Posted by Kyle Callahan on Wed, Sep 01, 2010
The September issue of TALENTSOURCE, our monthly e-newsletter, came out today with all kinds of recruiting tips and news. Just in case you're not subscribed, we thought we'd give you a taste of what you missed.
In this month's TALENTSOURCE, you would have learned how to save $10,000 when you skip the contingency firms, how to ask yourself a question that could save your life, how to take advantage of the differences between SEO and SEM, and how to get in front of over 2 million diversity candidates every quarter.
In addition, you would have found links to some of the better articles we re-tweeted over the past month (of course, you can also just follow us on Twitter), articles like:
- Recruiters: One Ugly Question That Could Save Your Life (Innovate CV)
- Some Firms Struggle to Hire Despite High Unemployment (Yahoo Finance)
- How to Measure Your Value In HR: You Gotta Show Your Executive Team (TLNT.com)
- How Will You Emerge…This Time? (The Fordyce Letter)
You would have also found information relating to layoffs over the past month, including highlights from a NY Times article, "With Recovery Slowing, the Jobs Outlook Dims", and a CNBC article, "Jobs Outlook Isn’t Just Bad, It May Be Getting Worse."
In short, you would have been kept up to date on all the goings on of the recruitment industry from August 1st to August 31st.
But the good news is, you don't have miss it again. Because with just a little click, you can subscribe to TALENTSOURCE today.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Thu, Aug 19, 2010
One of our customers, Sheila Primm, an H.R. Recruiter at Aerojet, an aerospace and defense technologies company, sent us a nice note about one of the direct sourcing projects we did for her.
Because we're so proud of our staff, we thought we'd share it with the world.
You guys at RCI have sent me some wonderful resumes and it has been a pleasure working with you. I will definitely let my Corporate office know how pleased I am with your services. I received over 80 resumes. Again, thanks for all your help. I will use your service again if I have a difficult position to fill.
Great job to everyone involved. There's nothing better than making a customer happy. Well, that and the Red Sox taking the pennant.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Mon, Aug 09, 2010
Lorna Frost, a Senior Regional Credit Manager of adidas Group, recently had this to say about our recruiting solutions:
We never thought in the beginning they could do it, but by God they know their stuff! They've done a great job and delivered everything they said they could. RCI came through 100%. They showed us that our concerns, while real to us, were not concerns to them and they proved that. So they get an A+ and a gold star.
Now all we have to do is get our mother to hang it on the fridge.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Mon, Jul 12, 2010
One of our clients, Armor Correctional Health Services, just sent us the nicest note, and it’d be a shame if we didn’t share it with you. Armor is “a physician-owned company that provides comprehensive medical, dental, and mental health services for incarcerated persons.” We’ve done print advertising for them, as well as a direct-mail piece and a plethora of web and email solutions.
Ceron Rawls, their Human Resources Manager, writes:
Our organization has been partnered with RCI for our advertising and recruitment needs for several years now, and if there is an organization out there not partnering with RCI, then they are missing out on a fantastic opportunity. RCI has provided many great solutions for us and has helped us facilitate those as appropriate. From their ATS implementation to their Direct Sourcing program and everything in between, they act as a real time-saver when it comes to helping us find the right applicant. If anyone ever had any questions regarding the hiring of a new advertising or recruitment agency, I would not hesitate to give RCI a great reference. To top it off, the staff is very friendly, including our Account Partner Melody Storms, and I am sure that President & CEO Mike Moore would be happy to help.
Ceron is right about that. If you’re interested in seeing how we can help your organization enjoy the same happy results as Armor Correctional, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
Posted by Eric Peterson on Tue, May 25, 2010
The search engines are a lot like parents: Show them you can be trusted, and they will reward you with an even greater level of trust; disobey, and you’re likely to get spanked.
Basically, when it comes to ethics and SEO, you’ve got three different routes you can go. You can follow the rules laid out by the search engines (”White Hat SEO”), you can try to deceive the engines to get better rankings (”Black Hat SEO”), or you can creatively interpret the guidelines to stretch their intended spirit (”Gray Hat SEO”).
If the goals of your Recruitment SEO strategy are long term in nature, avoid Gray and Black Hat SEO techniques at all costs. If you don’t, and a search engine catches you, it won’t hesitate to either decrease your page rank or eliminate your page entirely from its index. These penalties are sometimes assessed automatically by the search engine’s algorithm, or manually, following an investigation of the site. In either case, the result is a costly setback for you and your organization.
White Hat SEO, on the other hand, shouldn’t just be considered playing by the rules. Good White Hat SEO techniques prioritize people over machines. As Google says in its guidelines, “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”
If you want to implement White Hat SEO, start by writing your web content with your users foremost in your mind. Once you’ve accomplished that, you can start to consider how the search engines will view your site. The trick is to make your content easy to find on the page and relevant to a user’s search query. If you do your job successfully, your audience is more apt to click on, subscribe to, link to, share, and/or comment on your content. It’s this kind of activity that gives your site value and relevancy in the eyes of the search engines. If the users like and trust your site, then the search engines will to.
Which is why, when it comes to Recruitment SEO, choose good over evil.
But White Hat SEO is not all about page rankings. Remember, search engines find content irresistible for their own reasons, but if your web pages are not appealing to the humans who come to your site, then what do you care what the spiders think?
Is your career website playing by the rules? Have you broached this subject with your Recruitment SEO provider? I’d be interested to hear your story.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Thu, May 20, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the difference between active and passive candidates by exploring how finding the ideal candidate is kind of like finding a wife.
Well, keeping with the recruiting is a romantic relationship metaphor, Trisha McFarlane over at HR Ringleader has a post entitled, “Referrals - The Blind Dating of Recruiting.”
The gist is all in the title, but Trish offers some quick tips to help organizations “make the best possible relationship match:”
- Tell it like it is
- Trust the matchmaker
- Decode the situation
- Be ready to bail
Trish goes into a little detail on each of those tips, so make sure youcheck out the whole post.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Tue, May 04, 2010
We’ve just released a free white paper that aims to shed light on the future of recruitment advertising.
When the Presses Stop: Recruitment Advertising in a Post-Print World
When you wanted access to a predictable pool of local candidates, there was nothing better than the Help Wanted section of your local newspaper. But according to the New York Times ‘2009 Was The Worst Year for the Newspaper Business in Decades,’ which is why the important thing now is to find out what’s next. Unfortunately, job boards can’t do half the job that newspapers did when it comes to finding a large and predictable number of local candidates. There has to be a better way. Guess what? There is.
After you read the white paper, we’d love to hear your thoughts, so please remember to come back to Bells & Whistles and add your voice to the conversation.
Posted by Kyle Callahan on Wed, Apr 28, 2010
In honor of my third wedding anniversary this month, I thought I’d make an analogy: Trying to find the ideal candidate is kind of like trying to find a wife.
To all the lovely women out there, please bear with me.
When it comes to getting married, there seems to be two kinds of women: those who spend way too much time thinking about the prospect, and those who don’t — of course, there are also only two kinds of men in the world: those who are dumb enough to think there are only two kinds of women, and those who venerate the magical complexity that is the female condition; the latter wouldn’t dare to simplify the richness of that experience, unless of course, it was for the benefit of a possibly useful analogy; but I digress.
The women in the first group may not have a boyfriend (or a girlfriend, depending on their preferences), but they do subscribe to bridal magazines, they do build playlists on their computers with all the songs they might use for the first dance, and on the weekends, they actively source their local bakeries for potential cake designs. And when these women find themselves in a conversation with a person that comes close to matching their ideal husband (or wife), they stop paying attention to the ebb and flow of the moment and instead, start imagining the way their families will interact on the dance floor.
These kinds of wedding-seekers are the active candidates, the ones whose every focus is on finding the right partner for them.
If you’re an employer who wants to get in front of this audience, the process is easy. It’s all just a question of research. You define your target audience, discover where they are in the marketplace, and then make sure your message is there too. If I was a single guy looking to score a wife, I’d figure out where my preferred group of women hang out (coffee shops and bookstores), and then get myself there.
Employers interested in reaching active candidates should have a marketing plan that includes the main job boards, some niche job boards, maybe some alumni career networks, LinkedIn.com, etc. And because over 300 million people a month start their job search on Google (as opposed to 10 million on Monster), your plan should also include Search Engine Optimization for the career pages on your website, which will drive a share of those 300 million directly to your online postings.
In addition, depending on your needs and the number of openings, you may consider having a presence at some of your local job fairs, or possibly even hosting your own.
Of course, there’s always the recruitment advertising equivalent of running a single’s ad in your local newspaper, but in most cases (recruitment or otherwise), classified ads won’t get the quality of candidate you desire.
Then there’s the other kind of women, the ones who don’t stress out about winning a mate. These women are a bit more relaxed about the future—they’re not unambitious; they just don’t get worked up about it. It’s not that these women don’t want to get married to the right person; it’s that they believe the right person is bound to happen along one day.
These women are analogous to the passive candidates, and wooing them is a delicate process.
Finding them starts the same way as finding active candidates: by researching who they are and where they go. The difference is the way in which you approach them. Passive candidates aren’t chomping at the bit for a new career, so you gotta be smooth and seductive. You have to get them to imagine how much better their life will be if they partner up with you. You have to demonstrate how your organization can help them take their career to the next level, and show them why your opportunity is so much better than any of the others that might happen along. You gotta get them to not only pay attention to your offer, but also to select it: to say “yes.”
Whatever you do, you gotta do it smooth. You gotta woo. Because the passive candidate hasn’t been waiting their whole life for you to come along. They’ve been too busy living their lives instead.
Is it any wonder that employers prefer to recruit passive candidates? Something about their self-assuredness just makes them so…seductive.
Happy anniversary honey. And thanks for saying “Yes.”
Posted by Eric Peterson on Fri, Apr 09, 2010
I ran across a nice e-paper, “HR and Search Engine Optimization,” posted by LinkUp, a job search engine out of St. Louis that evidently lists only the jobs they scrape from corporate websites; a direct aggregator, if you will.
The paper outlines a list of basic dos and don’ts against which you can perform a gut-check on your own career page.
My takeaways from the paper:
- Label your employment section “Careers” and make it accessible from the homepage
- Create a single list of your open job titles for your visitors to skim
- Provide each job description its own unique page, no more than two clicks away from the homepage
- Display your job descriptions in HTML, as opposed to PDFs or Word files
- Refrain from requiring visitors to create a profile in your ATS or register on your site before browsing your jobs
- Tie every job listing into your ATS
- Make sure every job description page is print-friendly
- Mind existing standards with regard to the information you include in your job description, its order, font sizes, etc.
- Prohibit the use frames in your website design
- Avoid using graphics to communicate job information. Always use text.
Download the full e-paper (PDF).
Posted by Eric Peterson on Tue, Apr 06, 2010
As the search marketing conversation continues to heat up between our account managers and clients, I’m not surprised to learn that many who are new to the topic aren’t clear on the difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). I thought I’d take a moment to help distinguish between the two.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is the choice when immediacy is of the essence. With SEM, you pay the search engines to display your ads on the results page of a relevant query. Your jobs appear as sponsored links, typically in the right column of the search engine results page, and often at the top of the left column above the list of organic results. Because there is no ramp-up time, you begin to realize results right away.
How Search Engine Marketing Works
The first step is to use resources such as Google’s free keyword research tool to discover what terms people use to search for the types of jobs you want to advertise. Relying on your own intuition, you can experiment with your own words and phrases, always with the understanding that it doesn’t make sense to buy keyword phrases for which nobody’s searching.
Unlike SEO, SEM allows for precise control over the deployment of your advertising. You can choose what day and time you want the search engine to display your ad, and you can also target specific geographic locations, ranging from an entire country to a five-mile radius of a specific zip code.
After you establish the campaign parameters, you’ll need to set a budget. One attractive aspect of SEM is that the advertising is pay-per-click (PPC), which means you only pay if your ad is clicked on. Additionally, you set the daily budget, and once your daily budget is exhausted, the search engines stop displaying your ad; meanwhile, you reap brand benefits as your ad is visible even to visitors who don’t click. In order to maximize the return on your investment, you can track and analyze the results of your ad, experimenting with the parameters until you find a formula that works best for you.
All of these benefits and the sheer simplicity of SEM might make you wonder why you need to bother with the more complex undertaking of SEO. The answer is simple: more than 75% of all clicks on a search engine results page go to the organic links; less than 25% go to the sponsored links.
Search Engine Optimization
In a nutshell, SEO is the art and science of modifying web content with the goal of gaining better positioning on search engine results pages. The goal of your SEO effort is to incrementally improve your page’s ranking in the organic search results, and ultimately rise above your competition when a job seeker enters your target keywords in their search query.
Unlike SEM, SEO is not a quick fix to filling your open positions. In fact, it can take 3-6 months before an aggressive strategy begins to bear fruit. However, depending on your competition, the keywords you target, and the amount of link building you do, it is possible to see substantial improvements in weeks instead of months.
Because search engine algorithms change constantly, and the battles for page-one rankings grow fiercer by the day, SEO must be embraced as an ongoing discipline to maintain any successes you achieve.
SEM and SEO each have their own advantages and drawbacks, depending on your objectives. What are your objectives? What are your challenges? Have you found more success using one over the other?