Search Engine Marketing for Recruitment

With many candidates beginning their job search online on search engines like Google & Yahoo!, and Bing, Search Engine Marketing for recruitment is becoming an increasingly popular recruitment marketing tool for recruiters.

What is Search Engine Marketing for recruitment?

While Search Engine Marketing is marketing that is implemented on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, Search Engine Marketing for recruitment is simply the use of such marketing methods for recruitment ends. Search Engine Marketing for Recruitment generally follows two approaches: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising for recruitment

If you have used a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or Bing you will be very familiar with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Those ‘sponsored links’ that you see along the top or at the side of search results are all examples of Pay-Per-Click ads. When a user clicks on one of these sponsored links the advertisers pays.

For example, if you want to advertise your Sales Manager job vacancy on a search engine you simply tailor your Pay-Per-Click marketing to that end. To do this, you may want a sponsored link for your sales manager job vacancy to appear every time someone searches for “sales manager job” on that search engine.

The mechanics of Pay-Per-Click advertising are pretty straightforward too. Log into your search engine marketing account (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing) and bid for these “sales manager job” clicks. You can, of course, tailor your campaign to locations, times of the day amongst other things. The price you pay per click depends largely on how many other companies are also bidding for that click —the more companies bidding the higher the price. On the day we researched this article, Google Adwords indicated a bid price of 15p to 20p per click for the term “sales manager job.”

Once you have set your keywords, your bids and your budget, you can then sit back and wait for the clicks to come to your job advertisement. Of course, not all clicks will be relevant; not all clicks will result in applications; not all clicks will result in good applications; but some clicks will and it is this possibility that can make Pay-Per-Click advertising an effective recruitment marketing option.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for recruitment

Search Engine Optimization is another approach to Search Engine Marketing. Unlike Pay-Per-Click advertising above, it’s not about paying for clicks on sponsored links. Rather, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website appear as close as possible to the top of page one of the natural/organic search engine results.

Achieving such positioning in the natural/organic results of a search engine is not easy. Just as with Pay-Per-Click advertising above, you have to choose how and when you want your site to appear —your SEO keyword strategy. Once you’ve decided on that, the hard work really begins.

Search Engine Optimization is both science and art and success can be related to such things as search terms, keyword choice, keyword density, website architecture, meta-tags, inbound links and lots and lots of other things. Indeed, Search Engine Optimization is a fully-formed industry in itself and will, perhaps, be beyond the ken of most recruiters.

For those in recruitment, Search Engine Marketing can offer an effective recruitment marketing option. However, it must be realised that recruitment is a very competitive market. There are lots and lots of job boards and other websites competing in this area. Clearly, getting into those valuable front page natural/organic search results with Search Engine Optimization will be difficult. For this reason, Pay-Per-Click advertising is often the more cost and time-effective way to market your job vacancies in search engines.

Next steps? Check out these other guides and articles:

• Advantages and Disadvantages of Careers Sites
• An introduction to Careers Sites for employers
• An introduction to Psychometric Testing & Assessment
• An Introduction to Recruitment Branding
• An introduction to Referral Recruiting
• Ten tips for a great careers site for employers
• Ten tips for choosing an applicant tracking system