How to Make Every Keyword Count in Your Media Job or Hiring Search

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.”

Daniel Lindley is the author of Ambrose Bierce Takes on the Railroad: The Journalist as Muckraker and Cynic, and co-author, with George Manos, of The President’s Pianist: My Term with Truman and My Life in Music.