April 2006 Newsletter
April 2006
In this issue:
- Get better results from your Career Site with Search Engine Optimisation
- PageUp wins Australian Achiever Award for excellence in Customer Service
Get better Results from your Career Site with Search Engine Optimisation
An effective Career Site within your Corporate Web Site is one of the best tools to attract candidates and to let them know about your organisation. It is cost effective, easily updated and the creative possibilities are endless.
Recent research conducted by BOOZ ALLEN Hamilton consultants indicates that job seekers believe that their best chance of getting a positive response is via Corporate Careers Web Sites. The job seeker may use job boards to find a vacancy but they use the Corporate Web Site to learn about the Company and to apply for the job.
There has been much written lately about the skills shortage and the 'war for talent' so it stands to reason that the company with the best placed careers site and the most compelling Employee Value Proposition is in the best position to win the talent war.
One way to ensure you have the best placed Corporate Careers Web Site is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the art of increasing the visibility of the website to search engines through carefully selected keywords and phrases.
Potential candidates may be searching the web for jobs but not necessarily targeting your company. Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo outperform all other media in driving visitors to websites, with as many as 85% of internet users saying that they use search engines as their main way of finding websites. Job seekers who find your Careers site via a search engine are particularly valuable as they have qualified themselves by looking for a role in a specific field.
For example: a highly skilled accountant based in Melbourne with a background in manufacturing may be considering a lifestyle change by moving to Perth. He or she will access a search engine and type 'accounting careers in manufacturing in Perth'. The Perth manufacturing company whose career website comes to the top of the search results will have the best chance of snaring this top candidate.
An American research study shows that 93% of search engine users do not look any further than the first few results. You need to be at the top of the list. Remember that if the potential candidates don't find your website they may well find the websites of your competitors.
So how is it done - SEO is where the Recruitment function and the Marketing Department converge. SEO is an essential tool in web marketing, so you may find that your Corporate Marketing department is already utilizing SEO to maximize opportunities for sales on your corporate website. Use the latest SEO techniques and you'll get your careers website to the top of the search lists of the most popular search engines.
To be successful in undertaking SEO you must first conduct research to understand your target market (graduates?, the 40+ age group?, rare skill sets?) and the web searching habits of that target market. It has been proven that men search differently from women, and older men and women search differently from younger men and women.
Your marketing department or any one of a number of specialized companies can help you with this research and in the development of keywords and key phrases aligned to this market.
Your careers website will have optimised content if search engines can easily find the keywords and key phrases in the right places on your site. It is essential that the key phrases be chosen very carefully as they are the foundation of your SEO strategy. The choice of key phrases also must be made objectively and from the perspective of a potential candidate.
The next step is to build a content-rich web site that can be optimised for many different keyword combinations. The more ?different? web pages you have on your careers site the more likely it is that search engines will list it in the first position for a keyword and that career seekers will find your site relevant to their needs.
To sum up: the concept of SEO is relatively new to HR departments and requires the Recruiting team to think and act like a Marketing department. It is definitely worth the effort, as traffic coming to your careers site through search engine leads is potentially very valuable to your organisation. If done well, SEO for high search engine rankings can be your most cost effective recruitment advertising strategy and give you the edge in the ?war for talent?.
For assistance or advice on SEO please contact your CRM.
PageUp wins Australian Achiever Award for excellence in Customer Service
PageUp scored a highly recommended 89.72% for customer satisfaction, in the recently judged Australian Achiever Awards. This award system focuses on seven criteria, each scored separately, namely: Time related Service, Addressing Client Needs, Care and Attention, Value, Attitude, Communication and Overall Perception. Anything above 80% overall is regarded as exceptional and reflects outstanding customer service.
Some of the comments Australian Achiever received from PageUp clients are:
- 'The staff are very friendly and have a strong focus on customer service. They are very responsible to my needs, open to feedback and very keen to develop and improve the system. They are very professional in all their dealing with me.?'
- They are very proactive and responsive to my needs. They are always looking to enhance the product and the services they can offer. Very professional.?'
- 'They are very consistent and professional. They are very understanding of our business and our processes 'it's a good culture fit.?'
For verification of this report, please call Geoff Harwood, Director, Australian Achiever, (03) 8503 7763.