Latest Improvements to our Advert Optimisation

We've blogged previously about the importance of choosing the right job title for your advert, and nobody takes more care or researches this more thoroughly than our resource team at Easy Web. To give you a quick example, you might think that placing an advert for a customer advisor to work in a contact centre is perfectly sound, but by changing the title to Customer Service and referring to a call centre rather than contact centre you will increase potential traffic by a massive amount





Our attitude to job boards has always been one of maximum (worthwhile) coverage, and now we're bringing the optimisation of our adverts in line with that. Because we run 4 week long campaigns we're able to vary the keywords we use across those 4 weeks, capturing traffic from not just the most popular search terms, but also those terms that are slightly less popular.

In yesterday's post, I talked about how introducing more emotive, exciting terms can make your adverts titles STAND OUT and more appealing. The negative side to these titles is their poor optimisation. Throughout our four week campaigns we will now be utilising both STAND OUT and standard job titles where we deem them suitable. This should help ensure that we are appealing to all parts of the market and attracting the most relevant candidates.

We've also made other improvements to the way we structure our adverts, some of which we'd like to keep close to our chest, but one I will share with you is the repetition of the keyword based title at the beginning of the article. What difference does that make I hear you ask? On most job boards, not a great deal, but on one major job board in particular, it's a heavily weighted factor in their search algorithm, highlighting again the need for a bit of extra research before you post your advert.

Recruiting for Learning and Development Jobs by Analysing Data from Google, Linkedin and Monster

We're currently recruiting for a Learning and Development Officer for a company in the West Midlands, a position that raises some interesting issues when recruiting online, not because of the requirements of the position, but because of the title.

If you were placing a local press advert then the exact phrasing of the title would be less of an issue, any permutation of L&D would likely be understood by suitable candidates, but when you write content to be placed online it's not just the readers comprehension you have to take into account. You need to be sure that you are using a term that is being searched for.

Like all our roles, we conduct some serious research before we build our advert to make sure we're attracting the audience our client needs, and what seems the obvious answer is not always the best approach to take.

So how do we figure out the best approach for a role like this? A quick search for similar roles swiftly confirms that the "officer" part of the title is by far and away the most commonly used description of people in similar roles, but there are a few ways to phrase the term Learning and Development, making getting it right a key factor in successful advertising of the position.

Some research into the title...

Linkedin:

3236 “learning & development” in job title in UK:

Same for “learning and development”

577 for L&D

101 for “L & D”

Google search:

Monster:

Monster – “L&D” within job title search – 6 results

Monster - "Learning & Development" – 14 results

(It's worth noting that Monster's search engine will treat "&" the same way as "and", but this is not necessarily the case with all job boards).

If all the adverts and job titles we found had a common abbreviation (as is the case with HR roles) then we could safely decide on the phrase to use, but as you can see from the results, a significant portion of adverts and job titles are using terms other than the most common.

In a scenario like this there is really only one solution, to vary your job title across multiple adverts and reduce the risk that your advert will not be found by suitable candidates.

Using STAND OUT Job Titles in Your Job Board Advertising

Yesterday I blogged about some of the more "interesting" job titles people have referenced on their linkedin profiles.

Some searching this morning showed me there are some people looking for Ninja’s to join their team. This appears to be an attempt by start-up web companies to make their vacancies more “sexy”. The search results below from a major job board aggregator show that these unconventional titles may not be the most prevalent, but are definitely being used:

Indeed UK – 2 results for Whiz

Indeed UK –0 results for Ninja, but 82 in the US

Indeed UK – 5 results for fanatic

Indeed UK – 98 results for guru

Indeed UK –609 results for expert

(Expert's not really that wacky, but it helps put the numbers into perspective)

You're probably wondering now whether that last position you advertised could have benefited from a more "individual" title. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of this approach. On the positive side your advert is definitely going to stand out from the crowd, and an emotive title like "Javascript Ninja" is just the thing to get potential candidates excited, you could have the most boring position in the world ready to be filled, but who's not going to get at least a little excited when you tell them they're going to be a ninja!

As far as down sides go, you will be very poorly optimised for applicants searching for alternative traditional job titles such as “JavaScript developer”. However, people searching for just the JavaScript stand a good chance of seeing your role. Clearly no one is going to search for “JavaScript ninja”, as demonstrated by a couple of quick keyword searches using Google's keyword tool.

A search on Google Keywords tool (a great way to find out what people are searching for), and none of the following were showing a result:

"ninja jobs"
"geek jobs"
"guru jobs"
"expert jobs"
"fanatic jobs"
"ninja jobs"
"whiz jobs"

For niche searches google just reports that there was not enough searches by UK users in the last month to warrant displaying the result.

I'd advise a certain level of care be taken not to adversely effect the search functionality of your advert. Clearly there are candidates out there who consider themselves a fit for these descriptions, but they're never going to be in the majority and there is no guarantee they'll automatically be the cream of the crop.

In tomorrow's blog I'll take a look at the recent changes Easy Web have made to take advantage of these interesting job titles without harming our core search functionality. I'll also walk through how we strike a balance between attractive copy and search optimisation.

Linkedin Recruitment: Sourcing Monkeys, Ninjas & Village Idiots

Social networks can be funny old places, and while Linkedin's professional leanings clearly differentiate it from places like Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, it can also throw up some suprising (and often amusing) search results.

While doing some research for my next round of Linkedin Training Webinars I came across a profile whose current position was "Office skivvy". Now, aside from wondering what their employers position would be on this, it got me curious as to the other "unusual" job titles I might find...

A quick search turned up some amusing results, here are the numbers along with some of my favourites...

169 users with "monkey" in their job title, including the fantastic "Monkey - With delusions of being an Organ Grinder"

32 Ninjas.

14 idiots, including Chief Idiots, Founder Idiots, Big Idiots, Little Idiots and of course, a Village Idiot.

16 Skivvies.

130 Tea Boys & 6 Tea girls.

Now a large percentage of these profiles are very limited and have clearly been set up and forgotten about without the intention of really using the network, but a worrying number are much more complete and seem to have fairly active users. The million dollar question from an employers point of view is whether this admittedly minor trend can be flipped on it's head to make a vacancy stand out from the crowd.

In tomorrow’s posting I will show you how you can use some of the “stand out” job titles like Ninja and Guru to make your advert jump off the page. I will also highlight some of the pitfalls of this technique.

Facebook Plots World Domination – What does it mean for Online Recruitment & Social Recruiting?

I have just finished reading an interesting article, based on a presentation at Facebook’s F8 conference, about how Facebook wants to make social connections as commonplace as hyperlinks. An understandable position for the world’s largest social network to take. But what is interesting is the method they've chosen. They are making it far easier for websites of all sizes to integrate the “like” function into their site. I checked out this article on CNN and found the Facebook thumbs up symbol at the bottom of the article.




So what does this mean for recruitment?

Well I don’t think you will see this thumbs up on Monster just yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out. It does not seem such a logical leap to let your social community know you found a job you like, in the same way that if you read an interesting article, you might want to share this with your network. Your network of friends, colleagues probably have similar interests to you. Do they have the same professional aspirations, skills, experience? Seems less likely. So sharing jobs, will for now stay limited to the one-to-one option of “send this job to a friend”, rather than the one-to-many “share with network” option.

So what does this mean for the future?

Well I think I need to clarify first that I am not an expert on Facebook or Social Recruiting. But the whole point of a blog is to give your opinion and no one really knows how this will pan out.

Here is my best guess.

This move by Facebook is not aimed at recruitment, but the internet in general. That means every site you visit could potentially integrate with facebook. Leaving aside the good/bad argument, this means corporate careers sites, job boards, job board aggregators etc are all potential partners to Facebook in the advancement of its network. I believe the vast majority of recruitment sites will integrate with facebook in some fashion. It may not be a thumbs up, and many Facebook users may not want to involve their Facebook network in their job hunt, but it will be an option and Job Boards in particular will be paying close attention to how this area develops.