Louise's UK Recruiter Blog

The perfect time to review your website content

This is a Google Update update from Michelle Hill of Red Rocket Media.

Following the ‘Search, Plus Your World’ update that Google introduced a couple of weeks ago which prioritises content that has been shared within your online social-sphere in your search results, it has just announced another update to its algorithm (the way in which it returns search results). It will now be analysing the layout of a website and the amount of content that you see on the page.

When your clients and candidates land on your web pages, they want to find content that provides solutions to their problems straight away. They don’t want to have to scroll down past an excessive amount of adverts and ‘call to action’ buttons to find it, that’s not a very good user experience.  As such, web pages that don’t provide a positive user experience may not rank as highly going forward. 

This latest update, coupled with the previous ones which have thrown fresh, original, high quality and shareable content into the limelight (see article below) once again re-iterates the crucial role that your website content plays. 

Now is the perfect time for recruitment agencies to review their website content by carrying out a content audit. As you analyse each page, put yourself in the shoes of your clients and candidates and ask yourself:

•    Is there enough content?
•    Is it immediately visible?
•    Is the content fresh?
•    Is the content original?
•    Does the content add value to your clients and candidates?
•    Would your clients and candidates share it (particularly relevant to news and blogs)?

Google’s advice
This latest update is just one of over 500 improvements Google intends to roll-out this year so their advice, as usual, is just to focus on delivering the best possible experience for your website visitors ie. to provide a fresh supply of high quality, original content that your clients and candidates deem valuable enough to want to share.

 

 

 

 

Lazy Recruitment Job Advert Writing

I realise this is probably a pretty pointless rant but I actually couldn't believe this job "description" that I found earlier:

 

When your R2R can only write two sentences to describe your organisation, the role, the type of individual required.... well it wouldn't give me much hope for their ability to successfully place someone!

Jobsite's Quarterly Recruitment Review

I see that Jobsite have released their (independently conducted) Winter 2011/12 recruitment review. The survey is based on online research of 500 job seekers and 200 recruiters.

The questions asked focussed on areas such as the percentage of businesses trying to fill vacancies, the most used job search methods by jobseekers (job boards - but that's not surprising seeing as they asked jobseekers "online") and the most used recruitment methods by businesses; the number of job boards used by candidates and businesses (a massive percentage of business use only one job board per vacancy).  Also the most important factors when choosing a job board (pricing is unsurprisingly number one - but the other facts may interest and surprise you).

I won't go into lots of detail here because what you should do is check out the free report and read their nice concise summary.

How the latest Google update will affect recruitment agencies

This handy little article has been written for us by Michelle Hill of Red Rocket Media.

Over the last 18 months, Google has introduced three major updates to the way it returns search results, known as Caffeine, Panda and, just last week, Search, Plus Your World. Each one has thrown the importance of content into the limelight.

*Caffeine*
Launched in summer 2010, this enabled Google to display results more quickly after they were published. Prior to the update, the main content layer was updated every couple of weeks which meant there was a delay between Google indexing your content and when they actually made it available to searchers. Towards the end of 2011, they launched a further update which enabled them to determine when to give you more up to date results eg. for events  or hot topics. It was now able to identify the different types of searches and the level of freshness each one required. This affected 1 billion searches!
Results: recruitment agencies that publish fresh content win.

*Panda*
In Autumn 2011, the Panda update was introduced to penalise websites with low quality/thin or duplicated content. Websites known as ‘content scrapers’ which scour the internet for vacancies and post them on their own site, were consequently demoted in the search results. It also used artificial intelligence to identify the quality of a website by analysing how long visitors spend on your site, which pages they visit, how many adverts there are etc. Any deemed to be low quality were likewise given less priority in the search results.
Result: recruitment agencies that publish high quality, original content win.

*Search, Plus Your World*
This latest update took place last week and introduced a social element to search results. Now, when you search, Google will take your social-sphere (the main source being Google+) into consideration so say you search for a hotel in Manchester, if any of your social connections have written a review about it, they would be given priority in your search results. The thinking behind this, according to Nielson, is that whilst 42% of people trust search results, 90% trust recommendations from friends.
So how can recruitment agencies benefit from this?
Let’s say you publish an article called “5 Killer Interview Tips”. You share it with your ‘candidates’ circle on Google+. Sarah (one of the people in that circle) thinks it’s a great article and shares it with her ‘friends’ circle. Elizabeth (one of Sarah’s friends) sees it in her stream but doesn’t necessarily read it as she isn’t looking for a job at the moment.
A few months later, Elizabeth decides she is going to look for a new job and searches on Google for ‘interview tips’. Due to the previous social connection with Sarah, your article will be prioritised in her search results. Elizabeth clicks through to read the article and whilst she’s on your website, does a vacancy search. She finds one, submits her CV and voila you’ve connected with a candidate that previously may never have come across your website. Of course, the vital element here is that people want to share the content you produce. If it’s not shareable, it will fall on deaf ears at the first circle.
Result: recruitment agencies that publish highly shareable content win

Content wins every time
In every update, content has been the clear winner. Put simply, recruitment agencies that publish regular, high quality, original, shareable content are more likely to be returned in Google search results than those that don’t.

How Much Does your Job Cost You

I've been sent this "How Much Does your Job Cost You" infographic from Guardian Jobs.  It's a nice visual representation of how much time we spend on getting to work and buying coffee and lunch during the working day.  In these tough economic times who wouldn't want to save over £260 a year by making their own sarnies!!