Jobs2Web Blog

The Web 2.0 Job Seeker

This year in the recruiting industry there has been a lot of talk about how companies are tapping into Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their recruiting. But how is the candidate community also using these technologies for their own purposes, and what impact is it having on our recruiting strategies?

Web 2.0 Candidates Are:

• Faster. Candidates can gain access to more available jobs within minutes on any day.
• Smarter. Access to salary, compensation, and corporate performance data is everywhere.
• More Connected. Social networks help candidates identify insiders at any employer before or after they apply for any position.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Faster

When job boards came on the scene 10 years ago, they made accessing available job information much easier for candidates. No more digging through the classified section of the Sunday newspaper, crafting up witty cover letters on fluorescent letterhead to get attention and postal mailing resumes. Remember when we’d put our fax numbers on our ads? Come on: how many candidates really had fax machines in their houses? Today, there are “job aggregators” such as indeed.com and simplyhired.com which put all the jobs from multiple job boards into a single search engine that stream directly into any candidate’s personal home page on Google via RSS feeds every day.

I think one of the main reasons that recruiters are after “passive candidates” is that we think we have more time to get them through the interview process, versus “active candidates” who machine-gun apply from job boards to a dozen jobs on any Monday. With the latter, we have to get them setup with an interview within 24 hours and make a hiring decision within two to four days. That’s how fast the market is moving with so much job data available online.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Smarter

In addition to having access to an ocean of jobs, most candidates tap into salary and compensation data via sites such as payscale.com and/or salary.com. Not to mention that the younger generation of workers aren’t shy about sharing their comp levels in the lunchroom or over beers, unlike our parents’ generation who considered salary discussions to be so taboo they would only share this information with the IRS when filing their annual tax returns.

Many recruiters have candidates show up with a salary report printed from one of these salary sites and demand that their pay be at or above the level on the report. Candidates don’t care if our job descriptions aren’t perfectly matching the ones on those websites; they just see the numbers and get an expectation that’s usually out of line with our compensation levels. Regardless of how you handle this situation in your interview process, employers are under pressure to know how their pay grades compare to other major employers in their markets.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are More Connected

Remember when you would get an applicant resume, see which companies a candidate previously worked for, and then quickly find which of your internal employees had worked with the applicant in the past, in order to get “inside information” to determine if they were a good or bad prospect? (Never mind that 51% of people will comment positively or negatively on someone because of how they liked their personality — and not their actual work performance.)

During the interview process, candidates were lucky to run into a former colleague in the hallways. Or if they get lucky in the interview, they will discover who they might know in common with the interviewing managers and try to discover which “moles” they could find within the prospective company, which would help them do their own due diligence on the employer — not to mention that they will try and gain advocates to help them get the job should their interest grow.

Well, because of the growth of social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and many more), the minute most candidates apply for any job (and sometimes even before they apply for a job), they can now instantly see who they know at any prospective employer, all the way back to their old high school or college buddies.

This tilts the access of information toward the candidate community — who can now see if there are bad previous bosses or old enemies working within your company, which they may wish to avoid. The candidates’ reasoning will be if your company hires personalities the candidate disliked, it indicates that your culture prefers those types of individuals, which will have an impact on your employer brand whether you get a chance to enter the conversation or not.

This puts a new pressure on employers to create a working culture that will attract these more web savvy candidates. These Web 2.0 candidates don’t believe most of our career sites’ language about having an exciting work environment. They want to find out for themselves (via networking) what it’s really like to work within the sub-cultures within our company, which are driven by management personalities and business cycles which are exciting to certain candidate types, and a turnoff to others.

100 Million Job Related Searches Monthly!

For months (and years) I’ve wondered what the number of monthly searches are for job related keywords on Google. I always knew it was a big number, but I was shocked to see it was over 100 million searches monthly. The average monthly searches looks to be over 124 million searches, but we’re in the summer slump of job searching during July.

Historically, search engines haven’t shared specific numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed it’s keyword research tool (hooray) to show us the search numbers for the previous month, and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job and career related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

After you play with this Google keyword research tool, you’ll see how huge the opportunity is for employers who optimize their career site and job content, so that you can drive these Google users directly to your career site. (Shameless pitch for our services)

Best of all, there’s no fee to use this service (only a code to enter), and you’ll have access to this powerful tool at this URL:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts: (which you can validate using the tool above)

TOP JOB CATEGORY SEARCHES: (Monthly)

• Sales jobs = 2.2 Million searches
• Customer services jobs – 1 Million searches
• Administrative jobs – 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs – 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs – 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs – 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs – 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs – 301,000 searches

TOP STATES/LOCATIONS SEARCHES: (Monthly)

• Georgia jobs – 2.7 Million searches
• Illinois jobs – 2.2 Million searches
• Arizona jobs – 1.5 Millions searches
• Massachusetts jobs – 1.5 Million searches
• Michigan jobs – 1.5 Million searches
• New Jersey jobs – 1.5 Million
• Jobs In Chicago – 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs – 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs – 550,000

If you’re like me, you’ll blow an hour or so just doing research against your own recruiting needs, and then you’ll ask yourself “how do I get these candidates to find my career site?” – which is where Jobs2Web comes in of course.

Knowing how to optimize your career site and job content to capture this traffic is an art (and science) that we’ve helped dozens of major companies to achieve. We have over 2,000 client landing pages on the 1st page of Google. Some of our larger clients see over 10,000 candidates monthly directly to their career site where candidates then apply via their existing ATS system. (no middle men)

So, if you want to continue to pay the job boards for years to come, and compete for the pool of shared candidates, good luck.

Smart employers will learn how to go upstream online and compete for these candidates at their first search for jobs on Google, and drive them directly to their site using either Search Engine Optimization, or Search Engine Marketing to cut their recruiting costs dramatically.

Now’s the time to get started, as the fall is coming faster than you think – and you’ll need to get started now in order to get on Google’s 1st page if you hope to be there by September or October!

5 Key Talent Acquisition Themes Heard in 2007

Jobs2Web enjoyed terrific adoption this year, and along the way I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of organizations regarding their talent acquisition direction - here are five themes I heard repeatedly:

1. Measure your talent acquisition by source - know your applicant/interview/offer/hire numbers by source, and then check back in six and twelve months to determine retention by source.
2. Don't rely on the applicant to select the correct source -- have your partners auto-tag the source of the candidate when they deliver them to your ATS. This will probably improve your source accuracy by 200-300%.
3. Leverage your cost-per-hire - when you can auto-track by source you can determine your ROI. Be sure to leverage those numbers when you're renegotiating especially your job-board contracts. Which leads to observation 4...
4. Start reducing your job-board spend - I know of several F500 firms have dropped at least one of the big three job boards in the past quarter. Reasons given: increasing subscription prices, rising cost-per-hire, wide applicant: offer rate (e.g. too many candidates to weed through...), and the internal need to source passive or semi-passive candidates vs. only active candidates.
5. Begin tapping the passives and semi-passives using Google, Yahoo, and the other major search engines. The 35 million job-related searches monthly on search engines are done primarily by non-active job-seekers -- just individuals looking around for new career opportunities, but not desperately seeking a new gig (a/k/a a job-board applicant...). If your jobs and job families optimized and visible, you can access this candidate traffic.

2008 will see many more organizations adopt both pay-per-click and organic search engine marketing solutions to offset the falling productivity of job-boards. Those that can measure their applicant flow by source will be able to invest wisely.

Peter Brasket is a co-founder of HotGigs, and leads the Jobs2Web program

Why your jobs need to be Google ready...

...And why they probably aren't. Authoria has the lowdown in their online newsletter, Recruiting Edge, which features an article on search engine visibility by our own Peter Brasket:

Organizations typically place a lot of emphasis on recruiter performance, instead focusing on such metrics as “placements made” and “time-to-fill.” But the performance of the company’s career website and its impact on these metrics is largely overlooked if not ignored.

So there’s no question that your recruiters should be working hard, but are your jobs contributing to your overall recruiting performance?

Let’s start with a basic metric: Over 30 million job-oriented searches are run monthly on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other major search engines. Not surprisingly, these search engines get 25-30X more traffic (i.e., potential candidates) than the mainstream job boards.

Unfortunately, chances are your jobs didn’t show up in these searches.

Read the rest in this month's Recruiting Edge. Then head over to our newly-redesigned website (www.jobs2web.com) to see some examples of how major companies like the Mayo Clinic, AT&T Wireless and Xerox are making sure their jobs do show up where it counts. You can also find case studies and video presentations on how employers are increasing candidate flow by optimizing their career sites for Web searches.

As Peter's article underscores, one of the roadblocks to getting your jobs to show up on Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest is that most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are designed to prevent that very thing. To remedy that, use an ATS that integrates seamlessly with Jobs2Web, such as Authoria Recruiting.

How to supercharge your career site (in less than 30 minutes)

Important disclaimer: 30 minutes actually refers the length of this online PowerPoint/video presentation from the last month's Recruiting.com Roadshow and Un-Conference, which was held at Best Buy headquarters in the Twin Cities. Doug Berg, co-founder of Jobs2Web and HotGigs, gave a whirlwind tour of how updating your career site and making it search engine friendly can pay huge dividends in increased candidate flow.

Nicole St. Martin, our resident search optimization expert at Jobs2Web, sets the stage for Doug who leads us on a thought-provoking tour, touching on topics such as:

• How typical corporate job/career sites actually drive away candidates
• Why your ATS is a great tool once you know the candidate, but works against you on the Web
• Why your jobs are probably not being found on Google, Yahoo and MSN, and what you can do about it
• How to effectively use email marketing to promote your employment brand
• How to reach out to passive candidates via webinars and online recruiting events
• Why every career site needs a Live Chat to engage visitors in real time
• What is an RSS feed and how you can use it to form and maintain relationships with top candidates

If you are in HR or otherwise responsible for helping your organization win the war for talent, you owe it to yourself to grab a cup of coffee and view this online presentation, which combines slides and video. You can find it here.

Afterwards, if you have questions you can either leave a comment below, drop us an email at customerservice@jobs2web.com, or contact us directly via phone or Live Chat.

Xerox/Jobs2Web 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.

Jobs2Web Career Website Optimization Case Study – Xerox

I frequently am asked how long does it take for Jobs2Web to really drive a search-engine impact. I begin by defining “impact” as search-engine visibility, candidate flow, and hires.

To illustrate, Xerox agreed to share their “impact” success story, with the exception of hiring data, which we’ll keep confidential.

We launched Xerox’s Jobs2Web program in October 2006.  At the time they had no job-presence within organic search results on Google or Yahoo, and realized they were missing an important and growing flow of candidates (indeed – today there are over 30,000,000 job-related searches on the major search engines monthly).

Jobs2Web Impact

Our impact data through the initial eight-months looked like this:

The applies are driven from the job aggregation boards to which we post the optimized jobs, as well as from the major search engines. As indexing and ranking strengthen for our clients, search-engine based job-seekers increase.

By mid-June we had built Xerox’s Google rankings by job category into highly visible range.  With Jobs2Web keeping Xerox’s jobs up to date on a daily basis, those clicking on the links were rewarded with highly-relevant, matching job content.  Here are the first twenty job categories optimized for Xerox – you can see the entire list at Xerox-jobs.com 

To see a result, just type the Jobs2Web Category name into Google and search; Xerox-jobs.com is the Jobs2Web result.

Impressive after just eight months.  Check out the Software Engineer Jobs listing for example – Xerox was the 52nd listing (excluding sub-domains) out of 135 million possible results.  Typically Xerox is the only direct employer visible within the search results, a strong proxy as a savvy employer.

The Power of Search

To illustrate the strengthening benefit of search-engine optimization for jobs, let’s look at the Xerox data in the subsequent 40 days:

In about a month an a half Jobs2Web had generated over 600 applicants on almost 7000 visitors – 40% of what had taken the previous eight months.  The continued improvement in results can be largely attributable to the search engine optimization efforts (SEO).  Here are the same Google rankings for the terms noted earlier, just one month later:

Several key job categories that were not in the top 100 listings in June were so in July; others showed good progress, and those highly-ranked remained highly-ranked.

Jobs2Web can drive candidate flow on day one from the major search engines, but to enjoy the candidate flow and employer-of-choice branding driven by high organic search rankings, recruiting managers should use Xerox as an example, and set a two- to three-quarter expectation internally.

Peter Brasket is a co-founder of HotGigs, and leads the Jobs2Web career site and search engine optimization project.

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.

The Future Job Posting Page

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.