Finding retail employers retail jobs

When I left school I trained as a mechanic on commercial vehicles.  Not because I couldn't get anything better, but as a young child I did not like waiting for my Dad to mend my bike so learn't how to do it myself.  This impatience continued.  I didn't actually finish my apprenticeship, I finished college but left the spanners before the end of my first year.  I was impatient to move on and ended up moving into commercial vehicle sales.  I then moved into recruitment, commercial vehicle drivers no less!

A year ago I knew very little about SEO, nothing about blogs, but still know next to nothing about career site creative, look and feel, on brand etc.  But, as I am so impatient, and did not believe that I had to wait so long for Google et al to do their spidery stuff with my site, started learning about SEO.  Whilst I am nowhere near being an expert, I am finding that I seem to either know more or, care more about how important on page and off page optimisation are to an employers career site.  The recruitment advertising agencies do not seem to have the same interest.

Maybe they really want to only win awards for great looking sites; although great only in the eyes of other creative types.  But does the job seeker care?  I reckon not.  What they care about is finding the site easily, getting to the jobs first hit.  Not having to wade through spam sites, or job boards, or dead links that have never been 301'd.  Surely if the ad agency is so protective of the brand, then maybe they should put the user and usability at the front of their design pitch.  But HR should also stop buying pretty pictures and free lunches and focus their efforts on attracting great people to hire rather than people that paint them a picture.

In only a matter of a week I can get the site high up in Google for direct searches such as 'jobs at employer' but, I may not of course be 'on brand'.  In my limited experience, so many retail employers career sites are not found at the top of the natural search links.  In some cases, I have found job boards getting their banner ads at the top of Google with the headline 'Jobs at Employer X' yet there are no jobs from the employer on their website - how bad is that?!

So, employers really need to get the basics right and stop relying on the job boards to control and drive their traffic.  It is their brand, and if they want to be oh so 'on brand' then look around - there are a lot of other people exploiting it already, other than the employer themselves!