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I’m on a train home to Long Island last night and about 10 minutes in, a young woman across from me whips out her cell phone and within a minute I realize she’s being interviewed for a job. To the shock and somewhat delight of everyone within earshot, she’s telling the prospective employer what she’s good at, not good at, what her salary is (42k if you’re scoring at home) and what she wants it to be, etc., etc.. All in all, it seemed like a pretty standard interview except for the fact it was being conducted on a cell phone on a public train.
Why was this encounter interesting enough to compel me to share it?
The recruiter must have asked her where she heard about the job and her answer was something like, “I was not actually looking for a job but came across your opportunity on either Yahoo! or Google while I was doing a search…”
I don’t know what she was searching for but this was a real life example of search marketing having an impact on passive candidate recruitment. So it got me thinking about how companies like mine and yours can use search marketing as a means for attracting passive candidates and influencing them at different stages of their search.
Here are my thoughts.
Search marketing has a very real application in attracting passive talent because a lot of talented people use search engines daily to find jobs, career related and non-career related information.
I can’t speak for sites like Google or MSN but…
- Yahoo! reaches 72% of the entire online population
- Yahoo! reaches 88% of the US labor force that is online
- Yahoo! reaches 81% of all online job seekers
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, January to June 2006; comScore Plan Metrix, Summer Release 2006, Internal Yahoo Search data.
Search marketing may not typically be considered as tool for attracting passive seekers but if done right it can be effective. What’s unique about search marketing when compared to some of the other new services in the online recruiting marketplace is that it’s proven and companies like ours are making it easy for recruiters to buy and maintain.
Search marketing is about connecting people with the information that they are looking for.
So the trick with search marketing for passive talent is to identify the search behavior of those passive job seekers that matter to your recruiting objective, include the information that they are looking for on your career site and buy the keywords that connect these passive seekers with the appropriate content on your site.
By supplying this audience with the information they are searching for, you interact with the people you want to hire and you put your company in a position to be top of mind when these people contemplate making a move.
EXAMPLE
Here’s an idea that I have been kicking around. We are growing fast and I am looking for qualified sales reps. There are a lot of qualified sales reps using search engines to find information such as industry news, cold calling tips, closing techniques etc.
With keywords such as, ‘cold calling, sales tips, sales salary.’ I can capture the attention of these people and drive them to our job postings, our career site or landing pages for pennies-per-click and as Matt has pointed out before, the branding value is free.
By having my recruiters and sales managers supply the content (sales tips from my sales managers, career info from my recruiters) and buying the right keywords, ‘sales tips,’ our search marketing campaign will connect the passive seekers with the content they are looking for and engage them with my sales managers, recruiters and employer brand.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE
Another way to find these candidates is through Behavioral Targeted Graphical Advertising. “Behavior” will definitely be one of the hot recruitment words of 2007 but it is still new to the majority of HR consumers.
Over the past two years we have seen tremendous growth in sales of this sort of display advertising coming from our recruitment advertising agency partners and our more innovative HR customers.
But that’s for another day. I’ve got a train to catch.
A final note.
I have been very impressed reading this blog and seeing the interaction and passion of this community over the last few months. Considering it started with a young ambitious guy with a $12.95/mo. software package and a few forward thinking people contributing to what it seems to be growing into is exciting. Keep up the good work. I know I look to these types of forums to gauge and anticipate what’s coming in our space.
Michael DeLuca
Vice President of Sales
Yahoo! Hotjobs
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