Basic SEO strategies for your ATS
Many applicant Tracking system or recruiting software offer some kind of career website for their clients.
The career website show information about the hiring company, their logo, sometimes some links and of course the job ads.
The candidate then clicks on the big Apply Button and starts applying.
One important feature of such a career website, is to allow search engines to find the job ads it displays.
A large percentage (numbers vary greatly depending on which source you read) of candidates, active and passive, start searching for a new position on one of the major search engines,. Read Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Although getting your job ads to appear on a search engine is very difficult if you don’t have a strong and long term SEO (search engine optimization) strategy in place, it does not mean you should abandon all hopes. And cross out search engines as a good sourcing channel for your job openings.
Here are a few things to check out in your ATS and its associated career website
1) content duplication
This is the toughest and yet less talked about element that you should consider.
To avoid promoting copycats, Google hinders the promotion of content that exists on different web sites.
So, for instance if your job ad is on your career website and at the same time on one of the major job boards or job ad site (Dice.com, Indeed.com) and all these versions are exactly similar, Google will not put your jobads in its first results. Regardless of the content of the job ads.
What you should do when publishing your job ads on different websites is to make sure they are different from one another.
A similar paragraph or sentence might be ok but several similar paragraphs in a row will surely trigger Google rules about unique content.
2) Integrating your career website in your own website
Publishing your job ads under your own website address is important for your search engine visibility.
However, the most common way to integrate the ATS career website in your own website is to add some snippet of (javascript) code in your pages.
This will display the job ads in your pages without the candidate knowing that you are using a third party software to advertise your vacancies.
The problem is that Google does not read, index, see nor take into account this javascript code snippet.
And your job ads that appear on your website will never appear on the search engine.
What you should do instead is to use an ATS whose career website can be published as a subdomain of your main website.
Candidates should be able to go an address or URL such as http://jobs.yourwebsite.com to see and apply to your job ads.
Google does not consider http://jobs.yourwebsite.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com to be the same web site.
The visibility of jobs.yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsite.com will not be the same.
But they will benefit from one another much more than if your job ads are only available under the ATS domain name. Especially if you link from one to the other.
Getting the ATS to publish your job ads in one of your subdomain is not as easy as cutting and pasting a code but it’s within reach of any decent IT person.
I will write how it’s done in a future post.
3) The long tail
A search for “software developer” or “Sales assistant” generates over 15 million results in Google.
When a candidate searches for an open position, he or she will use many different terms, job titles or types , job sectors, salary, location.
Your job title and the content on the job page must reflect all these potential search terms. In the body of the job ad but also in the title and the meta tags of the pages.
Furthermore, the main keyword for a job search is “job”, not career nor vacancies. Nobody searches for vacancies or careers. They all search for jobs.
4) Be original
In the end what makes a search engine friendly job ad is the originality of your content.
A classic, corporate talk, job ad will not attract as many good candidates as would a truly original, true sounding one.
If you want candidates to be implicated and focused in their application and not just spam you with their resumes, the way you will describe your company and the job will really make a difference.
And as a side effect of your hard work Google loves original content.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a noise?
If a web application is launched and no one knows about it, has it really been launched?
- The whole candidate sourcing tracking module could do with a bit of simplification.
- We need to create some kind of user guide with videos or screen shots.
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Skill based job descriptions are making a poor job of attracting the best candidates. Performance-based job descriptions, ones that list what is to be expected of the potential employee, are better at appealing to the candidates that are fit for the job.
The job description is the first thing a candidate sees. It can either entice a candidate to learn more about the position or company and eventually apply, or it can have the opposite effect and make a candidate run away. If you ask most recruiters, they prefer the first option to the second. So just how can you make sure that your job description is effective and will draw in the best candidates?
The traditional descriptions are known as skills or experience-based, and focus on a list of criteria that a candidate must possess, such as education and past positions. But professionals in the recruiting industry have noticed that these type of job descriptions are making a poor job of attracting the best candidates. Performance-based job descriptions, ones that list what is to be expected of the potential employee, are better at appealing to the candidates that are fit for the job.
The following is some material that can help recruiters and employers learn the difference between skills-based and performance-based descriptions, and how performance-based will work best for them.
Lou Adler
Lou Adler is the founder and CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting company that works with recruiters in order to help them hire effectively.
Lou Adler is the author of Hiring with Your Head, the reference book on Performance Based Hiring. If you have the time for book reading, get this book. It will be time well spent.
Lou Adler also released a great series of youtube videos, on the Adler Group Channel related to performance based hiring.
In the video, “Converting Conventional Job Descriptions“, Adler talks about how recruiters need to convert traditional skills-based job descriptions into performance-based descriptions. He says that by using traditional descriptions, employers and recruiters often miss out on the best candidates.
Performance versus Skills Based Recruiting Approach – Rick Zabor
“The performance-based approach delivers talent where the whole person is greater than the sum of their individual skills. When the hiring decision is based on the candidate’s ability to do the job good things happen. You can begin to build your organization with Peak Performers who have the confidence and ability to deliver what is required of them.”
Rick Zabor is the president of People Staff, a search firm that works with technology companies in their recruitment processes. In this article, Zabor outlines some of the differences between skills and performance-based job descriptions, and he also gives a few words of advice on how to write a performance-based description. He also gives a performance-based recruiting method which lists steps to take further along in the recruitment process.
Best Practices: Writing Good Job Descriptions to Improve Hiring – CallMeJobs
“…properly crafting job descriptions can not only drive more candidates to your job listings, but can also act as an effective tool to allow candidates to pre-screen and self-select themselves for the realities of the job being listed.”
CallMeJobs specializes in the call center industry and helping call center professionals in the recruiting process. In this article on their website, CallMeJobs compares skills-based and performance-based job descriptions, and says that performance-based is more efficient in attracting the candidates best suited for the positions. CallMeJobs says that employers and recruiters need to make the candidates aware of what is to be expected of them if they are hired.
Performance Based Job Descriptions: How Effective Is Your Hiring – Dr. Maynard Brusman
“Effective hiring starts with a performance-based job description that reflects what needs to get done. The ability to achieve measurable objectives is a better predictor of future performance than the candidate’s level of skills and experience.”
Dr. Maynard Brusman is the founding principal of Working Resources a consulting and executive coaching firm. In this article on the Working Resources blog, Brusman focuses on how to attract talented individuals to apply by replacing traditional skills and experience-based job descriptions with those that are performance-based. He also says that by using performance-based descriptions, your hiring process will become more efficient and attract the best candidates for the position.
Candidate experience experts share their views on the subject of candidate experience.
While blogs and websites offer a wide range of information on the candidate experience, videos are also another great way to share material among professionals in the recruiting industry. Below are four videos that are good examples of the varying opinions on the candidate experience and the different aspects of it.
Jennifer Way, president of Way Solutions and an advisor with Aspen Search Advisors, takes a few minutes to talk about her views on the candidate experience with Todd Raphael of ERE Media. She discusses certain behaviors of candidate care and how some guidelines need to be developed in order to change what needs to be fixed regarding the candidate experience.
This video is from the @ce (Assessing Candidate Experience) research project, conducted by Barkers and Guardian Jobs. The project was created in order to “discover what jobseekers really want out of the recruitment experience.” Here, Guardian Jobs Sales Director Helen Bird presents the research findings which covers different aspects of the application process from the candidates view.
In this video, a panel from RecruitFest! 2010 talks about the candidate experience, mainly the topic of whether or not candidates deserve certain rights during the recruitment process and if all companies should guarantee this “Candidate Bill of Rights”. The panel includes Gerry Crispin, principal at CareerXroads, Chris Hoyt, talent engagement and marketing leader at PepsiCo, Mike Ramer, president of Ramer Search Consultants, Inc., Charlie Judy, global director of HR Strategic Development and Operations at Navigant Consulting, Inc., and Jason Lauritsen, vice president of human resources at Union Bank and Trust.
Tom Janz, chief scientist at PeopleAssessments.com, gives his suggestions on how to improve the candidate experience. He advises to make it fun, interactive and useful to candidates. This video is one in a series on Youtube, made by Shaker Consulting Group, and the Virtual Job Tryout channel includes several videos of professionals in the recruiting industry giving their opinions on how to improve the candidate experience.
The candidate experience. Is there such a thing? Yes, No ? Does it matter? Yes, it does. No, it doesn’t.
There have been many debates, discussions, and perhaps even heated arguments over whether the candidate experience exists or not, what are the right and wrong things to do, and how to improve it. Online, there are dozens of articles, webinars and forums dedicated to the candidate experience and the broad range of topics that these two words produce.
But just how broad is the candidate experience? What is it exactly and what does it include?
The candidate experience begins once an individual expresses interest, or as Gerry Crispin, Chief Navigator, CareerXroads, put it at the Boston 2010 Recruitfest, “once he puts his hat into the ring.” At this moment, the candidate has made a commitment, and the experience starts.
The words candidate experience entail the beginning of the application process all the way through to the end, which for some candidates may be a cut even before the first round, and for others it may be several rounds of interviews.
And then again, there are also the ways to improve the candidate experience, different tactics used by large and small companies, what works and doesn’t work, the “Candidate Bill of Rights”, the terrible user interfaces of common Applicant Tracking Systems, how to measure its ROI…the list goes on and on.
There may never be a solution to perfecting the candidate experience, perhaps because it is impossible to define exactly what the experience is. This is due in large part to the fact that larger companies may use certain strategies in dealing with candidates, and smaller companies may use something completely different. And also, it depends on the candidate and what they consider to be the “perfect experience”.
But this doesn’t mean we should stop trying to solve this puzzle. The entire candidate experience is important because it is about projecting an image for the company, and it is also about recruiting the best possible candidate for the position.
The candidate and your ATS
The first thing your candidates interact with when applying for a position at your company is your Applicant Tracking System or ATS. The software that will eat up their hand-crafted resumes, and correspond with them before and after interviews. If your ATS handles your career site as well, the interaction begins even before the candidate has read the job description. Before he or she has a clear idea whether or not to apply.
It used to be that candidates were asked to fill out forms and forms so as to populate your database with relevant information. I can clearly remember wasting hours filling badly designed online forms with my education, job experience, … over and over again. It was understood that going through such an ordeal showed your motivation for the company.
Fortunately, this is (mostly) over. Although I’m sure lot of companies still feel that building their database at the expense of the candidate’s time is normal policy.
Making sure your ATS deals respectfully with your candidates may be the first step towards ensuring a good candidate experience. In fact since the ATS treats all candidate equally, there is no room for human misconduct from the employer.
But what can your ATS do to improve the candidate’s experience?
Id’say : Time, Feedback and Contacts
- Don’t waste their time with online forms. Let them upload their resume or import their linkedin profile.
- Give as much feedback as possible. It’s always frustrating at the least to send a resume to never hear from the company again. Especially after an interview.
- Let them connect directly to the recruiting manager at the company when their application is rejected.
I know it sounds bad but think of it like comments in blogs. Companies use to fear (although some still do) possible negative feedback. In the end, not a problem.
- Make them feel comfortable before an interview by introducing them to the social ecosystem of the company. Twitter streams, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook groups or pages.
- Enable them to keep updated on their mobile.
What else can an ATS do to improve candidate’s experience ?