Early last year I introduced one of Xerox’s staffing leaders, a friend of mine who we’ll just call Dave to ensure his phone doesn’t ring off the hook after this post, to the concept of Search Engine Optimization for recruitment purposes. After only a few conversations Dave took the SEO ball and ran by researching providers and choosing Doug Berg and Peter Brasket’s Jobs2Web platform which was implemented in October of 2006
Just a few weeks ago Peter alerted me that he and the Jobs2Web Gang had just released a case study with some pretty impressive stats regarding Xerox’s recruitment SEO performance. So I took it upon myself to dive a little bit deeper than the numbers and give my friend Dave at Xerox a call, here’s the Cliff Notes version of the call:
Chad: Dave I’ve seen the case study showing traffic to your corporate career site has benefited tremendously from your SEO work with Jobs2Web.
Dave: Yes it has, during the past month or so our relevant job seeker traffic has exploded to our corporate career site and into our ATS.
Chad: Why did Xerox choose to Search Engine Optimize for recruitment?
Dave: Truthfully, what really pushed us over the edge was the Hitwise statistics you shared with me, which demonstrated job boards receive a ton of candidate traffic from search engines. I then went to Google and research job board SEO practices, noticing they were optimized incredibly well, even optimizing the Xerox brand for jobs. At that point we thought it would be more strategic to intercept that job seeker traffic with our very own SEO initiative.
Chad: And why the Jobs2Web platform?
Dave: Applicant Tracking Systems are NOT built for SEO and with the Jobs2Web platform our ATS provider didn’t need to lift a finger to implement, which is a blessing for everyone and was a big factor in our decision.
Chad: How were they able to implement SEO changes without getting your ATS provider involved?
Dave: The Jobs2Web team created an optimized site which they maintain, optimize with Xerox job content, and provide the correct links back to our ATS for proper job seeker application and tracking. Also remember, all new sites have to gain favor with the search engines and become “trusted”, which took some time with the new optimized site, but the results are really showing now.
Chad: Big question, what differences are you seeing when using SEO versus traditional job boards?
Dave: SEO has provided more relevant candidates, where we have noted job boards providing more irrelevant candidates, which equates into more work and lower efficiencies for our recruiting staff. We have adopted SEO to reduce reliance on job boards, provide more relevant candidates, and improve efficiencies. Through our research, here at Xerox, we were finding job postings on job boards just wasn’t bringing in the right candidates, which wasted our recruiters time and pushed us further toward the relevance model of SEO.
Chad: So you would advise other companies looking to improve efficiencies, relevant candidate flow, and better hiring toward SEO for recruitment?
Dave: I would encourage SEO most definitely! To me, it has become a proven avenue and just makes good business sense to invest in your very own corporate brand.
Chad: Last question… Dude, when are you going to get rid of the dorky looking guy holding his ear on your career site?
Dave: Yea, ummm, errr, I’m on it!
Chad: No seriously, he’s been there for like 2 years!?!
Dave: Dude I’m on it!
Right…
Big thanks to Dave for taking the time to answer my questions, relevant or irrelevant, about why he and Xerox chose to step into Search Engine Optimization for recruitment. I know of many other large employers embracing SEO and even Jobs2Web, one of which, Merck, will be presenting their case study at our DirectEmployers Annual Meeting in Vegas, October 11 and 12.
I am positive we will see more findings published, like these, focused on solid SEO recruitment case studies and testimonials from major corporations in the near future.
Checkout physician jobs on TheRecruiter.com.
Wondering if a breakdown of most popular search engines, with what percentage of traffic each engine brought, along with most popular keyphrases is available?
Hi Joel – the search engine traffic mix for all of our clients is predominately Google-Yahoo-MSN-Others in that order, with Google for all of our clients being by far the most productive source of organic traffic.
The key-phrases will depend on the client – specifically their jobs, optimized job categories, and industry. You can get a sense of Xerox’s key-phrases at this post: http://hotgigs.typepad.com/jobs2web/2007/07/jobs2web-case-s.html
An example of a healthcare client’s key-phrases would be HealthEast (Jobs2Web site: http://www.minnesota-healthcare-jobs.com). We’ve built optimized categories to fit their jobs and job families — just cut and paste a category name into Google and with a Control-F/minnesota-healthcare-jobs.com you will be able to see how highly HealthEast is listed.
Regardless of the industry for which Jobs2Web is being deployed, it’s important to follow the organic job search genome of “location” AND “job title” and “job”.
Our clients enjoy a lot of Jobs2Web candidate flow from searches that don’t match a category name – another benefit of solid SEO work. But doing our heat-index homework on job search strings relative to skills is a precursor to going live with a Jobs2Web site.
If anyone would like me to walk them through other examples, just drop me a note at peter@hotgigs.com.