Hiring Exchange - A HotGigs blog

Xerox/Jobs2 Web case study: The Chad digs deeper

Chad Sowash follows up on our recently-released case study on Xerox's SEO efforts with Jobs2Web. He has a conversation with a knowledgeable Xerox insider, "a friend of mine who we’ll just call Dave" on tbe benefits of career site optimization via Jobs2Web:

Chad: How were they able to implement SEO changes without getting your ATS provider involved?

Dave: The Jobs2Web team created a optimized site which they maintain, optimize with Xerox job content, and provide the correct links back to our ATS for proper job seeker application and tracking. Also remember, all new sites have to gain favor with the search engines and become “trusted”, which took some time with the new optimized site, but the results are really showing now.

Chad: Big question, what differences are you seeing when using SEO versus traditional job boards?

Dave: SEO has provided more relevant candidates, where we have noted job boards providing more irrelevant candidates, which equates into more work and lower efficiencies for our recruiting staff. We have adopted SEO to reduce reliance on job boards, provide more relevant candidates, and improve efficiencies. Through our research, here at Xerox, we were finding job postings on job boards just wasn’t bringing in the right candidates, which wasted our recruiters time and pushed us further toward the relevance model of SEO.

Read the entire interview at Chad's blog.

Are your job titles hurting your recruiting?

The answer: definitely. To find out how, read "Wouldn't you love a job as a P2 Fld Comp Sup?" by our own Doug Berg, currently on the front page at ERE.net.

Do you have the job page of the future?

I spent last week in Texas, giving a seminar on trends in recruiting technology, and one slide in particular generated a lot of excitement: What the job page will look like in the future.

Today, a job page typically contains a single call to action: Apply. That's great if the candidate's really ready to apply, but if they're not--too busy, not quite ready to make the jump, need more information, the boss is coming down the hall--there's nothing else for them to do.

I think that's why the View Job to Apply ratio is typically in the low single digits. But the talent wars are escalating, folks, and that's no longer enough. We've got to figure out how to change today's "look&book" to "look&hook." How do we grab that visitor's identity, get him into our network, in that very brief moment that he views the job listing?

The good news is that most of technologies that help solve this problem are already available commercially and they're relatively inexpensive. The bad news is that not enough people are using them. I've built a little diagram of a Jobs2Web career site that includes them..and incidentally is a pretty good example of what the job page of the future should look like (below). Let's look at each of the callouts in the gold boxes.

Add to personal home page. In two clicks, this button permits the visitor to insert a list of future, similar jobs into his Google, MSN or Yahoo personal home page. This is big for recruiters; as of January 2007 there were SEVENTY MILLION personal home pages. How would you like to capture that audience?

Subscribe to similar jobs. You've seen this for a long time; it's the classic e-mail opt-in. The modern version is clean and simple: the visitor types in an e-mail address and only similar jobs in matching locations are sent. At most, they can choose job and location filters. If only a few opt in every day that gives smaller, regional clients hundreds or thousands of deferred candidates to contact for future positions. ConstantContact, for example, offers this for only about $30/month.

Add RSS feed. Today's browsers support built-in RSS feeds and RSS readers are popular additions. Using this, similar jobs automatically reach deferred candidates. HotGigs has embedded this feature into Jobs2Web client sites; to do this on your own career site you'll need to embed a script. No programming needed and it's proven.

Feature webinar. This is a call to action to help visitors learn more about the company's work environment. The visitor clicks the box, provides information and is sent an invitation. You've just captured their identity. The webinars are easy and inexpensive to develop with products like GotoMeeting ($50/month) or GotoWebinar ($99/month). Most popular webinars have department or hiring managers talking about issues germane to the work, challenges, opportunities, i.e., anything likely to persuade a prospective candidate to submit that application.

Live recruiter chat. OK, this one generated a lot of skeptical looks when I brought it up. It seems like a heavy IT project (it isn't) and it seems to require extra staff (which might happen eventually but not at first). Live support chat is new to career sites, but becoming common on retail commerce sites and fast becoming an expected support channel. You can choose to use it lightly, where it only pops up for key jobs or categories, or assertively, where every career site visitor receives the opportunity to chat.

Live chat is a fantastic way to engage and hopefully capture the visitor. If you're interested, check out products like PHP Live ($9/month).

These are relatively simple to implement, as I promised, but they can have a big effect on building a candidate community. I know they got the Texans excited last week. It's too costly NOT to add some of these features to your job site. Choose at least one, and let me know how it goes!

Good luck-

Peter Brasket
HotGigs Inc.

Use RSS to stay in touch with candidates

Last week I was giving a Jobs2Web webinar, and I asked attendees how many knew what an RSS feed was—or had one. Almost no one did. Then I asked how many had a personalized home page from, say, Google or Yahoo? About half said they did.

Surprise—RSS is all over those personalized home pages. We had the big “ah-ha” when I showed them my Google home page, and pointed out the RSS links that were driving all that content into my page.

RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication" is popping up in job boards now, and it’s driving a lot of really effective tools. It’s going to be appearing all over corporate career sites in 2007, so it’s something you’ll want to understand.

RSS can be VERY valuable to your recruiting team because it can convert otherwise “wasted” visitors into “deferred candidates.” 

Today, the vast majority of career site visitors do three things: look, click and leave. We expect that—they don’t see a job they want, your apply process is too long, whatever. Fortunately, RSS lets you give those casual visitors a fourth option: they can add your jobs to their personal home page.

RSS feeds are something you’ll want to consider, and something that we’ve recently added to the category pages of our Jobs2Web clients. Here’s what it looks like:

It only takes about five seconds for visitors to set up the HotGigs RSS link on their home page, and once they do they’ll get advance notice every time you post a fresh job. This is what they’ll see:
   
I reviewed the data from one client and found that 23% of the visitors to that site also clicked the RSS feed link.  Over the course of a year that’s thousands of deferred candidates that otherwise would have been lost. With RSS, they can daily view jobs, and apply when their desired job appears.

Whether you add RSS feeds using Jobs2Web or ask your IT department to do it, don’t wait. It’s one of the easiest moves you can make and it can increase your talent pool enormously. Want to learn more? Visit our Jobs2Web site, or drop us a line.

Peter Brasket, HotGigs co-founder & senior vice president, business development, has extensive experience in e-commerce, staffing, advertising, and online promotion. He’s proficient in Japanese and the language of customer satisfaction, and has successfully built many customer-facing ventures.

Is Pay-Per-Click a good way to recruit candidates?

Hi. I’m Peter Brasket, and I co-founded HotGigs with our fearless leader, Doug Berg. When I talk with our customers a few questions keep coming up, so for my piece of this blog, I’ll try to answer them.

For example, clients ask whether pay-per-click advertising campaigns can help them find better candidates. Yes, but since they can be expensive and time-consuming, you probably also want to consider alternatives. We think we’ve built a more effective tool that can complement or even replace PPC: Jobs2Web.

Pay-per-click (PPC), also called search engine marketing (SEM) or cost per click (CPC), is essentially placing ads on a major search engine like Google or Yahoo, that appear whenever someone searches on a certain word or phrase. You pay $X for every resulting click to your site.

It’s big business. On any given search page, “paid clicks” account for maybe 15 to 20 percent of the links clicked. “Organic” clicks, i.e., the natural, non-sponsored results make up the rest.

PPC is a useful tool and many on-line companies, including HotGigs, rely on it. But it’s also expensive. Before you rely on it, you need to understand whether or not it’s the most cost-effective choice.

Remember, 80 percent or more of the clicks from a search engine results page are “organic, i.e., NOT coming from PPC ads. Our JobsWeb tool focuses on capturing those organic clicks at a much lower cost per applicant, so it saves you a lot of money.

Generally speaking, a Jobs2Web cost per applicant is about 15 to 20 percent of the cost of an applicant sourced through PPC.

BTW, if you're considering or using recruitment PPC you need to know your cost per PPC hire.  Or if you can't get to that level, at least try to measure your cost per PPC-sourced applicant.

Here’s how:

• Find out how much you spent on PPC in a month (your PPC vendor reports this)
• Determine how many people clicked on your ads during that month (PPC visitors—also available from your PPC vendor)
• Of those visitors, how many uploaded resumes during this period? (PPC applicant conversion). You can obtain this using a tool such as Google Analytics or a tracking parameter in your ATS system. This tells you how many of the people that clicked through to your site actually uploaded a resume. Dividing applicant conversion into PPC visitors will give you a PPC applicant conversion rate.
• Now divide the amount you spent by the number of applicants, and you get cost per applicant.

That gives you a cost per applicant baseline. Once you have it, you can track the results of your experiments in attracting applicants cost-effectively. These methods might include improving your “pitch” or call to action, adding custom landing pages that provide more targeted information, and so on.

We also use this data to measure the effectiveness of Jobs2Web (Download PPCvsJ2Wchart.gif to see a line-by-line comparison of actual Jobs2Web organic results vs. PPC).

For example one of our clients spends about $5K/month on Jobs2Web, and their average cost per applicant is declining, now about $16.27. The same spend on PPC at a cost per click of 60 cents (Google's average PPC cost last year) would result in a cost per applicant of $48 – assuming they reached a 1.25% applicant conversion rate. J2W saves the client $31.73 per applicant, and because Jobs2Web is an organic search-engine applicant generator, their average cost per applicant will continue to drop with with time.

A second, smaller Jobs2Web client spends about $3500 monthly for Jobs2Web and is currently generating a $20.83 cost per applicant.  Using more realistic PPC numbers – say $1 per click and a 1% applicant conversion rate- the client saves almost $80 per applicant against a PPC cost-per-applicant of $100. 

Obviously you’ll always want to deploy a variety of tools to draw quality candidates. But pay attention to cost per applicant; that’ll tell you whether you’re getting good value.
--Peter

Peter Brasket, HotGigs co-founder & senior vice president, business development, has extensive experience in e-commerce, staffing, advertising, and online promotion. He’s proficient in Japanese and the language of customer satisfaction, and has successfully built many customer-facing ventures.

2 (free) ways to grow your candidate pool

If your candidate sourcing strategies don’t include search engines, you’re missing a significant chunk of the talent pool. Web search engines increasingly are the tool of choice for talented professionals.

Just four terms—jobs, job search, career, and part-time job—are used in more than 8 million searches on Google and Yahoo each month. Where do your company’s job listings come out on those search results? If you're like most companies, probably not very high.

Persuading your IT department (or your Web guy, if you don't have an IT department) to do search engine optimization (SEO) on your career site ads isn’t always easy. (Shameless plug: HotGigs' Jobs2Web solution can automate your SEO strategy quickly and easily.) In the meantime, here are a couple of techniques you can quickly implement to increase the chances that a great candidate will find your job in a Web search.

Both involve editing the job ad for better search engine placement. If you make your job listings more relevant to big search engines you'll automagically increase your online reach.

Use common terms instead of company jargon. Do your ads say “Mech. D/D Engr. II” instead of “Senior Mechanical Engineer, Design and Development?” You may understand that, but chances are good that search engines (or anybody else) won’t. Make sure you use plain English throughout the ad.

Incorporate multiple titles into your job ad. My “salesman” may be your “account representative” and his “business development manager.” Check other company career sites and job boards for related titles and pick the two or three most common.

Now add those titles somewhere in your job description, preferably near the top. It can be as simple as a line that says “this position is similar to work done by an “account representative” or “business development manager” in other companies. That way someone searching for BDMs has a better chance of spotting your ad.

It’s a little extra work and it takes awhile to get the hang of it, but I guarantee it’s worth it. (And best of all, it’s free.)

--Doug