Search Engines - Spiders Attack!
'Crawling robots' or 'spiders' may not seem like the best answer to hiring top talent, but these cyber
creatures, which scour the web and sort the most-visited pages for search-engine indexing, could be the
best army of recruiters you could possibly have.
They belong to the discipline of search-engine optimisation (SEO), a micro-industry that has traditionally
been the domain of online marketers. But as recruitment becomes more internet-based, enlightened HR
professionals will need to know more about how this works if they are to find the best candidates for
their jobs. Put simply, SEO is a marketing technique that ensures a company's website can be found,
read, indexed and ranked high up on the list of matches by search engines Good SEO is behind all
those sites listed on the first page of results; the better a site communicates with search-engine robots,
the higher up the rankings it will be.
The relevance this has to recruitment should become more and more obvious. According to monitoring
company Nielsen, more than six million job-seekers are looking online at any one time. The National
Online Recruitment Audience Survey for 2007 revealed that some 35% of users found job and job
boards not by going to them direct, but by typing a job title or speculative company name into a search
engine. The Internet Advertising Bureau says that eight in 10 of all web sessions start on a search
engine.
So far in the HR space, SEO has only been embraced by online job boards and recruitment
consultancies, and they are reaping the rewards. Richard Baxter, Head of SEO at 4MAT, says for one
client, 40% of total placements now originate from online search.
Experts say HR departments have been slow to catch on to this and are missing out on candidates who
could be being snapped up by rivals. Type 'store jobs' into Google, for instance, and Mothercare comes
up in the first page. Tesco appears on the second page, but will candidates see this?
Baxter says a fully optimised site can become a pipeline of new CVs, and enable companies to become
less reliant on recruitment consultancies. 'The potential cost savings by doing this on your own site are
massive,' he says.
creatures, which scour the web and sort the most-visited pages for search-engine indexing, could be the
best army of recruiters you could possibly have.
They belong to the discipline of search-engine optimisation (SEO), a micro-industry that has traditionally
been the domain of online marketers. But as recruitment becomes more internet-based, enlightened HR
professionals will need to know more about how this works if they are to find the best candidates for
their jobs. Put simply, SEO is a marketing technique that ensures a company's website can be found,
read, indexed and ranked high up on the list of matches by search engines Good SEO is behind all
those sites listed on the first page of results; the better a site communicates with search-engine robots,
the higher up the rankings it will be.
The relevance this has to recruitment should become more and more obvious. According to monitoring
company Nielsen, more than six million job-seekers are looking online at any one time. The National
Online Recruitment Audience Survey for 2007 revealed that some 35% of users found job and job
boards not by going to them direct, but by typing a job title or speculative company name into a search
engine. The Internet Advertising Bureau says that eight in 10 of all web sessions start on a search
engine.
So far in the HR space, SEO has only been embraced by online job boards and recruitment
consultancies, and they are reaping the rewards. Richard Baxter, Head of SEO at 4MAT, says for one
client, 40% of total placements now originate from online search.
Experts say HR departments have been slow to catch on to this and are missing out on candidates who
could be being snapped up by rivals. Type 'store jobs' into Google, for instance, and Mothercare comes
up in the first page. Tesco appears on the second page, but will candidates see this?
Baxter says a fully optimised site can become a pipeline of new CVs, and enable companies to become
less reliant on recruitment consultancies. 'The potential cost savings by doing this on your own site are
massive,' he says.
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