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Five Marketing Tips to Promote Your Company’s Career Site

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Utilizing your company’s career site is a great way to incorporate free job postings in your recruitment strategy.  There is a lot of information on the web about creating the perfect job posting, but how do you get needed web traffic on your site to view them? Your agency’s online source of open opportunities is a centralized location where engaged candidates can easily check and apply for jobs and can potentially be a cost-effective advertising method. However, without frequent site visitors it can be difficult to maintain applicant flow from your career page alone. By implementing the below marketing tips, you can help drive traffic to your company’s job site without a hefty advertising budget.

  1. Email alerts

Send emails on a regular basis alerting passive candidates of current opportunities. This will position your staffing agency as a continuous source of available opportunities and keeps your brand at the forefront of candidates’ minds when actively searching for new jobs.

  1. SEO

When a job seeker uses Google to search for opportunities in his or her local area, ideally your website appears on the first page of the search results. This is accomplished through developing and implementing an SEO strategy. The many benefits of an SEO-friendly job posting contribute to your overall site’s search rankings. By creating new site content regularly, implementing keyword strategies and ensuring meta titles and descriptions are well constructed, your agency’s website will have the basics needed for competing with other companies for better online visibility.     

  1. Social media

When used effectively, social media can help develop a community that’s dedicated to your brand and what your business offers. Some staffing agencies use platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as job feeds, which is a risky approach. If your company’s career site is updated with new opportunities as they become available, advertising each individual position on social media can be repetitive work for your team and does not resonate with brand followers who are not in the market for a new position. Instead, look for ways to visually personify your agency while continuously reminding followers to check your website for new job postings. Ideas for this approach would include:

  • “We’re always looking for night owls interested in 3rd shift positions, check our site frequently for any opportunities near you!”
  • “Welcome to our new recruiter Emily! She might call you if you’re a qualified applicant for one of the positions listed on our website.”
  • “We’re gearing up for seasonal jobs this holiday season, keep an eye out for overtime opportunities on our website!”

  1. Submit your site to job posting aggregators 

Job aggregators collect job posting URLs on one site so job seekers can view multiple opportunities at once, such as Indeed and Simply Hired. You can submit XML files to these types of sites provided from your IT department or recruitment software provider. Your company’s job postings will perform better with a SEO-friendly URL, contact us today to learn more about how our digital job posting solution will give your staffing agency this type of advantage!

Driving continuous traffic to your company’s career site ultimately can help save time on sourcing for hard-to-find talent. If your recruitment software is not designed to keep your teams efficient and help improve candidate engagement, contact us today to learn more about how our staffing technology solutions can help make your staffing agency more profitable!

4 Tips for Creating the Perfect Job Posting

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Because of the many challenges that come with recruiting in a tight labor market, recruiters often publish job postings on company websites and online job boards. When enough responses are collected from qualified applicants, this tactic can save recruiters time on sourcing for candidates. Online job postings are a great way to not only promote open positions, but to also expose online visitors to your business. Since a lot of companies and other staffing agencies utilize online job postings as a method for sourcing candidates, the below tips and tricks can maximize your chances of reaching your targeted talent pool toward order fulfillment.

  1. Pick a simple, searchable job title

The job title is the most important part in a job posting since it needs to match keywords that job seekers use in search queries. The client might say he or she is looking for a Customer Success Advocate and sends you a job description that describes a typical Call Center Customer Service Representative. Choosing to advertise an opening under a job title that is not commonly searched can be detrimental to your response rate. Make edits to client-specific titles and verbiage within a job description so that candidates will easily find your position.  

  1. Do not use the job description sent from the hiring manager without editing

After you have determined a simple, searchable title it can be tempting to simply use the job description provided from the hiring manager to save time. This approach risks a negative impact on search engine rankings and could potentially confuse job seekers. By developing original job posting content, you can easily ensure the verbiage is understandable and contains correct information.

  1. Point out perks, but don’t look like spam

When competing with other organizations for filling the same type of role, promote the company-specific perks that come with the position you’re staffing for. For some job orders, this may require some creative thinking and in-depth knowledge of the working conditions. For example, you might not see any competitive advantages for a data entry position in a typical office setting. Highlighting small perks like free coffee, a positive work environment, training opportunities, or any other benefits could potentially make your posting stand out and motivate job seekers to apply.

When identifying positive aspects of an assignment, be sure to avoid writing styles that could come across as spam, such as typing with the Caps Lock key on, excessive use of punctuation to emphasize something, grammatical errors, and being too vague in the job description. By presenting assignment information in a clean, professional format your posting is most likely to appear as a credible opportunity.

  1. Follow Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidelines

Following SEO guidelines for job postings is important for your website to become more visible on search engines like Google and Bing. Since job boards also use search engine technology in presenting opportunities to candidates based on keyword relevancy, it’s a beneficial strategy for most posting platforms. Although very much worth the effort, it can be time consuming for recruiters to create a job posting that meets all the necessary SEO requirements. Consider creating an SEO-friendly job posting template to easily input specific assignment information while maximizing your chances of getting the most online visibility.

Job postings are a great way to find new talent and engage passive candidates in your database, both on job boards and your agency’s website. By implementing best practices such as choosing a searchable job title and writing for SEO in a professional format, you’re more likely to receive applicant flow from qualified candidates. A recruiting software that is designed to keep your team at maximum efficiency will allow you to spend more time sourcing and less work on administrative tasks. For more information on how our front office solutions can make your recruiting processes more profitable, contact us today!

Top Marketing Strategies for Recruiting Success

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In today’s candidate market, recruiting is become increasingly intertwined with marketing.Marketing Strategies for Recruiting Success

A recruiter has to be able to sell a candidate on their firm and what they have to offer. With candidate’s putting themselves out there through outlets such as social media, recruiters have to in turn tell their story. With the integration of recruiting into marketing strategies, the ways you go about sourcing candidates is more complex than it has ever been.

Here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to successfully use marketing strategies for recruiting success.

  1. Create a Brand Strategy

How do you want people to view your firm? If a potential candidate comes across your agency, is it readily apparent from your brand that your agency would be a good place for them? Your brand needs to tell your story and convey your value.  Depending on your offering, your brand could range from broad concepts like “employer of choice” to narrow concepts like “Atlanta area’s premier event staffing.” 

Once you have identified your brand, how will you use it? Identify a recruiting strategy for your marketing efforts by determining how you will build your brand awareness. Your strategy should be coordinated and intentional. Everyone in your agency is an ambassador of your brand and your strategy should include how individuals will represent your brand as well. Your brand is the starting place for your marketing efforts, so ensure your brand strategy is clear and used consistently and deliberately.

  1. Build a Social Media Presence

84% of organizations use social media for recruitment; your firm should be part of that statistic. With more people than ever using social media as a way to job search, you should have an active presence across all major social media channels. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the top three sites that candidates use to job search. Social media participation should be driven at the corporate level with company LinkedIn and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, and each individual recruiter should leverage their social media networks to further spread brand awareness and recruit new candidates. Take advantage and promote your firm only as a recruiter could while sourcing the candidates you want.

  1. Develop a Blog

Reaching candidates through social media is only one part of the puzzle. A blog is a great way to show them an inside look into your firm and provide them with valuable information for career development. Use your brand strategy and center your blog content on topics your ideal candidates would find interesting. Be consistent with how often you publish and stick to a schedule once one is developed. You want your call-to-action to resonate with your candidates and make them want to engage with your firm.

  1. Create a Social Community

With your social media networks and blog in hand, you need to take the next step and build a community around your involvement with candidates online. Build campaigns around a specific topic of discussion to involve candidates you need to source for open positions. Share not only your information, but also that of those you consider influencers of the positions you have available. You want candidates to see that the topics you discuss are the ones trending the most in their industry. By engaging your social community with information that is important to them, you make it that much easier to source the candidates you need.

  1. Lead Generation & Nurturing

Once you have begun to capture the attention of your community, you want to start converting them into potential candidates that you can bring into your firm. You want to utilize your recruitment software as a tool for finding potential candidates and keeping track of all levels of communication. Are they reading your blog? Are they engaging with you on social media? Once you have identified potential candidates, you can begin to nurture them with your marketing efforts. Track your talent through email campaigns, job postings and any relevant information about your company that captures their interest.

  1. Track Your Success

With any good marketing strategy, measuring the success of your efforts is as important as the efforts you put into it. Tracking your engagement and who you reach will help you build a more successful marketing campaign. Here are some key metrics to consider:

  • Social media engagement
  • Blog visitors
  • Email campaign engagement
  • New candidates

When you use marketing strategies as a recruiting tool, you will increase the success of your candidate sourcing. When recruiting and marketing come together, they build a brand image that is appealing to candidates and consumers alike.

5 Sports Strategies for Recruiting the Best Candidates

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Touchdown! Goal! Score!

U.S. Women's National Team Head Coach Jill Ellis and hat-trick scoring Carli Lloyd celebrate after USA’s remarkable World Cup victory. Photograph: Darryl Dyck/AP

U.S. Women’s National Team Head Coach Jill Ellis and hat-trick scoring Carli Lloyd celebrate after USA’s remarkable World Cup victory. Photograph: Darryl Dyck/AP

Doesn’t it feel good to root for the winning team? Success in sports, much like the recruiting world, comes down to this: Every great team begins with a great coach.

It is your job as a recruiter, much like a coach, to find the best candidates for the job using staffing software. With the economy shows good signs of job growth throughout the private sector, odds are competition among recruitment agencies is going to rise to find the talent to fill those incoming job orders. Here are five sports strategies that will help you find the best candidates and maximize your success.

 Strategy 1: Be Your Own Ambassador

Good coaching is about leadership and instilling respect in your players. Dictators lead through fear – good coaches do not. – John Wooden

Your job, as a recruiter, is to represent your company. You are the face of the company in the eyes of the job candidate, much like a coach represents the sports organization they are affiliated with. The quality of relationship you build with your candidate is entirely up to you.

Matt Charney writes “the first interaction candidates almost unilaterally have with an organization, either by submitting a resume (active) or being proactively engaged by an employer (passive), is with someone in recruiting.”

First impressions are everything. As a recruiter, you have to be able to step up and represent the most positive aspects of your company. If you are willing to go beyond what is expected of you in terms of approach and technique, you will garner the attention of the top candidates.

Equally important is the effort you make to build a positive ongoing relationship with every candidate – even those who are not selected or a fit for the job. Why? Remember that the rejected candidate for one job order may be a perfect fit for another. Also, even a rejected candidate may be a great source for referrals – if they have a positive experience with you and your agency. As the agency’s ambassador, it is your responsibility to keep doors and lines of communication open, not shut them to potential hires.

Strategy 2: Scout for Talent

 Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. – Vince Lombardi

College football coaches, on average, send out between ten and fifteen thousand letters to prospective athletes. Of that pool, maybe 25 will sign with that coach. Your job, as a recruiter, is much like that of the coach. You have to sift through multiple candidates, make all the right calls, and beat the competition to the punch when it comes to making an offer.

But before you get to present a candidate or make an offer, you have to source the candidate. As a coaching recruiter, you know that sourcing talent is both easier and more challenging today. LinkedIn is probably your ‘go-to’ to find passive candidates for higher-level or technical positions, but it won’t help you in your efforts to recruit light industrial warehouse workers. Just like any good coach, you need to know how to leverage the right sourcing methods for the candidates you need.

Placing the right talent in the right field is the key to winning the game; if you can successfully place the right candidate, you will maximize your endgame.

Strategy 3: Develop Your Playbook

It’s not the will to win that matters – everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters. – Paul “Bear” Bryant

The playbook, perhaps a coach’s greatest weapon in the game, allows them to develop their own unique formula for how best to utilize their players. You must develop your own playbook; working with different search models, interview processes, and business development tools gives you the opportunity to be unique in ways that benefits your candidates and allows ease of access for you.

“The intangible this year is our coaching staff focuses on the minor details that make all the differences,” said Abby Wambach, the veteran striker for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.

When you effectively develop a plan of how you search and engage your candidates, it affords you the ability to attract the clients you want, when you want them. By developing your own skills and methods – especially with repeatable, automated workflow processes – you streamline the recruitment process and gain an edge over your competition.

Strategy 4: Know the Playing Field

The values learned on the playing field – how to set goals, endure, take criticism and risks, become team players, use our beliefs, stay healthy, and deal with stress – prepare us for life. – Donna de Varona

A great coach goes into each game knowing exactly how the playing field is set up. They watch, study, and plan, knowing that it is their responsibility to dictate how their players succeed on the field.

For you, recruiting is your playing field. Your responsibility lies in not only finding the right candidate, but making sure that the talent you choose is the best choice. You need to know what comprehensive search capabilities are available, what CRM technology is at your disposal, and what data is available to you.

The key to understanding your environment is knowing that you have the ability to put the right candidate in the right position.

Strategy 5: Never Underestimate Your Opponent

Sportsmanship is not just about being nice. It is much more important than that. It’s about realizing that you could not compete without an opponent and that she has the same goals as you. – Stephanie Deibler

Your competition, whether it’s an opponent, a rival, or even yourself, is in the business of ensuring that they succeed where you do not. It falls upon you to overcome anything that might get in your way, from inadequate skills to outdated techniques.

A good team can be somewhat successful with a middling coach, but a good coach cannot succeed with a bad team. It is up to you, as a recruiter, to make sure that the skills that you use and the people that you hire are suited for the position you put them in.  

With new search techniques and improved technology available to automate tedious administrative tasks, how you manage your search for candidates can become highly focused and more effective. When you put your best foot forward and utilize the proper skills and techniques you need to succeed, your search for the right candidate will yield results that put you at the top of your game and ensure your success in the field!

Gorilla Glue: Recruiting Strategies That Help Clients Retain New Employees

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Gorilla Glue’s motto is, “Get the job done right the first time.” Apparently most companies aren’t following Gorilla Glue’s mantra when it comes to hiring — according to a recent article on Inc.com, 40 percent of employees who quit their jobs in 2013 left within six months of starting. This presents an opportunity for recruiting firms, who can help clients utilize recruiting strategies to find, place, and retain employees who will stick Gorilla Glue strong.

Recruiters have unique skills, including honing in on a job order’s specifics, discussing onboarding procedures, tracking results with recruiting software — actions that help determine what candidate will be “just right” and stay long term.

Recruiting Strategy #1: Gain Clarity on the New Position.

You’re an expert at delving into what a job will really, truly be like and what it can offer your candidates’ long-term careers. Help candidates clarify if this will be an excellent fit or a “pass” by sharing your expertise on the following:

  • Daily Job Requirements. Before interviews begin, recruiters should know exactly what the job will entail. You don’t want your candidate to begin a job and then discover it is not what they expected. Clients may be tempted to highlight only the best components of the job — but that doesn’t set realistic expectations. Daily job requirements, including the mundane and challenging, should be outlined for candidates.
  • Salary and Benefits. You don’t want to put time and energy into a candidate who goes through the process and then turns down the job due to a lower salary offer than expected. From pay to healthcare benefits, vacation days to tuition assistance, your recruiters should know exactly what the candidate will be getting if they’ll eventually be a permanent hire.

Contract employees or statement of work (SOW) candidates should be clear on how long the contract will last, deadlines, if there will be opportunities for additional work and other factors specific to contingent work.

  • Current Stars. In an article on Inc.com, Sue Marks, CEO of Pinstripe and Ochre House, says that as part of her recruiting strategy she asks clients, “Who are your star employees, and what is it about them that make them such great employees at your company?” If your recruiting team can learn from clients about what makes future stars, it’s a win for everyone, and they can offer candidates who match that profile.

Recruiting Strategy #2: Encourage Insight During Interviews. Recruiters should encourage candidates to actively ask questions and get a strong feel for the company and the position. The last thing you want is for your candidate to leave questions unasked, only to discover later that there are frequent weekends on call for IT, expectations of working late nights or a micromanaging supervisor, and then quit. For their part, clients should hone in on not just what the candidate can do now, but in the future as they grow in their role.

  • Company Culture. Suzanne Lucas, the self-proclaimed “Evil HR lady” who’s an expert on recruiting strategies, hiring employees and workplace issues, recommends asking certain questions to determine what the company culture is and what candidates may be the best fit. For permanent employees, determine the average employee tenure, frequency of promotions, how employee performance is measured and why the position is open.
  • Pace of Environment. Recruiters should provide insight into whether the job is fast-paced, slow, or a “feast or famine” workflow. Candidates should ask about the job pacing during interviews, because some individuals thrive in a fast-paced environment while others would find that extremely stressful.

A recent study found that professionals who have more experience are less concerned about salary and more focused on living a good lifestyle, which includes work-life balance. Recruiters should make sure that top candidates have absolute clarity on the intensity and pacing.

  • Opportunity for Growth. Both the client and candidate should be considering not just the job description but where and how the new worker can grow. Is the candidate happy with the track the job is expected to take? Does the client have clarity on how a new employee could advance?
  • Ability Trumps Resume. One tactic that Lucas recommends for clients is having candidates do a project rather than just answer questions. “[G]ive candidates a real task to complete or ask them to prepare a presentation,” she writes in her post titled 3 Simple Ways to Hire Better. “Throw them problems and see how they solve them. It will give you a better idea of what they really will bring to your organization.”

Recruiting Strategy #3: Follow Up After Placements. As part of your firm’s long-term recruiting strategies, recruiters should follow up with candidates after they’re placed in order to analyze the quality of the placement, hear about onboarding processes and share feedback with clients.

  • Onboarding Process. According to another article on Inc.com, studies found that onboarding directly has a positive effect on employee productivity, retention and engagement during their first few months at work. Placed candidates can give recruiters feedback about strengths or areas for improvement in a client’s onboarding process that can be passed back to the client.
  • Candidate and Client Feedback. How recruiters’ placements feel about the process is critical for improving the performance of your agency. How clients feel about their new employees is of utmost value as well. Recruitment management software can help your team track employee evaluations, dependability, attendance and work quality. That way you’ll know what works and doesn’t and can make future changes as necessary, or know that you’re on the right track to finding your clients employees who stick.

Lucas says that “length of service” data can help both recruiting companies and candidates have insight about a company. “If people are booking it out the door in six months … it’s because … management stinks,” she writes. High turnover is a definite red flag.

Your recruiting team can use your tried-and-true recruiting strategies to help clients find employees who stay long term. From gaining clarity on the position to encouraging insightful questions during interviews, your team can be of true value to clients. Like Gorilla Glue, you can help your clients find candidates who stick — the first time.

Discover more recruiting strategies that your firm should know about regarding the re-recruiting trend in our whitepaper, “How Staffing Professionals Can Counter Companies That Re-Recruit.”