Mike Deluca, our VP of Sales, has been reading my blog and the other industry blogs for a while. I think his position here gives him an interesting perspective on the industry, so I’ve asked him to share some insight here. This is the first of a three post series from Mike that will be available here…
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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? 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…
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 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 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 |
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8 Comments
Comment by Chad Sowash — February 7, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
Price increases, from the major boards, is literally pushing more hiring companies to, at the very least, “test” SEM avenues. Mainstream adoption is just a matter of time, and I believe ‘07 will be a break out year for SEM(r).
Thanks for the knowledge Michael.
Comment by Mike DeLuca — February 7, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
Thanks Chad, I agree. As you noted, traditional “Job Boards” will increase price but I believe in the not too distant future, you’ll see a migration to Search Engines as the de facto standard place to start a job search. When that happens, the core listings/resume search piece of the puzzle will end up being the least costly and the real dollars will go to SEM and targeted media.
Comment by Jim Durbin — February 8, 2007 @ 9:47 am
The capability is there, but what is missing is the public component. I still get lots of resumes from people who read a post I made a year or two ago, and want to apply for a job based on an industry term they searched that landed at my site.
The goal now is to get lots of stories into the press about successful placements made from SEM – until they are looking for it, the average job-seeker is still going to be stumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch.
Comment by DT — February 8, 2007 @ 2:09 pm
Thanks for this article Mike (and Matt), and I think some very good points are raised herein. This actually ties back to a bell curve theory that I’ve applied to people in my previous recruiting experience. Meaning, that with all passive candidates there is a certain threshold of job seeking activity.
On a day when person A had a good day at work, was a part of a success, etc., their aptitude to be a casual candidate is low, conversely, if they’ve been yelled at by the boss, the commute was horrible, etc., they then cross over this threshold, and become a passive/active candidate for employment.
At this point, SEM becomes very valuable to a recruiter, as this is the tipping point at which getting the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time, is the golden ticket to finding that high quality candidate they’ve been searching for.
Perhaps matching up a search of what someone above the threshold might be searching for that evening while they’re at home that night, might lead to positive matches with SEM. For example, by yahoo searching “making a commute less stressful” brings up only results for a moving company, while searching “my boss sucks” does bring up one targeted response from simplyhired.
To pick up on Chad’s point, agreed that the (in my opinion) highly overinflated prices on job boards are certainly driving employers to seek alternative methods in their recruitment strategies. I don’t see why employers/recruiters are not utilizing the power of SEM and buying up the same slots to advertise their products: a desirable position within their organization.
Comment by Mike Deluca — February 8, 2007 @ 3:47 pm
DT, all great points, thanks! If you can believe it, every once in awhile I get a complaint that our service isn’t meeting a need for a recruiter. Whenever I hear this my first question is “are you enhancing your postings with any SEM or media offerings?” which the response is always predictably “no”. Like in any industry, there will be first movers and laggards when it comes to change and new ideas. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it is necessarily good but in order to gain first mover advantage, you have to be at least willing to try. Doing a decent SEM trial is not going to break the bank for any reasonable business. I think fear of the unknown is what is holding these concepts back at this point but I believe it is just a matter of time and when that time arrives, the early adopters will be the ones who reap the largest rewards.
Comment by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com — February 11, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
Given the recent news of Jobster following the HotJobs free job posting model, it would be interesting to read from people at HotJobs about the good, the bad, and the ugly of that strategy.
Comment by Matt Martone — February 12, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
Hi Steven. FYI, HotJobs does not offer free job postings.
Regardless, I do think its a good move for Jobster. They are already aggregating job content from across the web. Now they are offering free postings which, from what I can tell, get premium placement on a job search results page.
The good. Jobster could develop some awareness and build a lead list of recruiters and their contact info from which Jobster sales reps can call on later to sell Jobster’s paid services.
The bad. I don’t see much of a bad side as it seems like Jobster has little to lose.
Regarding your misunderstanding of our job posting business…
We do not offer free postings.
At times, if it creates a better user experience for our job seekers and a better opportunity for our paying customers, we will leverage our Yahoo search technology, aggregate job content from across the web and display it under paid listings.
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