The concept may not be so far-fetched. That's largely due to the rise of search engine marketing and search engine optimization in recruiting. (SEO refers to free, "organic" or "natural" listings that predominate on the main part of search pages; SEM includes the small paid ads usually above and to the right of the organic results.) Taken together, they could become more popular as job-search tools than traditional jobs boards within several years. A newspaper editor might Google up a replacement copy editor without having to advertise on Monster.com; writers could land their next gig without having to slog through dozens of different job boards....

Candidates and recruiters fire up search engines

Though still small -- SEM accounted for just 3 percent of hires among Fortune 500 companies surveyed by the career consulting company CareerXroads last year -- search is growing -- up from just 1 percent in 2007. What's more, job boards have peaked, according to the same study, plateauing at 12 percent for the last several years. Recruiters and employers told the study's authors, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, that they'll incorporate more Web searches into their recruitment strategies as they push to find better candidates on their own rather than sifting through thousands of resumes from often unqualified candidates that pour in from job boards. Search, according to Crispin, could have a devastating effect on job boards and eventually "disintermediate" job boards.
Crispin isn't alone in his predictions. "I would say that search is still in its infancy," said Joel Cheesman, self-described "head cheese" at the influential recruiting blog. "But I do think the number's going to go up."
Indeed, a lot of people are in the search pool already. Google Analytics reported nearly 300 million job-related searches in the U.S. in September. Among the reasons for search's increasing popularity among recruiters and employers, according to Cheesman and other recruiting-industry experts:

It's often cheaper than advertising on traditional job boards.
Return on investment tends to be better, in that it can yield more and better job candidates per dollar invested.
While search helps a company find candidates, it's also providing brand exposure while the company hunts employees on the Internet.
Search, in particular SEM, could be a good way to hook highly sought-after passive candidates -- those potential employees who aren't necessarily looking for a job but who might be tempted into taking one with a well-crafted SEM campaign that catches their eye while they're researching industry-related keywords. Rank-and-file recruitment

There are plenty of potential benefits for job-seekers too, according to the experts. Search-engine job hunting offers one-stop shopping; a candidate can find bunches of jobs in one search rather than roaming around dozens of job boards. They can refine their search by pinpointing keywords.
Still, that doesn't mean that job-seekers can easily Google a gig right now. Basically, the job boards have a lock -- for the moment at least -- on top rankings in job-related search results on the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
"Currently most job posts don't get indexed with a search engine," said Alison Engelsman, senior strategist at Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications. "So if a candidate's looking for related information and they type in, for instance, nursing jobs, the first results they're going to see, probably three pages deep, are from job boards." That's a big problem, she added, because most Web users don't bother to drill down past the first page of search results.

Thus, most won't get real-time job postings with a Web search. A few years ago Google tried to launch a more traditional job vertical, called Google Base, which would have offered up more postings, but it flopped; recently it's been experimenting with Google Profiles, which is more like social and career networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook than traditional job boards.
For job-seekers who want to use search to cut right to live postings, experts like Engelsman and Cheesman say, the best option is to use big job aggregators -- also called vertical search engines -- like SimplyHired and Indeed. These aggregators scrape job postings from multiple job boards and post them on their own sites, where they can be searched in all sorts of ways by people looking for work. Like the big search engines, such sites make part of their living by selling SEM ads that run alongside the free postings.
Job boards' domination of organic search results could change, Engelsman said, as emloyers learn to use SEO to move their Web sites higher in search results. Ultimately, she said, companies with good SEO could cut out job boards as the middlemen for recruitment because they'll be able to get their own corporate job sites on the first page of search results.
And there are plenty of companies, including well-known names like Jobs2Web, that are very willing to help businesses get their sites noticed in the Web's ever-expanding information universe. But SEO isn't cheap. It costs about $10,000 for a company to get its site optimized. Even then, there's no guarantee that it will rise to the first page. The very fluidity of the Web, with sites and algorithms constantly changing, ensures that rankings will change daily, even with the best SEO, and that further investments in SEO may be needed to stay near the top of the rankings.

 
SEM vs. SEO: Do paid ads pay?
SEM offers a much more conservative approach for employers. Because it's a paid ad, it's guaranteed to show up on a page with the corresponding keyword. Advertisers set limits on what they'll spend, and the cost per candidate usually is lower than the traditional "post and pray" method of listing a job on an employment site -- though that could change. SEM's ad cost is determined in auctions, and the price of good keywords could rise as SEM becomes more popular.

Good keywords aren't always that easy to find, either, and subtle changes can make a big difference. Jason Gorham, CEO of Sharkstrike, which helps companies with SEM, SEO, social networks, and candidate sourcing, said that one campaign for entry-level jobs got far more clicks and conversions for entry-level jobs with a hyphen than for entry-level jobs without one. He's still not sure why. "There's a human factor in search," he said. Finding the right keyword, or combination of keywords, is as much art as science, but it's a crucial exercise for search. "There's so much noise right now that if you're not standing out in the space, then you're lost," he said.

Trolling for top candidates
Search also presents some unusual tactics for employers: the potential to poach employees from other companies, for example. "I can serve a job ad to somebody who works at The New York Times because I can see their IP address and say, OK, this person works at The New York Times, and I can serve them a Washington Post ad," Gorham said. It's a hypothetical example, though Gorham's done the real thing with competitors like Home Depot and Lowe's.
In similar fashion, Cheesman pointed out, employers can use SEM on sites like Facebook to troll for employees who work for competitors. "If I know that USA Today has people that I, The New York Times, want to hire, I can actually target them via my Facebook advertising and say, hey, jobs at The New York Times, come and check out what a great atmosphere we have, or whatever. It's a neat kind of way to target that search engines don't really give you." Perhaps the biggest attraction search advertising could have for employers is that it could make traditional job boards almost completely unnecessary -- just as the advent of job boards in 1995 eventually made newspaper help-wanteds practically a relic.

"Hitwise did a report that said a third of Monster's traffic comes from pay-per-click advertising," Cheesman noted. "With that knowledge, you're saying, why can't I do that to drive traffic directly to me instead of using Monster as a middleman? People are putting together the dots. It's not going to happen overnight, but more and more people are getting turned on to SEO and pay-per-click."

For job-seekers, search offers a "push-pull" strategy, according to Gorham, that will outdistance perusing the postings on traditional big sites like Monster.com. "From an SEM standpoint, if you're spending time reading about your job and your industry, you'll get captured by the right keywords. In SEO, you can go and pull data from a search engine," he said. SEO tends to reel in active job-seekers who include work-related words in their searches, while SEM typically trolls for passive job-seekers researching industry-related terms. A typical SEO job-seeker might type "reporting jobs" into a search box, while a passive candidate might merely be researching a media-related topic -- proofreading or freelance writing, say -- and SEM ads will pop up with job opportunities.
So, will we all soon be Googling our way to better jobs and better workers? "Yeah," Gorham said. "The crossroads is here and now. If you were doing classified advertising with your local paper and it was working, now it doesn't exist anymore. So people will be forced into new media, whether they like it or not." 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SharkStrike CEO Jason Gorham To Present at Technology Association of Georgia Recruiting Event

ATLANTA – Jason Gorham CEO of Sharkstrike, the leading provider of passive candidate strategy, will be a keynote speaker at the Technology Association of Georgia Recruiting event held Sept

 15, 2009.   Gorham will be co-presenting with Matt Matrone on search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) for recruitment.

“I am glad to contribute. The recruiting market continues to grow at an exponential pace and the use of online tools like ours, are leading the way for a company to find the best possible candidates faster and cheaper than conventional methods” said Gorham. “I look forward to sharing industry trends, pitfalls and some of the successes we have seen in recruiting as it relates to SEM and SEO.”  

Candidates are not likely to search on a companies name to find a job as if this was the case they would just go to their website.  They are however likely to search job titles or industries and this is where companies should be focusing their HR-SEO strategy.  A lot of the HR SEO process is education and for most human resources departments this isn’t their core competency and that’s why they should select a leader the HR Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space that has a number of years of experience.  Multiple HR SEO vendors are claiming that their products are making jobs HR SEO compliant when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites and hoping that the links to the jobs will create natural or organic traffic when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites. 

About Sharkstrike

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

###

For SEO to be effective you have to have multiple ingredients for it to work and more importantly work effectively.  What I mean by work effectively is if I were to get you a #1 ranking in Google for a keyword phrase like seattle welding jobs you would think this is effective.  However if I did keyword research on seattle welding jobs and found that the keyword volume (this is the amount of times someone searches on the keyword) has no supported data or very little data that means that no one is searching that keyword phrase.  You would be #1 in Google for a phrase that no one ever searches on which means that the SEO strategy didn’t help you at all to capture more candidates in natural search.  This is only one example of what you should be educated about when selecting an SEO vendor. 

Here are the multiple ingredients that make up a true SEO strategy and the work that goes into increasing your SEO ranking.

1. Back Links – A back link is when a website places a link to your site on theirs.  Back linking is not placing a link on your site to another.
2. Page Rank – Google measures page rank from 0-10 with 10 being the best.  You can get the Google toolbar here to see your page rank.
3. Content – Search engines love good content and the more you have the better off you will be to get pushed up in rankings.
4. Title Tags – This is the title of what the page says when you log onto it.
5. Meta Tags – Keywords that the search engine robots know how to index and your site
6. Submission – The website needs to be submitted to the search engines to find it.
7. Manual Submission – Some search engines don’t automate your submission so it needs to be done by hand.
8. Ranking Monitoring – Just because a site reaches #1 in a search engine doesn’t mean it will stay there.

These are a just few things that go into making a webpage SEO optimized.  If your considering SEO and talking with vendors make sure to ask them the above referenced questions.  You will learn a lot about what their system, product or person does and is capable of and how that’s different from just job distribution.

The new interface has a much cleaner/newer look and feel to it and it's more analytic and tends to look more now like Google analytics than it does Adwords.  The goal of the new interface is to make it easier for people like me to manage accounts quicker and more effectively as well as for beginners to understand their accounts and use the tool more often.  One of the key features that I like is the keyword search within a campaign feature.  In the past you had to run a search across all of the campaigns and then drill into the ad group to manage the keyword.  Now all you have to do is set up a filter and run your keyword search.  

The data map is much easier to read and figure out so a novice or your executive team can login and see a quick snapshot of your campaign is doing.  I also like the account tree so everything is on the left hand side of the screen and you can even look into your analytics while not having to leave Adwords. 

The new interface seems to be improvement over the old interface, but it will take some time to get used to.  With that in mind remember this, Google is a pay-per-click company the more clicks the better Google does.  A lot of people trust Google for everything including analytics for them to give them the best data, keyword searches etc.  However I leave you with this...if Adwords says it's a click and Google analytics say's it's a click is it a click?

The figure is down from the first half of 2008, when 13.2% of messages were opened.

How often e-mails were opened and clicked varied with the industry of the sender—and the size of the list.

Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

Click-through rates for lists of over 1,000 recipients were also highest for religious e-mails, followed by travel, general consumer and retail.

“A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers,” wrote the authors of the report.

“By examining the top 5 companies in the world’s careers pages we understood quite quickly that a common marketing tactic is being ignored by human resources and recruiting strategies to capture more candidates to their career portals.”  Said Jason Gorham CEO of Sharkstrike. 

“The white paper examines the application of SEO methodologies within corporate HR departments as part of their talent acquisition strategies. The paper defines SEO, discusses its use in product and service marketing, and outlines the rationale for its potential to create efficient and cost-effective avenues for attracting key talent.  Companies of Google job searches that potential job seekers conduct in order to find new placement.  Companies are spending too much money on branding big name job boards and not taking matters into their own hands to create a seamless process of candidates that can find them in Google search. Said Gorham.

“Candidates are not likely to search on a companies name to find a job as if this was the case they would just go to their website.  They are however likely to search job titles or industries and this is where companies should be focusing their HR-SEO strategy.  A lot of the HR SEO process is education and for most human resources departments this isn’t their core competency and that’s why they should select a leader the hr search engine optimization (seo) space that has a number of years of experience.  Multiple hr seo vendors are claiming that their products are making jobs hr seo compliant when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites and hoping that the links to the jobs will create natural or organic traffic when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites. 

To learn more about HR SEO strategies and to download the full white paper please visit http://www.sharkstrike.com

About Sharkstrike

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

"Angela brings a strong technology marketing background to the company that will help us craft and distribute our message across many platforms".  Said Jason Gorham SharkStrike CEO.

Angela, brings over 15 years of marketing experience to SharkStrike including working with some of the leading software technology companies in Silicon Valley.  

While working at Quova software Angela was responsible for taking IP/geo-location targeting software and introducing it to the market.  She headed up the marketing initiative including increasing the market perception of Quova to a 65% favorable market perception.   Prior to Quova Angela spent 5 years at Brio Software as the Senior Director of Worldwide Marketing helping shape the companies marketing direction.  She helped grow the companies valuation from $8M to $130M.  While at Brio Software she had 25+ direct reports including both domestic and international and was responsible for a $20M marketing budget.

Her breath of marketing background lends itself to online marketing, public relations, direct marketing, telemarketing and international marketing.  Her previous titles include: Vice President of Marketing, Senior Director of Marketing, Senior Director of World Wide Marketing and Director of Channel Marketing. 

About

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

For more information please visit http://www.sharkstrike.com

Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR

A professor says most human resources professionals are ill-equipped to carry out value-added workforce planning and transformation.

David McCann - CFO.com | US

March 10, 2009

Addressing a crowd of about 300 financial executives this morning, a professor of human resources soundly denounced the corporate HR profession for being mostly unable to provide analytics that are useful in making workforce decisions that build economic value.

Most companies today spend too little effort on attracting and retaining top strategic talent and too much on satisfying the rest of the employee base, asserted Rutgers University's Richard Beatty, who spoke at a general session during the CFO Rising conference in Orlando. In fact, he claimed that typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization's success. "HR people try to perpetuate the idea that job satisfaction is critical," Beatty said. "But there is no evidence that engaging employees impacts financial returns."

Beatty based this conclusion on employee surveys done at IBM and other companies that found little relationship between job satisfaction and performance ratings. Not only is employee engagement very expensive, but "how do you know you're not satisfying a lot of people you really wish weren't there?"

To buttress his argument, Beatty presented data from a Gallup survey on the performance of about 4,500 customer service employees at an unnamed major financial firm. The survey results, which were based on customer feedback, showed that the employees who scored in the top quartile had a positive effect on 61 percent of the people they talked to. The next two quartiles registered 40 percent and 27 percent positive responses, respectively, but there were enough neutral responses that the employees' net performance was positive. The lowest quartile, however, scored a net 2 percent negative impact.

"You'd be better off had you paid these people not to come to work," Beatty said. "You'd be a lot better off if you paid them to work for your competitor." The financial firm paid about $30 million in salaries and benefits to the employees in the lowest quartile, whose performance cost the firm as much as $50 million worth of business.

However, Beatty pointed out that this kind of performance variability means there is an opportunity to build a more valuable work force. Usually in such a situation, HR professionals try to figure out what the top performers are doing right, then train the others accordingly. That is faulty thinking, insisted Beatty, who asserted that selection is a more powerful predictor of performance than training. In addition, training may not be the problem - some employees may know what to do, but choose not to do it, opined the professor.

"HR wants to treat most employees the same way, and they spend considerable time trying to defend or fix poor performers, taking on the St. Bernard role," he said. "Low turnover isn't necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest."

Human resources is also behind what Beatty called the "silly" idea that a company should try to be the "employer of choice." If you are the employer of choice, he asked rhetorically, who's going to be applying for your jobs? "Everybody and their dog's brother," he said. "You want people who are excited, enthused, and understand how to contribute to what you do, as opposed to those who simply want to find a good place to hide out."

Beatty said that it is most important to think outside the HR department box when it comes to filling the strategic positions that create the bulk of a company's value. To that end, he suggested that companies might be better off appointing someone from outside the HR department to manage strategic talent. He pointed to Precision Castparts Corp., a $7 billion machine-parts manufacturer, as one company that has bypassed HR in several situations. For one, it reassigned an operations executive who ran a third of the company's 150 plants to take control of scouting for and retaining strategic talent.

Such tactics are warranted because while "the language of organizations is numbers, HR isn't very good at data analytics," Beatty said. "They don't think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I'm all for, but I'm also for building winning organizations."

It's the CFO's job to make sure that the work of analyzing and, as necessary, reconstituting the work force gets done by someone qualified to do the job, added Beatty, and there has never been more at stake than there is now.

"The labor market is in a position to provide you with better talent than you have ever had," said Beatty, co-author of the new book, The Differentiated Workforce. "If you don't emerge from this market with better talent in the roles that really make a difference, I don't think you're trying."

Are iPhones Good for Advertising?

Young, hip and ad-friendly.