To achieve the best results online a recruitment agency needs an online recruitment strategy.
This strategy should include not only the planning building and development of a recruitment website, including job search functionality but also search engine marketing (SEM), Web 2.0 activities, e-recruitment and much more.
This can seem a daunting task. It is all the more challenging because online technology and candidate behaviour when looking for work on the web, is constantly changing.
The ideal solution for any agency that wants to be found on the web is to find a recruitment content management and SEO partner. Jobshout answers both of these requirements, and can help to ensure that a recruitment agency's website gets found by search engines like Google and has all the functionality that you would expect of of a good recruitment website.
One of the most important factors for a recruitment agency, when considering their online presence, is the use of job boards and CV databases. Getting this wrong will directly affect the bottom line of any agency. Here are some points to consider when selecting a recruitment job board or CV database.
Job boards and CV databases overview
The cost of advertising with job boards and CV databases has steadily increased over the past four years, as their use by both candidates and recruitment agencies has grown. With the emergence of more niche driven job boards and CV databases, this rise is expected to continue over the next couple of years.
So to get the highest return on investment (ROI) recruitment agencies need be sure that they are choosing the right sites to reach their target audience, within budget and with wide enough coverage across a broad base of online services.
The first step in creating an online advertising plan involving job boards and CV databases, is to evaluate the goals, coverage and what ROI is expected.
The second step is to evaluate where and when their target candidates look for work.
Existing candidates are one of your best sources of information about job boards and CV databases. An agency should collect information from all its candidates about the websites they use and where they saw a particular advert. This is absolutely essential, as without this information it is impossible to monitor the ROI from a job board.
Recruitment consultancies should also find out how their candidates use the web to find work. Do they post their CV anywhere? Have they registered for email opr text job alerts? Where do they browse for jobs?. This information will give a clear picture of what candidate activity is like and how the advertising spend should be allocated and when job adverts should be placed for maximum return. This behaviour will change so it should be regularly reviewed.
Search engine searches, such as Google and Yahoo, are extremely useful in tracking down relevant sites to advertise with. Try to mimic the behaviour of candidates by searching on the keywords that people use when looking for work, and see what sites come up. These will also be the websites that candidates find. Recruitment agencies using Jobshout will in some cases come up before some job boards. This does not mean that the job boards are not relevant or good, it's simply that the search engine optimization in Jobshout is excellent and the job ad may contain very focussed content.
Where do your competitors advertise?
Once a list of relevant websites has been compiled, it is important to check where your most successful competitors are advertising. Presumably they are doing something right.
All job boards supply statistics on their audience covering the number of unique users, hits, sessions, demographics and in some cases much more. The costs of the services they supply will often be broken down. With this information the cost and allocation of the budget can start to be formulated.
It is important to also use other sites that supply information on web activities like NORAS and ABC Electronic.
Established in 2002, the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS) is the UK's leading source of independent and objective information on the audiences of online recruitment sites.
NORAS is also the UK's largest piece of online recruitment research, having analysed over 100,000 questionnaires completed by online job seekers in the last six years. The results of NORAS help recruiters to differentiate between online recruitment sites and choose the site with the audience that best matches their recruitment needs. Choosing the site with the right audience means more responses from the right candidates and less irrelevant applications.
Job boards covered by the NORAS 2007 survey:
Accountancy Age, Blue Line Careers, Brand Republic, Change Board, thecareerengineer.com, eFinancialCareers.com, Eteach.com, exec-appointments.com, fish4jobs, GAAPweb, Grocer Jobs, Guardian Jobs, InPharm Jobs, jobs.ac.uk, JobServe, JobsWales, The Lawyer, LondonCareers.net, mad.co.uk, ManchesterOnline, Monster.co.uk, Prospects.ac.uk, s1jobs, SecsintheCity.com, Scotcareers, Times Online and TipTopJob.
For more information on these sites or trends on demographic use of the web go to www.noras.co.uk . This information has been supplied courtesy of Enhance Media.
ABC Electronic was established in 1996 to aid the buying and selling of advertising space through the development of measurement metrics and the independent audit of all forms of electronic media to industry agreed standards in the UK and Republic of Ireland.
For more information about using it, visit www.abce.org.uk
With the right information an online advertising strategy can be created. It must be reviewed on a regularly basis, as the candidate bahviour constantly changes.
For more information please contact nathan.mayatt@jobshout.co.uk or call him on 020 7371 7161
View a full listing of all the articles on Jobshout go to the Resource Centre
Copyright © Jobshout 2007
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