In a time of financial upheaval, when recruitment consultants are under continuing pressure to meet and exceed targets, they want the most direct and reliable route to attracting fresh, talented candidates for their clients. That means they want immediate response to advertising, and will ignore any advertising source that does not deliver. To agency owners and managers, it is for this reason that your recruiters may not bother to (or just not get around to) post jobs on job boards when they donít have confidence in it. Your own agency website all too often falls into this category also. In fact, itís usually the advertising route that gets the least use by recruiters. It doesnít matter that itís free – it only matters that it works. If you are not attracting candidates in sufficient numbers to your website, then your recruiters will not maintain it with current vacancies, and delete those that have been filled. What then happens, is that you have a site with out of date content, and an absence of new vacancies. This is the very best way to drive away whatever traffic you are currently getting.
Maybe then you should simply accept that the major job boards with their big marketing budgets, and website optimisation expertise, will attract all the traffic you want, and that you just need to pay to advertise on them. What then though, if your competitors are exploiting their site well, and therefore getting candidates before you do?
Is it possible to compete toe to toe with the major job boards? Yes it is - with a well optimised website, plenty of changing vacancy content, and an ongoing schedule of online marketing and SEO work, to attain and retain your ìPageRankî on Google. All of these things can work, but there is no guarantee; and no guarantee of traffic simply discourages your recruiters from bothering to post vacancies to your site in the first place. Itís both a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a vicious cycle in one.
Pay per click. So if SEO is hit and miss, is there a more sure way of bringing candidates directly to your site? Many companies will swear by Google Adwords. These are the adverts you see on the right hand side of all Google Searches. By bidding on phrases that you believe your target candidates will search for, your ad will appear here. The pay-per-click system means that you will be billed for each time someone clicks on your advert, and that can be anything from a couple of pence to pounds. Google also uses a formula to ensure that the most popular adverts, that generate the most revenue for them will appear at the top. For a sophisticated ongoing campaign to continually optimise your bidding, change your selected phrases, and lead the correct applicant to the correct vacancy on your site, requires a dedicated service. There are agencies that can specialise in providing both SEO and Adwords campaigning on your behalf.
In an ideal world, each website would get the traffic it deserved, based upon its content and relevance, and popularity amongst internet users. This is certainly what the leading search engine Google claims to aspire to. The reality although is, that in a competitive market, you may still be excluded from the first few pages of search results. You could be excused for resigning yourself to this, and believing there is no cost effective way to redress this imbalance.
There are, however, secondary search engines, which themselves are extremely well optimised for internet search engines, like Google. These dedicated job search engines index and categorise only vacancy adverts from a multitude of websites. Because of this, the search results are specifically focussed on jobs in the location and industry sectors, which the candidate is looking for.
Most UK job boards now attract additional candidates to their sites in this way, and increasingly recruitment agencies and employers themselves. As it is the most direct and immediate route to attracting targeted traffic, and is extremely efficient, it need not cost the earth either. The charge is usually on a pay per click basis, so you only pay for the actual traffic you receive. This targeted traffic, in turn, generates greater applications and registrations, thereby directly satisfying the needs of job boards, recruiters, and ultimately employers. Each vacancy has equal weight, so even adverts from the smallest agencyís website will achieve as many clicks per vacancy as those from major jobsites.
New sites, that can take months, and a well implemented SEO strategy, to achieve good natural search rankings, can receive an immediate presence amongst the very candidates that they are targeting, in their specific industry sector and location. This means that the return on investment is much quicker, and that market awareness of your brand is established in a much shorter period.
The impact of immediate traffic to a site also brings into sharp focus the very development work that you have implemented. This will give you a quicker return on your investment, and generate an immediate level of satisfaction with your improvements; eliminating, or sharply decreasing, the delay between implementation and the response from candidates. This can save huge amounts on marketing costs, time and effort, debugging time, and of course keep a tightly scheduled business plan on-track.
The confidence of your recruiters is much more important than you think. Website envy is a real factor in attracting and retaining recruiters. Like it or not, your recruiters, like your candidates, visit the sites of your competitors, and they need to have confidence that your own website is attracting the job seekers they need. The huge advantage that recruitment agency websites have over job boards, is the human element and expertise of recruitment consultants themselves. Ensuring your site visitors are well aware of this is the best way to differentiate the best agencies from just another job board.
With a constant stream on valuable candidates, a busy recruiter is well equipped to fulfil their potential. Recruitment agency owners, and managers, know that they must give their recruiters the tools to do the job. Failure to do so, especially now, can result in not only falling revenues, but the potential loss of your most important asset.
Stephen OíDonnell FREC, 1Job.co.uk, AlljobsUK.com
Website Envy – Every recruiter wants advertising that works
In a time of financial upheaval, when recruitment consultants are under continuing pressure to meet and exceed targets, they want the most direct and reliable route to attracting fresh, talented candidates for their clients
