Is your career site lost in cyberspace?

Connecting to top candidates is the key to recruitment success. But what if your ideal candidate can’t find their way to your career site? What are some of the ways you can reach out and engage the talented professionals you need to keep your organization strong and growing? Let’s cover the basics:

 You have to use a multimedia approach to reach great candidates.

Gone are the days when you could advertise in one media and find all the candidates you were looking for. Today the media world is extremely fragmented and only getting more so. Targeted media falls into two main buckets…it is either offline media (like newspapers, trade journals, direct mail, radio, billboards, transit advertising, etc.) or online media (such as job boards, banner ads, e-blasts, social networking sites, virtual worlds, you name it). The correct mix is determined by your budget, the target market, the number of people you need to fill and the geographic locations of the jobs.

Your marketing call to action has got to be to drive traffic to your website.   

This goes for any type of recruitment marketing you may do. The goal is simply to motivate them to action and that action should be to get to your website. Think about it.  If you place a print ad, you don’t need to spell out all the job requirements and qualifications anymore. You want to create a call to action and get them off of the page and onto your site.

Even with job boards, you want the candidate to find your job as quickly as they can and get them off of there and onto your site. You want them away from your competition and onto your site where you have their undivided attention and can tell your story.

Search Engine Optimization is a smart way to drive candidates to your site.  

The web has gotten big and complex and search engines help sort and organize information for you. Search can also be a powerful recruiting tool. When you look at the reach that Google, Yahoo & Bing have, there is simply no comparison…you are reaching many more eyeballs than even the largest job board.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, the best way to describe SEO is to look at a simple Google search. When an individual goes onto Google and types a phrase, certain sites pop up. On the left there are organic results…results which come up based on a mathematic algorithm ranking some 125 factors. What it basically comes down to for the search engines is the three C’s…Content, Code and Credibility. These results get 80% of the clicks.

Smart companies are developing their sites so they match particular search strings that candidates may be typing in. Stop driving traffic manually to your site and let the site do the work for you. That’s the bottom line in this whole process…enabling your website to work for you, as opposed to you working for your website.

When it’s easy for candidates to connect with your career site, you’re a step ahead of your competition. If you would like to put these strategies into action, contact us to learn more.

• The goods on engaging and retaining employees
• When old school works: traditional media and its role in recruitment