I’m pretty excited to be included on this great list. Definitely check it out and start following other fantastic recruiting people on Twitter.
Here’s the link:
http://www.hrexaminer.com/lists/online-influence-recruiting-2012-v5/the-entire-list
In Dr. John Sullivan’s article, Emerging Talent Acquisition Trends for 2010: Are You Ready for a Roller Coaster? (Part I of III), he predicts 10 topics that will dominate the recruiting landscape in 2010. While he has many interesting points in this article, one in particular caught our eye: Negative Employer Branding. As he predicts in the article:
Negative employer branding: Whether organizations acknowledge it or not, social media is a force that will impact them for better or for worse. 2010 will be a year in which employees, past and present, really start to influence how organizations are perceived by being more vocal about their experiences. As more and more online communities expose their content to search engines, transparency will abound. Is your glass house shatterproof?
It’s clear that Employer Branding will continue to grow in importance with the increased proliferation and use of social media tools. The question is how can you successfully improve your employer branding and build advocates in your target applicants? Here are a few ideas:
1. Utilize Your Employees as Advocates
One of the greatest resources you have for employer branding are your current and former employees. The question is how can you encourage them to spread positive buzz to potential rockstar employees? One way is by creating a great referral program. Not only will this incentivize current employees to act as brand ambassadors to their professional networks but it will also likely increase the quality of the applicants that you receive (as your best employees will more than likely bring in like-minded and skilled applicants.) In addition, you may want to open this up to your alumni as well. One thing is to hear great reviews from an current employee but another is to hear great reviews from an participant with little invested in the company in question.
2. Re-visit your Careers Page
Your careers page can be a great way to provide high potential applicants with a better feel for your company culture as well as preemptively answer questions they might have. Be cognizant of the messaging that you provide applicants about your company and include information on topics that are important to them such as work/life balance, work environment, company vision, employee testimonials, etc. (Take time to think about these topics.) The overall goal is to give them a healthy expectation of what working at your company would be like, so they can become excited about the opportunities you provide.
3. Make Social Media a Hub for Company News
As potential applicants research your company, they are more than likely to come upon your social footprint online which is great. This allows you the opportunity to control the flow of the conversation to resources such as your company blog, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools and point to resources and conversations that champion your company brand and provide a positive view of your company. Lastly, make use of different types of media from blog articles to video in order to engage top applicants in different ways.
Overall, Employer Branding can have a important impact on the success of your recruiting efforts and there are a variety of things you can do to encourage positive buzz for your company that will enable you to attract and grow your applicant pool.
Ever wondered how many people were in a specific target market or wanted to take a quick snapshot of a potential market opportunity? With Facebook Ads you can. All you have to do is visit the Facebook Ads site and check out their targeting tool.
For example, say you want to see how many people (on Facebook) play fantasy baseball. Sign in to Facebook Ads and get started. Here’s what it will look like:
So for this initial search here’s the result you see at the bottom of the report.
Now let’s see how many of these people are Single by clicking the box in the Relationship category. Here’s the new result:
A few clicks and you can dive more deeply into the data. Isn’t that great?
There are obviously some limitations to this tool however. First, you will only be able to see an estimate of ONLY the Facebook population. Second, you only will be able to see an estimate of people in the Facebook population that actually listed the keyword in their profile.
But overall it’s still a pretty fun and interesting tool to use, so check it out!
Wordpress
Does your small business have a website? Have you looked into having a website built but the cost is too much? Well, here’s an easy solution that can provide your small business with a search engine optimized (SEO) website: Try Wordpess!
In short, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to store and display content on the web. But all you need to know is that it allows you to create website pages and post blog posts to your domain. And best of all, installing WordPress can take less than 15 minutes to do!
So here’s what you need to do in order to create a WordPress website:
I’ll likely share other plugins or features of WordPress that I find interesting so definitely check back in the future.
So hopefully you took my advice in my post “Build a Small Business Website using WordPress”. But what do you do next? For most Small Businesses finally creating a functional website is a time to celebrate, sit back and relax BUT not so fast. Sure, you have a great website that you can point customers to but just doing that essentially makes your website just an online version of your brochure. The point of a website is not to point customers to it but to ATTRACT consumers to it. So how do you do this?
A quick, easy and effective start to this process is to utilize local listings (Yahoo! Local, SuperYellowPages, CitySearch,etc.) most important of which is Google Local. If you ever looked for a service or business in Google, you’ve seen their local listings at work.
As you can see in the graphic above, this shows the search results for “Electrical Foxboro, MA”. As you can see local listings have an incredible amount of value when consumers search for a particular product or service in a particular geographic area as it appears first even before the organic search listings. So if you are a Hammer supplier in Bismarck, ND, getting into Google listings is a big deal because people who search for “Hammers Bismarck, ND” will most likely find your company in the Google Local listings.
The best part of this is that it is so easy to set up. All you have to do is visit Google Local and click “Add a Business Listing”. Follow the instructions and that’s it. You just increased traffic with ten minutes of work, I wish I could always be that productive!
Blog
I’ve seen this question appear a lot over the past few months and I figured I’d address it. But first I’d like to explain some of the basics of what a blog does. A blog can be a great resource for SEO for a few reasons:
While blogs are a great resource for any business, there are a few things you should consider before jumping into one:
Homework:
When I first learned about SEO, I was amazed about how some of the simplest things could make such a major impact on your in- house SEO results. One prime example is Page Title.
So what is the Page Title? Take a look at the screenshot below of Amazon.com:
The page title for this webpage would be “Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more”. This is important for one reason: Search Engines find it valuable. When a Search Engine scan a page on a website, the first thing it will do is scan what the page title is for the page. This is to tell them what the page is about. For instance, when Google looks at Amazon’s homepage they know that Amazon’s site is for Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more. That’s the first layer of the page title.
The second layer is that the order the keywords appear in the page title also has significance with Google. Very simply the keywords that appear first in the page title carry the most weight in Google search. So in terms of the Amazon example, the terms that carry the most weight are Amazon.com, then Online Shopping, then Electronics and so on. So make sure to include your most important keywords first in the page title.
There are lots of widgets and plug-ins that you can use to update your page titles. It is a simple change that can have huge impacts on the amount of traffic you receive from search specifically Google.
Note: I mentioned this to a friend who runs the blog fantasybaseballhotstove.com. After updating his blog to include player projections (he does a rankings countdown to spring training) in the page title, he’s seen an over 90% increase in overall traffic to his site. So it does work!
Your Homework:
Yahoo
In continuing the Job Searching Tips series, I’ll move onto Tip # 1 which is Yahoo Pipes.
Yahoo Pipes is probably one of the coolest applications I’ve come across in quite some time and is an amazing tool to use when researching basically anything. Pipes basically allows you to set up unique filters for multiple webpages that you can send directly to your RSS feed.
Because I don’t want to screw up the description of how to use Yahoo Pipes even more, here’s a video that shows you how to utilize the tool.
Time for an example. Say I really like the sites Mashable, Venture Beat and Xeconomy, however, I don’t want to see every article they post in a day to appear on my RSS feed (because they post about an article per minute.) I do however want to see every article they post that includes the words marketing and social media as I’m most interested in these stories. Yahoo Pipes can help you filter this.
In the same way that you filter articles, you can also filter jobs from various sites like Indeed and Craigslist. For instance, I created a pipe that’s looking for job postings with Marketing and Boston in it on these job sites. All the jobs that match this description go automatically to my RSS feed which I check every morning. Talk about automation!
This is my last post of the year! I’ll see you back at the beginning of 2010.
In continuing the Job Searching Tips series, I’ll move onto Tip # 2 which is LinkedIn. (Note: I used to think this was a pretty basic requirement for professionals to have but more and more I’ve seen people not use it to the most of it’s potential or not be on it at all.)
For those that don’t know what LinkedIn is, it is essentially a social network for business professionals. If you are not on it, you should be as it has a lot of great features of which I will only highlight a few that I feel are most useful:
1. Googling your Name
Do a quick Google search of your name right now. If you are on LinkedIn, your profile probably appears in the first few queries. Because LinkedIn has so many pages and so many inbound links (every connection links to all other connections.) it will be one of the first pages that any recruiter sees if they google your name. So make a LinkedIn profile and make it awesome!
2. Make some connections
The more connections you have, the more powerful the actions you take on LinkedIn can be. After you build your connection pool there are a few things that are great about LinkedIn. First, LinkedIn is a great way to let friends and colleagues know that you are looking for a job. Update your status and it will appear in the weekly email synopsis that all your connections receive. You’ll be surprised by the number of contacts that will reach out when they see you are “looking for positions in the Boston area”. Second, identify companies that you would love to work for and know more about. Once you identify them, look for people in that company that are direct, 2nd or 3rd degree connections with you and send them an InMail. Most people are more than happy to help you learn more about their position and the company you work for and who knows the conversation may lead to a job opportunity.
3. Show some personality
When LinkedIn was first marketed to consumers it was labled as a place to “put your resume online”. The website has since evolved but some peoples profiles have not. Remember recruiters already have a copy of your resume, so don’t regurgitate it on your LinkedIn page. Show some personality.
I hope this was helpful to you and make sure to tune back in as I reveal the #1 job searching tip.
Indeed
As you may know from reading my bio, I’ve been unemployed since September. I’ve learned a few good short-cuts that help you not only save time but be more productive in your job search. The first website that I will highlight is Indeed.com. If you don’t already know Indeed, you should check it out for two main reasons.
Reason #1: Indeed is a search engine for jobs.
Reason # 2: Indeed Alerts allow you to effectively target jobs you want.
Homework to do tomorrow:
I hope this helps. I’ll be coming out with the #2 job searching tip in the next few days.