Jobs Ireland

2008’s buzzword seems to be “Search Engine Optimization“. At my day job at Climber.com, I talk to a lot of recruiters who are ‘kinda-familiar” with SEO, “don’t understand it completely”, “not sure why its necessary” and sure “don’t know how to deploy it”. Yes, some are utilizing SEO vendors to optimize their Career’s page and/or jobs, but the majority are not.

Optimize, optimization, optimal, optimistic. All of these words resemble the same action: to make something better or to desire better.

So why optimize your jobs?

1. The main reason is: To help your jobs, your careers page and/or your recruiting profile all receive a better chance of being found in organic search results, which of course will increase candidate flow and traffic to your jobs and/or careers site.

The other reasons are below:

2. Most job seekers’ first stop for conducting job searches are on search engines, like Google, MSN, or Yahoo. Their next stop, if they are a savvy job seeker, may be Job Board Aggregators like Indeed, Simplyhired and juju. After that it’s usually on to the major job boards. Since the general population is used to ‘googling’ things, (brand name-turned-verb, wonder when it will hit the dictionary?) I’m not surprised at the fact that the word ‘job’ was searched 1.14 billion times during the last month. Most job seekers aren’t typing in just ‘job’ but more specific phrases like, “Accounting Jobs”, which by the way was searched 13.4 million times in the last month.

3. It’s a great way to build Employment Branding Efforts. If you are a small to medium sized organization (aka no name) who has to compete with the larger brand name types for the same talent, then you can’t afford to skip over this buzzword.

4. Passive job seekers typically will ‘google’ a company to see more information about them. But what comes up in the first page or so of search results is key. You want to make sure your Career’s site is right up there with the main url for your page. This gives job seekers a one search, one click trip to your careers page where they can be sold into working for your company.

5. It’s a perfect strategy for keeping your talent pipeline full, ESPECIALLY for organizations who are continually recruiting for the same positions like Salespeople, Customer Service and Nurses. SEO offers a consistent and ongoing way to be in front of the people who are searching for you.

If you’re going to post anything online about the jobs you recruit for, albeit job posting, employment branding video, social networking profile, etc…what good is it if you just post it and hope people find it? You have to make sure it is optimized or it will fall in the big black Internet hole.

Bulletin-Board-type recruitment is loooong gone. It’s now up to you to get your name, your jobs and your brand out there and in front of the right people. So I ask, are you optimizing? If you say no, I want to know, what’s holding you back?