Webinar Series: Keywords – The Key to Qualified Applicants

Welcome to another installment of our webinar series. Today I’ll be discussing one of my most favorite topics – keywords. There are a few different reasons why this particular subject strikes a chord with me, but predominantly, I accredit keywords to being one of the most central players in the Internet Marketing world. So, what do these little gems have to do with HR Professionals? Well, a lot more than you think actually.

By now, you probably know what my beliefs are surrounding search engines and the web. They’ve completely transformed the way we do job posting and online recruiting with keywords driving this evolution and being a “key” player in ensuring job ad success. Here are two things your need to know when choosing the right “words” for your target market:

Know Your Job Board

There are two types of job boards for posting your ads: one is a category based and the other (which will be our main focus today) is search based. Category based search engines use groups to separate information and classify job ads within certain types of jobs – ie Craigslist. Craigslist uses categories like “Sales,” “Admin,” “Marketing,” etc to distinguish where your job description will populate. It’s designed so that job seekers select a category based on the type of job they’re interested in to search for openings. Search based boards on the other hand, function exactly like Google in the sense that there is an area to type what you’re searching for and then a “bot” will parse through all the ads to distinguish which posting mirrors your job seeker’s description the best.

Know Your Audience

Category based engines ensure that both you and your potential candidates are speaking the same language because Craigslist does the organizing for you whereas search based engines rely on you as an employer to write your ad in a way that will mimic what your seekers type into the search field. To give you an example of what I’m talking about here, picture an accounting job opening. Most employers list the official internal job title (ie Sr. Accountant I) as the title of the job ad; this poses a problem from a job seekers perspective because there’s a slim chance that your candidate is going to type Sr. Accountant I into the search field. Chances are, they’ll type “accounting jobs in Utah” instead. In this case, your job ad wouldn’t even be seen by job seekers so your candidate traffic is likely to be almost non-existent. Not only will you have wasted money on advertising if you’re using a paid job board with no ROI, but you also have severely limited yourself on attracting a quality pool of applicants to choose from.

Of course, with ApplicantPro, we do most of the work for our clients by optimizing their job ads so they cast the widest net possible for their target market. For more information, please contact our support team.