to feeding the fish and other such chores, “The successful applicant will be required to report back on their adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews.” They were looking for someone adventurous, passionate about the outdoors, willing to try new things, have strong communication skills in English (both as a speaker and in writing) and, of course, the ideal applicant would be a good swimmer who enjoys snorkeling/diving.

 

So, what about you? Do you have the best job in the world at your organization? Are you hiring for the best job in the world? Wouldn’t it be great if you could reach out to job seekers and say: “Here’s a job you’re going to love. Let me tell you why.” I can already hear you saying “Are you kidding? We don’t have an exotic locale, our job description doesn’t include snorkeling in crystal clear water. Real jobs are not like that.” I disagree. Let’s set our sights just a little lower than the lofty goal of ‘Best Job in the World’, lets focus on matching job seekers with the Best Job Ever…for them. You can find the tell-tale signs of people who have the Best Job Ever (BJE) by asking three simple questions of your organization’s employees: 1) Why did you take this position?, 2) Why do you stay with this organization? and 3) What do you enjoy most about your work experience? Sure you could ask more, but at this point you don’t need a full-fledged survey to track down BJEs —  you need to find signs of engagement, passion and fulfillment among your employees. You need to find the stories that highlight what makes you unique.

 

My job is the Best Job Ever because it allows me to: 1) work with topics which fascinate me, 2) continually challenge myself, acquire new skills and develop those I already have , 3)  travel and meet new people, 4) provide comprehensive solutions to specific problems and 5) work with a close-knit team of professionals i respect.  

 

There are BJEs in every organization, what makes your job a BJE or what BJE opportunities exist in your company?

What you need to know about job seekers’ search engine habits. Part I

There is a lot of discussion about using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract job seekers to your career site and even directly to viewing your available positions. What isn’t very clear from these discussions is exactly what you need to focus on optimizing in your pursuit of candidates through organic search engine results. What are the actual words and terms which job seekers are most likely to use when searching? Is there a relationship between certain search phrases and the number of searches performed? To get some perspective on this lets consider what controls your search effectiveness: intent, keywords and competition.

The more specific your terms the more capable we are of determining the job seeker’s intent. Matching the searcher’s intent is what allows you to successfully engage with the search engine job seeker. The job seeker looking for ‘nursing jobs’ has a less specific intent than the searcher looking for ‘nursing jobs salary’ and their informational goals could be quite different. The ‘nursing jobs’ job seeker could be interested in locating sites where they can find job opportunities, maybe a job board or an aggregation site where they can perform a search. They could just as easily be researching how many different types of nursing jobs exist for a school paper. Typically speaking, the fewer the terms a person searches with, the more vague their search intent — and the more competition there is to gain a first page listing on a search engine for these high traffic terms.

We can place the keywords an active job seeker uses into four different categories, each with distinct traffic volumes and specificity of intent:

• Core Search Terms
• Position/Job Title Terms
• Location Terms
• Hybrid long-tail phrases

Core Search terms can also be considered job browsing terms — they are the highest level, least specific job search related terms for a particular area of work such as nursing jobs or nursing careers. These are search phrases which see very high volumes of activity but there is a distinct order of job seeker preference which echoes across different groups of job seekers. In fact, according to Google’s search volume reports, just adding one simple letter to one word can increase the search activity on a core search term phrase by over 100,000 searches per month or more. What letter could wield such power? The letter ‘s’. Job seekers typically seem to favor the plural form of the words job and career. The terms jobs and careers consistently generate more searches than their singular forms: job and career. In some cases these increases can be as high as 1258% to 2400%.

Typical core search terms include the following (the term ‘nursing’ is used as a job field indicator for example purposes): nursing jobs, nursing careers, nursing employment, nursing job and nursing career. The search volumes for these phrases is typically quite high, especially for phrases containing ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ and typically the organic, non-paid, search results for these terms are dominated by job boards. Arguably, at this phase of the job search experience the active job seeker using these search phrases is looking for job search resources although if the right job opportunity or company were to appear in these listings, it would definitely receive traffic.

Position/Job Title Terms could be considered ‘strong active’ job seeker searches. These are searches specific to a particular position or job skill. For the core search term ‘nursing jobs’ a related position search phrase would be ‘registered nurse jobs’ or ‘nursing assistant jobs’. From a search volume perspective, it is not uncommon for more than half of the top 20 search related terms about a particular field to consist of these position specific terms. Again, depending on the job family niche these volumes can be quite high (i.e.: sales manager jobs with ~74K average searches per month) or noticeably lower (i.e.: accounting sales jobs with ~210 average searches per month). However, like the core search terms mentioned above, these search results pages are often dominated by both the general audience and niche audience job boards. Again, the seeker looking in this area is probably looking for job search resources but would welcome the appearance of a familiar company name in their area.

Location terms are even more specific variations of the previous search phrases. Why look for nursing jobs everywhere when you know you really want a nursing job in the greater Boston area?  Depending on the job field these monthly job search volumes tend to be in the thousands for state-related searches, in the hundreds for city-related searches, and for some locations the search volume is so low that Google will simply report ‘not enough data’. Who is your competition here? It’s not your candidate-space competitor across town who’s looking for the same talent you are. Yet again these search results tend to be dominated by general and niche job boards. However, depending on the job niche and the city, it is not uncommon to see the occasional business show up in this type of search result.

There are syntactical variations to all of the above searches: people looking for ‘jobs in sales’, ‘nursing job finder’, ‘engineering vacancies’, ‘nurse job opening’ and the like. Some of these can even generate a fair amount of traffic but typically, as seen with the rest of the types of searches performed, the search listing competition is dominated by job board sites.

Finally, there are long-tail search phrases. Long tail phrases are typically very specific job search related phrases like ‘sales jobs in fort lauderdale fl’ or ‘nursing jobs boston area.’ These search phrases typically see much less traffic than the more general search phrases mentioned above. And, although the competition for these phrases can be much less fierce than that seen for the other types of job seekers searches, it is still no cake-walk to get a first page listing for these phrases. The strength of the job boards in the other search areas still lends to them appearing in search results for these phrases. The key question that long-tail job search raises is: how much is a search phrase which may only bring in one click a month really worth? On it’s own, not much. This is why typical job search SEO long-tail strategies focus on hundreds, if not thousands of long-tail search terms. Variation after variation of ‘job name city’, ‘job name city state’, etc.

The goal of long-tail search phrases is to attract visitors who have signaled very specific intent through phrases which get typically get very low volumes of search on a monthly or quarterly basis. The intent of these long-tail visitors is typically more ‘serious’ than your ‘browsing’ job seeker using a search engine. These are visitors whose intent, when matched with the appropriate information on your ‘landing page’ (the page they arrive at after clicking your link) are more likely to convert…either as an applicant or by joining a talent network, subscribing to an RSS feed, etc. The value of the actual volume and leads generated through these long-tail methods in search engines (not job search aggregation sites) needs to be carefully balanced against the cost of implementation and how the execution fits into your entire online recruitment strategy.

Why job boards are your search engine competitors.

When it comes to search listings, the search engines look to two primary items to determine if a page should be listed high in search results: content and confirmation. Yes, Google’s ranking algorithm is complex and yes there is more to it than JUST these two items, but these two represent the heart and soul of search. Google and the other search engines want to know what the page is about and the more closely the page’s content relates to the specific search term being used by someone, the more likely that page is to be listed. However it isn’t enough for your page to contain content about a subject or to be ‘optimized’ for a specific search phrase. The search engines want confirmation that your page REALLY IS about that topic, and even more importantly that it contains worthwhile content about the subject. To get that confirmation they look for links, links inside your site that point to that page and links from other sites that point to your page. The more links you have from credible online sources, the more certain the search engines are that your page is related to the search phrase. Optimizing for the exact search phrase is crucial, and subtle: under-represent the phrase in your strategy and you will get ignored, use it too aggressively and you risk being penalized for ‘over optimization.’

The job boards have plenty of what Google loves: Content and Confirmation. This translates into millions of page of content capable of linking to each other with keywords specifically created to align with the four job search patterns: core, position/job title, location and long-tail hybrid search phrases. They have strong networks of links pointing to them, reaffirming that the content of their pages is topical and relevant. Oftentimes, they are your search engine competition, not the company who is out recruiting the same talent as you.

So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by search engine job seekers? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts? In part 2 of this post we will look at some solutions to this dilemma and your secret weapon for candidate engagement. In the meantime, please share your search engine optimization experiences.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter

Analyzing your career site traffic

So you’re convinced that building a microsite full of job posting links is going to fix what ails your recruiting strategy.  You’re also convinced that your ideal candidates only care about the job description and not about the reputation of the organization.  This is why you end up with a page with a large number of job links and poorly written job descriptions that lack details about your organization and your employment value proposition.  

I am completely perplexed by HR leaders who rush into investing in technologies they don’t need.  Today, all over the Human Resource space there are vendors who claim to be “recruitment web 2.0 providers” selling the fear that if the client does not replace their Career Site with a set of SEO optimized job listings that they somehow are going to lose out on this vast sea of qualified candidates that are doing only position specific searches (not company specific searches) for employment.

These clients end up with a job-centric SEO solution that yields nothing more than a poor candidate experience and inferior results compared to a properly structured and SEO optimized Career site and a well-designed recruitment marketing strategy to augment the effort.  

Easy solution, optimize your career site to obtain a balance between serving the candidate’s desires and expectations and exposure to search engines.  You’d be surprise to know that your site is already receiving substantial traffic from search engines and there are far better techniques for leveraging your existing Career site investment than buying an expensive solution from “recruitment web 2.0 providers”. 

Let me expand my thought on this…

A large health system located in the Midwest engaged us to provide deep analytic reporting to help their organization understand where job seekers were coming from; what sources drove job seekers to the career site and most importantly which traffic sources yielded the highest percentage of applicants.  The data shows that the search engines yield significant traffic on their own, even when the career site is not optimized.  And don’t get me started on optimization – has HR been sandbagged?  You bet.

These are the facts.  HR doesn’t need to create a standalone microsite outside of the parent site – that approach actually dilutes your recruiting strategy by confusing the candidate.  Don’t under estimate the value of your own brand.   Search engines consider many factors to get your site ranked and your brand reputation is a major component in that ranking. If you believe what the “recruitment web 2.0 providers” are selling, they promise to get you organic rankings on your job postings alone.  So here is what happens when you let someone build you a microsite outside of your parent site:

Each site you launch represents a new marketing problem. Each site needs links to prosper, and if a set of sites all share the same links that’s a sure red flag to the search engines that something is amiss.   You also dilute your search engine ranking because the mirror site competes for the coveted top 10 links in the search results with your corporate site and your career site.  This ultimately confuses the candidate, because it offers them an additional set of search results which creates the impression that you don’t have a cohesive search strategy.

The fact is that job seekers like any other consumer group want ease of use. They want content and information contained in sites with easy to remember URLs and the fewer URLs to decipher, the better. 

Candidates also place significant value in the reputation of organizations, so use your career site to the fullest extent.  Stop spending money on band-aids outside of your career site and fix what you have – it will always result in a better return on investment in the long run.  Create a site that engages job seekers and creates a powerful experience for job seekers by selling them on your organization and allowing them with easy to use job search and apply features.  There is no need to replace your ATS.  There are many ways to effectively leverage your ATS (applicant tracking system) and create ways to connect with your job seeker visitors when they arrive. 

The concept here is that SEO is more cost effective when you optimize your career site.

Learn how to use social media for recruiting.

Emerging social media environments from socials networks (such as Facebook) to blogs have already begun to have an impact on recruiting. Just as these environments play a role in changing and shaping how people at large use the internet, the world of recruiting online is affected. As the way people use the internet changes, these are environments and user-engagement realities which cannot be avoided. However you have to be remarkably careful about which environment or publishing method you utilize. Ultimately the primary criteria for a usable social media are determining if you target audience is represented in the environment and committing to a regular schedule of publication, response and outreach.

Social Media engagement at large depends on connection, conversation and participation – the same core dynamic will hold true for recruiting with social media. All of these go to forming a community. The impact of this changing level of user engagement is going to continue to resonate throughout the web as people’s use of the internet and expectations from companies, hospitals, employers, etc. will change. As users learn that they do not have to remain strictly on the receiving end of static communication from employers, they will expect more opportunities for engagement in relevant environments such as social networks

Social network outreach can be very fruitful allowing you to place a distinct Employment Brand and important Employment Value Propositions directly in front of a passive job seeker in a natural environment. The viral nature of sites like Facebook encourages further exposure among people with similar interests. What works in these environments is communication – open communication in a personal tone, such as that used by the Director of Recruiting for Ernst and Young when replying to questions on E&Y’s publically-accessible Facebook Wall. This open communication can also be seen in such Facebook environments as the “I AM NURSE” network, a Facebook application which already has over 191,000 subscribing nurses and links them to each other for conversation as well as Nursing-specific job searches.

Blogs are also very effective in communicating with passive and active candidates. Blogs have been shown to have a positive effect on consumer perceptions and the appropriate use of a blog in recruitment can provide important HR information in a timely manner to job seekers and candidates as well as position an organization as a thought leader.

There are some areas which may be more ‘hype’ than ‘hit’. Twitter, for instance is an environment where most messaging is limited to about 150 characters of text. This environment, while generating a lot of ‘buzz’ still has yet to make a definite impact on a majority of web users – job seekers or otherwise. It is however worthwhile to keep an eye on since some recruiters have already shown success in building a dedicated following of users interested in whatever opportunities or information they have to share. A successful Twitter campaign requires dedication and a careful control over message: users do not want to follow a Twitter of someone who only uses the media to self-promote or spam. They want information, education and even entertainment. If you give them content they are interested in, you increase the chances that your followers/subscribers will be interested in your postings about job opportunities.

Across all these environments, appropriate tone is the key to engaging active and passive job seekers. Social media is a peer-to-peer communication environment. You want to be professional but informal. Anything that looks like standardized mass-market communication will be seen as advertising or hyperbole and ignored. A relaxed dialogue that lets your audience know you are speaking to them directly will provide more opportunities for engagement and involvement.

Look for future NAS Interactive posts discussing recruitment in each of these social media environments in detail.

3 things you must know about your career site visitors

Another potential job candidate visited your career site today. In fact, according to your latest hosting reports, you had a LOT of visitors to your site this week. The reports show impressive page view numbers and they’ve definitely grown since the last reporting period. So there you are: you know how much traffic is coming to your career site. You just don’t know much more than that from your recruitment/career site analytics reports.

Analytics reports, as in, Web analytics and metric reports. Somehow it manages to sound over-whelming, potentially confusing AND unbelievably boring at the same time. It’s important to remember that when you look at your career site traffic, you aren’t looking at TRAFFIC and you certainly aren’t looking at NUMBERS. You are looking at PEOPLE.

In order to get the most from your Web analytics, you need to look beyond numbers to gain an understanding of your visitors. Viewing them in the appropriate context allows you to build valuable intelligence about your media sources, your messaging and your career site’s user-friendliness (what some like to call usability). You can begin building this insight by learning three simple things:

1. Where did they come from?

Understanding where traffic is coming from can help point the way for optimizing both lead acquisition strategies as well as guiding the creation of a more personalized experience to match a user’s expectations when they arrive at the site. Typical Web site visitors come from three general sources:

a. Direct b. Referral c. Search Engines

a. Direct Traffic visitors are those job seekers who have either typed your address directly into their browser or have used a bookmark in their browser to arrive at your site. Direct traffic can measure the impact of off-line messaging as well as your brand penetration as a career destination outside of on-line sourced advertising.

Promotional material and products displaying your career site URL can help bring targeted, quality job seekers to your Web presence. New and exciting methods and technologies are emerging which allow for off-line campaigns to spur online engagement. By leveraging these techniques you can gain insight into the performance of print and broadcast media as your audience engages with you on-line when you can examine their behavior.

b. Referral Traffic visitors includes anyone who arrives at your career site from another Web site. Any other Web site, through any type of link: text, banner, blog, email link, ad campaign, etc. If someone is sending traffic from their site or online source, it will appear here.

Referral traffic sources give you immediate insight into:

· Brand-driven traffic

· Online campaign performance

· Unexpected resources

Brand driven traffic measures visitors arriving from your organizational parent (or partner) site(s). These job seekers have already identified your larger ‘brand’ and used it to locate and enter your career messaging. This audience can be considered as ‘primed’ for your message, typically already having an Employment Brand related reason (i.e.: Benefits, Location, Reputation, Work Environment, etc.) to actively pursue more information about your career opportunities.

Online campaign performance tracking allows you to spot the effectiveness of where your money is being spent. Are your banner ads at superlocaljobsite.com bringing in more visitors than the text links on nichecareersite.com? These traffic statistics are especially important since they contain important ROI value as well as the ability to guide future media purchase decisions.

Campaigns can be tracked with greater detail and provide important intelligence on the performance of specific banners as well as specific pages where your message is being displayed. All of this can help you manage and guide your media spend.

Unexpected resources are sites and locations which may be linking to you of which you are unaware. Discovering these ‘bonus’ traffic generators can aid in identifying target audiences and media campaign opportunities.

c. Search Engine visitors are the one segment of your traffic population that literally tells you what they were looking for when they came to your site. Don’t be surprised to see a lot of brand-related search phrases – people search for jobs by location, field and company and you are likely to see your brand driving more traffic than any specific position or location.

In addition to brand-specific search phrases, you can discover specific careers which attract job seekers to your site as well as important job areas which are not represented in your search engine traffic. Are you getting plenty of traffic to your engineering positions but your data management IT positions are drawing no search engine traffic? It may be time to take another look at your SEO and SEM campaigns.

2. What did they look at?

Much like search phrases, the most viewed pages of your Web site provide a clear indication of why visitors are coming to your site. These pages are important to watch over time for trends in changes of content focus by your visitors as well as indicating areas of opportunity to drive a deeper visit or focus on content development. In candidate-oriented messaging, this report is especially useful in providing an indication of what topics concern potential candidates the most as well as highlighting the questions they may be looking to have answered while on your Web site.

There has been a lot of discussion about measuring either user Time on Site or Number of Pages Viewed as a benchmark for visitor engagement. Frankly speaking neither is an appropriate absolute measurement of ‘visitor engagement’ – different sites with different focuses require distinct engagement criteria. Multi-media and Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and YouTube will clearly benefit from measuring users Time on Site – the aim of these sites is to encourage visitors to spend more time viewing videos or interacting with other member’s profiles.

There are problems with this measurement. A visitor could arrive at your ‘super important you-MUST-read-this’ page and then go grab a sandwich for 5 minutes. This is not to say the metric is meaningless, Nielsen/NetRatings DID shift to ‘Time Spent’ as its new key metric for a reason. What this does mean is that a close examination of trends in time spent on page is very important if you are going use this as a measurement of content engagement.

Independent of the time spent on any given page, we can see what specific content visitors viewed during their visit. Is your incredible benefits package being ignored by job seekers? It may be time to draw more attention to them with a well-crafted Call to Action.

Do you have a small number of visitors to your sales career content, but they show more engagement than other career audiences? Discover what parts of your message drew the most visits to gain insight into your job seeker’s information needs. Take a closer look and make sure they aren’t searching for information that isn’t there at all.

Does your Flexible Work schedule get a lot of interest? It might be time to incorporate it into your Employment Brand, encouraging job seekers to associate you with this specific benefit.

Let your visitor’s tell you what they are interested in, then use that knowledge to communicate with them more effectively.

3. Did they complete a goal?

Goal completion measurement allows you to match your business goals with visitor activity. Frequently this is communicated as conversion rate and measures the number of users who filled out a form or made a purchase. In the case of recruitment this is often tracked as some type of Expression of Interest (EOI) such as entering a job search or completing an application. Sometimes these are the ONLY goals considered of any importance on a standard career site. They are not.

When looking at goal or task completion you have to consider all of your employment market audience. Not everyone is looking for a job every time they visit your site. Does that make their visit worthless? Look at ways to tie content exposure and on-site behavior to goals through the development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Good online recruitment KPIs allow you to measure the progress to a variety of organizational goals – not just job search leads. Some of the items mentioned above could be considered quality KPIs, such as measuring source effectiveness or content engagement.

By examining your online goals through specific recruitment KPIs you set the stage to turn your metrics reports into Actionable Intelligence.