Hire Strategies Blog

How much time do applicants spend searching for your jobs?

As search engine traffic begins to slow, recent suggestions are that search activity now only relates to 5% of a users time on the Internet. The question is, then what are they doing the other 95% of the time? Kenneth Cassar, Senior Director and Chief Analyst Nielsen//NetRatings says: "41% of the time, they're visiting communication sites; 35% of the time they're digesting content; and 19% of the time they're shopping. It mirrors real life in that first we talk about a product, do a little research, and then make a purchase."

According to com.Score's James Lamberti, without including click through rates and conversions, only 9% of Web traffic comes from search. Bookmarks were responsible for 18%, and 15% came from following a link. In the keyword world, the top search terms are heavily dominated by URL searches - an important development to note as indicates the searcher already has an idea of where he or she wants to go - from experience.

Even if you are not convinced that the above is necessarily true, what could you do from a recruiting viewpoint?

Well, adding a 'Bookmark this site' link on your career site is not going to smash your budget as it really is a job that only takes a few minutes. And the more you promote your entire career site address, the more people will remember it. Try keeping it simple and maybe even taking a leaf out of the ASDA book who use www.asda.jobs. That's not www.asdajobs.com - they have a .jobs domain name!

Bottom line: Search is still important but it's not the only thing to think about. Give applicants good reason to bookmark your site and keep returning until they find the right job.

Does search support your offline recruitment advertising?

Most retail employers still advertise vacancies in one or more of the retail trade magazines with either an e-mail address or careers site URL. However, according to recent research by Yahoo, consumers will remember an advert but rarely remember the exact website address. Hence they use a search engine to find the website; apparently more than eight out of ten users habitually use a search engine after having partially remembered site addresses from adverts!

But will they find your careers site that easily?

I ran through a few recent adverts and you may be surprised at the results when you do the search. Remember, the advert may have been seen a few days ago before the job seeker does the search so you may want to make sure your careers site can be found easily. If not, they may look elsewhere whilst they are searching!

Online recruitment hots up!

Great scoop from Joel Cheesman about Google Base adding its jobs to the general search results of Google. Worth watching what happens as the uptake of Base listings in the UK will take off in due course.

Is the 'pay for job listings' mdoel coming to an end?

Google launches Page Creator.

Your inital thought when you saw the title of this page was probably 'so what'. Google are as ever getting into so many different things which also includes jobs/recruitment. As Joel Cheeseman points out, even Monster are adding their jobs onto Google Base so what next for Google and Recruitment? They already have People Profiles in Google Base so where does Page Creator fit?

I've not managed to get an account yet to try it out, but if it's as easy as I would expect, people could start creating their 'employment portfolios' and maintain them like a Blog. It's not a particularly new idea i.e. having your CV/website but it seems that whenever Google comes up with something, people go mad to use it; I can't even get a Page Creator account already!

So, when you add a job onto Google Base, Google could quite easily compare this to all of the Page Creators who match your job and hey presto, you've got a number of links to potential candidates and maybe even some Adword adverts for people instead of products.

Why not, people have to eat so why not market yourself this way?

Use search to fill KEY roles, not ALL roles.

SEO is pretty hot in UK recruitment at the moment - SEO being search engine optimisation! But maybe employers are expecting a little too much, too quickly.

Now, I have had many conversations where retail employers consider that job boards send too much crap and not enough quality. But the job boards rank highly in many search results (paid and natural) so they are going to get a load of traffic. But the employer now wants to be on the first page of the natural search results and sponsor 100's of keywords.

Now, in my opinion, they may be better off thinking long and hard about this. Will they really get 'results' from search terms such as "retail jobs" or "jobs in retail". Not only will it take a long time and a lot of effort to get there (top of natural search results page) but they will get the same traffic that job boards do; some good, lots of bad. Surely they need to focus their efforts on the jobs they cannot fill, that are very specific and a lot easier to get themselves noticed.

So, searches such as "retail jobs" are not going to deliver as much as "Employer name Pharmacy Manager Glasgow". If this is the kind of vacancy you have, is "retail jobs" going to get it filled?

Best leave volume to the job boards, they want it more than the employers do.

Are online application forms getting too complicated?

This will of course depend on how you look at it. If you think like an online retailer, you want the transaction (checkout) to be simple, secure and fast. OK so selling is different in that you want volume of transactions whereas in recruitment you may not, but maybe volume is good for recruiters.

If you have a long complicated online application form, for key roles which are hard to fill, the kind of people who complete this could be considered as the wrong type i.e. if you are great at your job are you really going to spend an hour completing an online application form? Hmmm, no.

So, who is the long form really benefiting? Active (desperate) job seekers will apply anyway be it a long or short form. So the recruiter can see the wrong people more easily but in reality, most of them will be wrong anyway. No point attracting great applicants if they won't apply.

But even when this fact stares them in the face, do they change? Nope, they just rely on recruitment agencies to get them the best applicants as they don't make great applicants fill in loads of forms. Still, at least there were no long forms for anyone to complete or review so everyone should be happy.

The culture of dissatisfaction by Seth Godin.

Oh what have we become?!

This is why I always try to deal with smaller companies where the person you speak to has a name and generally cares - particularly if they are the owner!

Read more.....

Finding a job boards jobs.

Just to make it clear, this post focuses on retail job boards, in the UK. The main players being Inretail, Retail Choice, Retail Moves and still hanging in there, Workthing. In reality the main battle for market dominance is being fought by Inretail and Retail Choice although both parties should (and maybe do) consider all of their customers own career sites as a direct threat to their business model.

Inretail do have the majority of direct employers jobs, and in some cases have exclusive agreements (or are they exclusionary!). Retail Choice are not however too far behind with a similar number of jobs.

But the real difference, is that the jobs on Inretail are not spidered by search engines whereas Retail Choice jobs are.

What does this mean?

Simple really. If you have jobs on your own career site (which may not be spidered and therefore found in a search engine search result) and only use a job board that also does not have its jobs spidered, chances are you will not get great results and, you will probably have to pay a lot of money for your advertising package as the job board marketing costs will be pretty high to ensure they get sufficient market presence/penetration.

But hey, if it works who am I to comment!

What makes a great careersite?

It is of course down to individual opinions but you need to think like an e-retailer. The sites that sell the most have not only a great proposition and a great brand, but their sites are easy to use!

How about this for an employee proposition:

"...our strategy is simple: we hire great people and encourage them to make their dreams a reality. There's still so much for us to dream and do."

It inspires me!

Know who it is?

Where are my jobs - on your careersite!

Quite often I get asked by retailers why they can't find their jobs (and in some cases their careersites) via a search engine. Well, there are two different issues here.

First of all, you have to think about how you want your careersite to be found by applicants and guess what - they don't search very often for careers or vacancies! Your content needs to be optimised for search engines and contain the right keywords or key phrases. That done, you then have to think realistically about how well you will be able to rank in the natural search results as it takes a lot more than just having the right keywords to get to the top.

So, your site is optimised, your jobs don't show up in the search engines yet you've spent all of this money on a new career site and sexy new e-recruitment system. Now, you may have decided to use a job board as part of your e-recruitment strategy which will of course ensure you get a lot of applicants. If you look at one of your jobs on a job board, try searching for the exact job on Google to see what happens.

Not all job boards are equal so you may not find the actual job directly via a search engine. Even worse, if you use more than one job board, plus your own careersite, the only place that has the most up-to-date list is your own careersite yet the search engine spiders cannot find them.

It gets worse! Some retailers who have a really basic careersite actually get better results from search engines than those that have a state-of-the-art e-recruitment system.

What to do? We'll be telling you over the next few weeks so keep watching this space.