Although geared towards the recruitment industry, The Understanding Online Jobseekers article by Jennifer Fernandez from the Google UK Classifieds Team, raised some interesting points. This does help to stengthen the argument that HR needs to either work closer with their marketing department or develop their own marketing skills if they are to get ahead of the recruitment game.
It’s not surprising that there has been an increase in the number of job related queries on Google this year (25%), however, what is interesting is that jobseekers are now becoming much more specific when searching for jobs. The article highlights that year on year there has been a dramatic increase of 3 or more words used for job queries. (see graph below) If you couple this with the increasing sophistication of ATS systems & careers sites, there is a great opportunity for direct employers to increase the amount of traffic to their website through natural SEO & PPC with minimum effort and cost.
And if that isn’t enough to convince HR to adopt a more direct hiring strategy, since March this year there has been a 33% increase in branded queries for employers (company names) rather than service providers (such as Total Jobs or Reed).Â
Obviously Tesco and Vodaphone have a well known household name which may help them gain brownie points when appealing to online jobseekers today, but imagine the possibilities for the medium sized employer if these job seeker habits continue to develop. By simply creating an effective & localised job related online PR exercise and then effectively engaging with all the prospective talent that is presented to the business, why would you need a recruitment consultant to sell your brand?
In addition, Google have announced this week that they will soon be implementing a “real time search” which will include a social media, live stream on their key word searches. (see video below) This could really have an impact on getting employer vacancies to the top of search engines quickly and in real time.
So, with a bit of research into job seeker habits and planning in their recruitment marketing strategy, HR Managers stand an excellent chance of promoting their employer brand through online media and increase their chances of staying ahead in the recruitment game.
December 12th, 2009 at 11:21 am
[...] Original post here [...]
December 17th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Thanks for the post and for sharing the very resourceful information here, great post.
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:45 am
Great Post and I do agree real time searching is going to make a big difference for jobseekers on materials they search for or gather. Thank you for your the great post.
July 10th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Great post,
This is very efective searching the jobs.