SEO and HR

by Fabrice Calando on June 29, 2011

SEO for HR

If you’ve been working in HR for at least a little while, you probably never thought you would have to worry about stuff like SEO, web design, branding, SEM and what not. Having a good relationship with job boards reps like Workopolis, Monster and Jobboom was good enough. But not too long ago, Comscore released numbers indicating that most major job boards had suffered traffic losses – losses in the vicinity of double digit percentages. That’s an indication that recruitment has changed (only an indication, the reality is the change has happened long ago). Do you still think they’re a credible cornerstone of your recruitment strategy?

Enter the world of online

The loss in traffic, just demonstrates how important it is for us to have strong career sites. While social media is taking the world by storm, a strong presence you control (ie.: the career site) allows candidates to find you regardless of which job board is up and which social network is down. This is where your knowledge of SEO kicks in.

Google changes implements changes you need to know about

The search engine has been working on new things that will directly affect how findable your career site is:

Search results are now different for each person based on their social connections. What does that mean? If you have a Twitter account such as @ABCCompanyCareers and you have 10,000 followers. When these followers search Google for new opportunities, your job openings will be displayed more predominantly. Add to that the influence of all your employees…think about the impact you could have.

What should you do?

  • Encourage employees and prospects to connect to your Twitter account.
  • Encourage employees and other corporate account to tweet out job openings.
  • It’s also a good idea to start following, influencers in your domain.

Google just updated their algorithm (Google Panda they call it). SEO is definitely no longer only about links, content, meta descriptions, tags, titles and so on. Here are 3 things Google now looks at to determine if your site is relevant:

  1. User design and experience – is your site appealing to people or does it look like it did back in 1990?
  2. Quality content – not content that was optimized for SEO, but actually written for people to want to read it. How do your job postings read? Like a legal document or like a script from Modern Family?
  3. Usage metrics – are people coming to your career site? Do they bounce off or do they read 3-4 pages?

What should you do? Take a long hard look at your career site. Is it really a place that’s engaging for your candidates? Is it up to date? Do you offer reasons for people to share, browse and interact? Is your content (including your job postings) interesting to read?

Recruitment is changing and it might just be the time for an Chief HR Technologist to take charge. What are you doing to improve your SEO?

(Photo credit: TopRankBlog)

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