How will your staffing firm survive “Indeedmageddon”?
Staffing professionals are calling Indeed’s policy change “unfair,” “discriminatory” and even “illegal.” But honestly, we should be thanking Indeed for providing staffing and recruiting firms with free job postings for the past 15 years.
With free job posts going away effective January 7, 2019, you may feel a little uncertain about the future of your recruitment marketing strategy. And we’re here to help. We’ve created an eBook for surviving “Indeedmageddon” – and thriving in the coming “new normal.”
Today, I’m continuing my 7-post series based on this ebook. Each post is dedicated to a specific recruiting strategy your firm can use to attract, engage and convert more qualified job seekers.
If you missed any of these earlier installments, click the link to read the full post:
Strategy 2: Optimizing Your Career Site & ATS
Strategy 4: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Option 1: SEO for jobs
Are your jobs and your website being found when people search on Google? How about other search engines? To optimize your jobs, you need to do the following:
- Ensure all your jobs are on your website.
- Ensure the jobs portal on your website is on your domain or a jobs subdomain.
- Ensure each job can be seen by Google as its own web page.
- Optimize individual job pages based on job title and location in the URL, page title and page content.
- Optimize each job for Google for Jobs – this requires adding “structured data” to each job so Google can effectively read and categorize your job post content.
- Incorporate Google Cloud Job Discovery – this is an API used by Google that lets you effectively notify Google every time you post a new job.
Option 2: SEO for job seekers
Active job seekers search the internet for jobs. But what about passive job seekers? They’re not looking for jobs, but they are searching Google for other information. Are they finding your website when they search?
To improve SEO for passive job seekers:
- Define “personas” for the different types of candidates you want to attract.
- Produce content for each persona – this can include blogs, videos, infographics, eBooks and other content.
- Blog at least once per week on the topics of interest to your audiences.
- Create a separate web page for each significant piece of content, so you can optimize that page around each piece of content.
Option 3: Google AdWords and other PPC
Paid advertising can be expensive when you’re targeting job seekers…especially if you’re targeting high-demand candidates like doctors, nurses and IT professionals.
But Google AdWords are not as commonly used for other types of recruiting, and you may find it very cost-effective to use AdWords to recruit for specific job titles in specific geographic markets.
Another way to use AdWords and paid advertising is to target your competitors. Buy their names, so when their temps are searching for those companies, ads for your company appear.
Beyond AdWords
AdWords is a form of advertising that targets people conducting specific searches on Google. But there are other ways you can target job seekers through PPC:
- Remarketing – Get ads about your jobs to follow people around. Using Google’s display advertising network, your ads will appear on millions of websites—but only to people who previously viewed the jobs on your site.
- Matched Audiences – Google gives you the ability to upload a list of email addresses (for example, the candidates in your ATS or your Haley Marketing Job Board), and then target these people with advertising. Matched audience advertising is a great way to re-engage and reactivate the people in your database.Matched audience advertising can also be used on social media, and we are big fans of using Facebook for matched audience targeting.
Up Next: Employment Branding
In my next post, I’ll explain how to recruit more qualified candidate by strengthening your employment brand. But if you don’t want to wait for the post to publish, you can download the full, FREE eBook: “Indeedmageddon? Strategies to help staffing and recruiting firms prepare for the loss of free job posts” here.