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Get ready to add, ‘local SEM(r),’ to your recruiting budget

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

eMarketer is reporting that US Local Paid Search As a Percent of Total Paid Search Advertising Spending(say that 10 times fast) is expected to climb to 23% in 2011. That’s almost double what it was in 2006.

When you consider this research and the following facts it’s hard to argue against Yahoo! being dominantly positioned to drive this local SEM(r) growth.

The HR consumer is adopting new technologies link
Employers want seekers to engage in their own career sites and will be spending towards career site promotion. link
SEO and SEM are big buzz in the space
Monster and Careerbuilder are focusing on international market growth link | link
The Yahoo! experience is made more local thanks to the newspaper content deal link
The Yahoo! experience is made more social thanks to integrations of web 2.0 sites like Yahoo! Answers and Flickr into other sites on the network
With HotJobs, Yahoo! has been supporting recruiters for about 6 years already
Google is new to the game
Yahoo! can provide search + display support to recruiters on a local scale and research shows that this boosts performance link
MarketingSherpa found that in 2006, keywords on Yahoo! were 28% less expensive than on Google link

Posted in SEO / SEM(r) | 1 Comment »

eMarketer’s Search Marketing Whitepaper: Counting Dollars and Clicks

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

Recruitment has yet to catch on as a category being watched
by analysts such as David Hallerman of eMarketer.com though I expect that will change given the rapidly expanding adoption of new media in the recruitment ad
space and the demand of HR execs to market their own career sites. (pointed out
by DirectEmployers’s 2007 Recruiting Trend Survey).

Hallerman’s study of the Search Marketing landscape
is a valuable read to anyone interested in leveraging paid search or search
engine optimization for recruitment.

If you’re a recruiter, this whitepaper has too much
information(TMI) and you should be hittin’
the phones. So, I’ve listed below the things that I think are most
important to you.

If you’re a Human Resources consultant, blogger or pundit type
than this whitepaper is a must read. Shut down email, pay for and download the whitepaper,
grab a coffee, bite the cap off of your pen, start reading and scribbling
notes. Educate your clients. Make their recruiting efforts more effective.

If you’re an entrepreneur thinking of launching a search
engine marketing agency specifically for recruitment then quit telling everyone
about your idea. It’s annoying. Find someone whom has already paid for the whitepaper. Convince her to send you a copy. If it requires lying, don’t worry. It’s not the first time you’ll lie and it wont be the last. Use the research to formulate your biz plan. Get moving. The barrier to entry in this space is low right now. More competition is on the way. Your long term plans should include integrating VOIP, RSS and SMS into your product suite.

Recruiters, here is the summary of info from this whitepaper
that matters most to you:

How much do search
keywords cost?

eMarketer: ‘Keywords on Google are 28% & 29% more
expensive than on Yahoo! and MSN respectively.’

Me: Since keyword pricing is driven up with
competition in the market, Google’s success in the consumer ad market may hurt
it in the recruitment ad space

Which works better:
paid search advertising or search engine optimization (SEO)?

eMarketer: ‘More US marketers cite SEO for best return on
investment than do those who cite paid search…A higher percentage of large
advertisers currently engage in (paid search) than those who use SEO….Control
maybe be one reason some advertisers prefer paid search to SEO. ‘

Me: A cost effective SEO strategy is worthwhile for
employers’ long term recruiting objectives. Paid search is the go to tool for
supporting immediate and dynamically changing recruiting objectives. Paid
search and SEO always compliment each other so the right strategy across both
will make a world of difference today and tomorrow.

Measuring results…

eMarketer: ‘The core metrics advertisers and agencies use
to measure the effectiveness of search engine marketing include web site
traffic volume, conversion rates, click-through rates and the bottom line of
return on investment(ROI).’

Me: The best recruiters will know the source of their best leads. Identifying new sources will require your understanding career site analytics. Get familiar with analytics like clicks, conversion
rates, click-through rates. Take a tip from Jim Stroud. Read: Career Site Analytics a la JimStroud

Search Marketing: Counting Dollars and Clicks

Search engine marketing is a highly concentrated industry. Over 90% of US paid search ad spending will go to Google and Yahoo! in 2007. One result of this concentration is that it often makes advertising on second-tier search engines a better value—less competition for keywords means a broader reach for fewer ad dollars. Get it at eMarketer.com.

Related:

Posted in SEO / SEM(r) | No Comments »

More proof that experienced professionals are researching employers on search engines prior to applying.

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Check out the results of a Facebook poll that I ran today.

In between submitting an overdue expense report and waiting for the Intern’s kareoke kegger to start, I asked 200 people via a Facebook poll…

Do you research companies on search engines before applying for a job?

It cost me 51 bucks but the results proved that more experienced people(those over 17) are more likely to research a company on search engines prior to applying for jobs than not to research the company on search engines.

the poll | the data

Questions that employers need to ask themselves:

Q. How well or poorly is our org represented on those local and niche search results page which are relative and critical to our recruiting objectives?
Q. How can we influence those search results pages?

Verizon does a great job…

Comcast and Verizon are in a serious battle for talent. Each company needs to hire technicians to rollout initiatives that will dictate who wins the lion’s share of a huge telecom market. From what I can tell Verizon seems to be doing very well recruiting and therefore, executing their rollout. (I can’t wait to get FiOS to come to good ole Hudson County.)

This is not surprise to me as I am well aware of the great job that Verizon does with email marketing and seo.

Comcast on the other hand…eh…go run a ‘comcast technician’ search on Yahoo!, Google & YouTube.

Posted in SEO / SEM(r) | 2 Comments »

At SHRM 2007. My first conversation landed back on Recruiting Blogs.

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Early this morning I met a really interesting HR Director. You’ll get to meet her later, as we scheduled an interview. Long story short, she is excited about the idea of blogging for recruitment.

The fact that this was the absolute first person that I spoke with here at SHRM and considering the attendance at Jim Durbin’s session on blogging for recruitment at the ERExpo in San Diego, I think it’s obvious that corporate recruiting leaders want and need to know more.

So, I quickly put together this page with links to great content for the woman that I met this morning and for HR/Recruiting pros whom want to learn about blogging for recruitment.

Doing this got me thinking and I’d like to put together a complete guide by collaborating with thought leaders in the recruiting blog space. The guide will share our collective knowledge with with HR/Recruiting pros. If you are interested in participating, here’s what I’m thinking…

My goal is that this guide will soon be completed as a collaborated effort by some of the more influential recruiting bloggers; it will be a value-add to professionals seeking more strategic sourcing options; and it will provide each of us with the satisfaction of contributing valuable insight to our customers, partners and networks in need.

If our own employers would like to get behind this effort and sponsor it, then that would obviously provide some great thought leadership and value-adding brand exposure as well.

Please consider this post to be my invitation to participate.

I’d like to invite Jim Durbin and each of the panelists of his ERExpo session on recruiting blogs. They include Microsoft’s Heather Hamilton, T-Mobile’s Dennis Smith and the funniest guy ever…I forget his name (but he was absolutely awesome).

I’d also like to invite Joel Cheesman for his input on recruiting blogs from an SEO perspective and Shannon Seery Gude of Bernard Hodes for her insight into the impact that recruiting blogs provide employer branding efforts.

Collectively I think we have a ton of knowledge to share and value to add.

Moving forward this page will serve as a collaborative workspace on the project. I’ll figure out how to make it work once I’m back from SHRM.

For now, let’s have it serve as a source of links to great content on recruiting blogs for Recruiting and HR Professionals to get introduced to the concept and technologies behind blogging for recruitment.

I’ll be pointing all interested HR Professionals that I meet at SHRM to this page. So, if you are interested in adding value and helping out, please post a link to what you believe is great content for an HR or Recruiting Professional to read on the use of blogs for recruitment.

I’ve linked the content that I plan to share with the woman I met this morning. Please comment below with what you would like to share as well.

Posted in Conferences, Recruiting Blog News/Info | No Comments »

Would you welcome me into your home via your broom closet?

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Just a quick note from me as I commute to work on a gleaming clean and super safe NJ Path train(if your not familiar, that’s sarcasm)…

Last week I researched some career sites. What I found completely reinforced my feeling that employers must consider landing page strategies when planning their career sites.

One pretty large, very well known brand, had about 200 jobs on it’s career site. The site was hosted by an ATS; I don’t remember which.

There were 3 different pages on the career site for each of the 200 jobs. Each job had a job description page, an apply page and a confirmation page. Approx. 600 pages in all.

How many of these pages do you think should be available(included in the indexes) for search engine job seekers? In other words, which pages are best to welcome job seekers?

Right, the job description pages and only the job description pages.

You want seekers whom are searching to find links directly to your job descriptions. You want them to read those descriptions and apply.

You don’t want the job seekers landing on apply pages with no explanation of the job…that’s bad. Confirmation pages…i.e., ‘You have successfully applied to this job.’ Worse. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

In this case, there were 60 pages of the 600 included in the index. Most of them were apply pages. Very few were actual job descriptions. So…this employer is capturing the visibility of desired and relevant job seekers and then confusing them when they land on the career site. Naturally, this leads to the loss of the talent opportunity.

Employers need to realize that the pages which make up their career sites act as doorways for search engine job seekers to enter their career sites. Without an effort to control this engagement into their sites and employment brand, employers are missing out and essentially inviting talent to enter their career sites via back doors and broom closets.

ATS Sourcing Data, Mis-Information Superhighway

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

I’m perfectly comfortable telling you that my friend Rj is a degenerate gambler and the worst source of information in the tri-state area. Rj, like everyone else who grew up in north jersey has a nickname. We call him Mis-Information Superhighway. He’s not a bad guy; just poorly informed.

This matters to you because a recent study by JobsInLogistics.com found that 83% or 5 out of 6 candidates enter inaccurate data. (when asked how they were referred to jobs they were applying to on a company’s career site) You like Rj maybe making decisions based on shoty data.

The study was documented in this whitepaper, ‘ATS Sourcing Data – 83% Inaccurate.’ It’s worth reading.

My 2 cents…

Monster’s career site hosting service does this…

This is also the practice of many custom built career sites…

This is unacceptable…
My $12.50/mo. blog software is providing me better tracking than the services that you’re paying an arm and a leg for are providing you. I can tell you that the most recent visitor to my blog came from a Yahoo search results page. That person searched, ‘matt martone job search marketing‘ and landed on my homepage. Prior to that, another person came from my linkedin profile and landed on my homepage. At 8:08a someone else landed here and came from a Google search results page. That person was searching, ‘searchmarketing.google‘

If my $12.50/mo. is getting me better tracking data than your ATS vendor is providing you then you need to press that vendor for more support.

As the recruitment advertising landscape broadens to include more services for job seeker traffic from search engines, social networks, blogs and aggregators like Indeed.com, you’ll need a better understanding of which services are providing you the greatest return. You’ll need better tracking.

Oh yeah…btw…Rj’s out of work. If your interested, you can find his resume on Monster, really.

Posted in Career Site Optimization, SEO / SEM(r) | 5 Comments »