Hire Strategies Blog

Maximise your employer brand before the job boards can!

I have to admit to being a big believer in the brand when it comes to recruiting. Having been in recruitment for (oh my god!) 20 years now, I can speak from experience. If we could ever get the employers logo on our adverts we just knew we would get a much better response - nothing much has changed since my early days.

Job boards just love the employer brand for a number of reasons. It makes their site look good with all of the logo's. They get lots of jobs/content to attract applicants with. And in most cases, they can use the employer brand name in their various marketing activities but in particular search engine marketing.

Now, I have just finished some analysis work for one of my customers and according to the reports (not 100% accurate but I'll 'moan' about this some other time) around 50% of applications come directly from the career site and 90% of online hires also come from the career site; job boards only delivered 10%! This is however an extreme as the norm is that job boards deliver 30-50% of online hires.

Laura Ries Blogs on The Origin of Brands about having focus when marketing using Apple and the iPod as one of the examples; showing how the whole company benefits from the major success of a key product.

So, my point is this....

Employers should focus more of their recruitment marketing cash on directing applicants to their career site in the most direct way possible. They should not allow job boards to hijack their applicants (read Joel Cheeseman about Yahoo views on this) or recruitment agencies to use their brand to attract applicants who end up elsewhere. They should make sure they have a robust and efficient online job application process, optimise their site and make greater use of search engine marketing (SEM).

Why? Because everyone else is and then charging the employer (a lot of money) for the benefit of having used the employers brand, to attract applicants, who then eventually get hired by the employer. But until they do, they'll have to carry on using job boards!!

Spell check.

The spell check functionality in Blogger (now owned by Google) recognises Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo etc. It doesn't recognise Google, Gmail, Blogger etc. Yes, I can teach it these 'new' words but should I really have to?!

Google aim high!

As most people who spend time online will know, Google have been in the news this week. First, search related ad revenues are forecast to slow! Second, they aim to be a $100 billion company. So, if search ad revenues are slowing (not stopping remember) and they are (only) a $6 billion company now, that's a lot of growth.

Recruitment advertising may not be the biggest market for them but I bet they'd like a big chunk. And if so, I reckon we could see some pretty big acquisitions in the next year or so. What they will be, who knows. It all depends if Google want to be a tech company, a media company, a service company........ Would they buy Adecco? Would they buy Monster? Would they/could they buy Microsoft?

Whatever happens, I just hope I get to carry on using Gmail, Blogger, Google search, Google Reader, Google Base etc. Even my 7 year old daughter told me to tell the tooth fairy to use Google images for her next letter!

However big they get, life would not be the same without them!