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Candidates, are they finding your company career web site?

By Bryan Johanson, January 17, 2007

In this week's article, I interview Doug Berg, CEO and Founder of HotGigs. He and his team have recently developed a new product called Jobs2Web which addresses a growing issue for many companies. This interview is not intended to be an endorsement for the Jobs2Web product, but rather an exploration of the issues that make such a product necessary for companies that want to fully leverage the internet for recruiting.

First some background. When the Internet was first invented (not by Al Gore) it was touted as the great disintermediary. No longer would we have to go through middle men to get to products and services. The Internet would flatten the world, allowing buyers to purchase directly from the manufacturer at lower prices, with greater service and more communication. Unfortunately, with only a few exceptions such as Ebay, the first wave of successful Internet companies has really just been another vehicle for middle men to tap their target markets. Job seekers still generally go through middle men like Monster or CareerBuilder.com or any number of other niche sites. With the cost of ads rising (over $400 an ad) and the reach declining, these middle men are getting top dollar, delivering less and providing a market place which does not differentiate job offerings. Doug Berg describes why companies should start driving traffic to their own websites and not rely solely on the job boards. So sit back and enjoy a different world view:

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Question: Doug, tell us what drove you to create a new approach for driving job traffic to the corporate employment websites?

Answer: Good products come out of customer needs. As we talked to many of our corporate clients, we heard a recurring theme. Many had made significant investments in their employment websites over the last few years. They wanted to leverage that investment in technology by establishing their own website as the platform to capture more talent, centralize their branding strategy and, also, the distribution of where their jobs are found to cultivate ongoing relationships with candidates. The goal is to capture people before they become applicants by clearly understanding who is coming to the site.

Question: Why now?

Answer: People are changing the way they look for opportunities and companies need to change the way they find good people. There are over 10 million searches each month for job related content with just the top 20 job related keywords. Candidates are frustrated with the job boards. They apply to lots of jobs, but they never hear back. It's a big black hole. They want a direct connection to their target employers. We work with a group of hospitals here in Minneapolis (HealthEast). They have an ongoing need to find nurses. While some nurses look online for new opportunities, most don't. However, they do look for salary information. Last month there were over 14,000 searches on nursing salaries. Nurses looking for salary information are doing it for a reason. Some just want to know if they are being paid fairly, while others may be frustrated with their current situation. So we've helped HealthEast create a site that offers competitive salary information that is specific to the geography in which they want to recruit. When a nurse searches for salary information, our site comes up and they also see a link to nurse job opportunities at HealthEast. This is all about marketing. The great value of the Internet is the ability to go direct and build a better relationship with a target audience. Just by understanding the audience better, we can offer unique relevant content that pulls people in. (If you want to see how effective it can be. Check it out.)

Question: How do you know what strategy to employ for a particular job category or client?

Answer: We do research. We use a variety of online tools to help us understand which keywords people are using to search for particular positions, what demographic are we trying to reach and also what behaviors particular groups of people are using - not only to find jobs, but also to research topics of importance in their jobs. We want to clearly understand how a specific audience is using the Internet in their jobs. This helps us create a strategy to target that audience. For instance, in our research for HealthEast, we discovered that nobody searches for "Sonogram" or "sonography jobs". They search for "ultrasound". Their online postings didn't even have the word ultrasound in them and their titles all used sonography. Just making a minor change like that can greatly increase traffic.

Question: How can companies start to drive traffic to their websites, without paying huge posting fees to the middle men?

Answer: Companies need to explore alternative sites like Indeed.com, Craig's List, and Job Central. Some of these sites are inexpensive job boards, but most are job aggregators that require a special job feed to participate. (These sites take job postings from websites - corporate and public - and aggregate them into a one stop shopping site for the job seekers.) This is a huge opportunity for companies to slip their jobs directly into the marketplace and drive candidates back directly to their own career sites at no cost. However, most companies haven't configured their jobs to be automatically picked up by these aggregators. Companies also need to change their philosophy about applying to a job. I've heard estimates all over the board, but most experts agree that 75-80% of those people that view job opportunities online don't apply. They don't act. Applying for a job is a huge emotional transaction for somebody and it can take upwards of 45 minutes on certain career sites. (How long does it take on your site? BJ) We want to give candidates easy options to subscribe to career websites so they can be notified of future jobs without forcing them to apply. This way companies can start building a long term online relationship with the candidate. Jobs2Web is trying to shift the corporate recruiting mentality from a hunter to more farming and cultivating (viral networking approach). Companies build an online network of candidates that they can broadcast positions to, communicate with over time, and ultimately help them fill positions faster and directly with their growing candidate community.

Question: What should forward looking companies be watching as the next logical step?

Answer: I think the next big area to explore is adding RSS feeds to employment website. RSS feed is the next wave of content syndication. You can now go to GOOGLE and customize your home page to include content that is personal to you. Using the same technology, we can build highly personalized pages built around a company's job content categories - which puts a company's jobs directly into the personal home page (and everyday life) of their candidate subscriber network. Also, people don't just want to hear about jobs within companies, but rather the culture, projects, and thought leaders they would work with inside future employers; and, companies should consider publishing information (employment newsletters) from within their companies (key projects, promotions, white papers, etc.) from their thought leaders by starting blogs and leveraging their hidden knowledge outside of their closed community.

Question: Is there a downside to this approach?

Answer: I really don't think there is a downside. I suppose there is a risk of too much traffic or bad volume, but in our system companies can unsubscribe an undesirable candidate, which gives them control. It does take time for all these changes to work their way across the various indexes of the web. The Internet is constantly changing. Search engines keep changing how they index content. We have a technical team whose sole purpose is to understand how the search engines work to ensure that our clients' content is indexed quickly and appropriately. I think it's also important to set clear expectations. This is not an overnight fix. This is something you have to nurture over time. Companies shouldn't abandon what they are doing now and focus just on this. They need to launch a strategy that incorporates this and, over time, it will grow and eventually take over.

Question: What industries are ripe for this type of recruiting approach?

Answer: It is a big one. Healthcare, sales, marketing and engineering seem to be receptive. Industrial and manufacturing are not as good. It's also surprising to see keyword searches for truck drivers, which is always in the top 20 categories searched for jobs on the web. So, you have to do your research.

Whether you agree with Doug's unique views or not, effective sourcing strategies today require a higher level of technical knowledge and sophistication. Part of the reason for including this interview in our newsletter is to get this issue on the corporate recruiting agenda for 2007. The world is changing and forward thinking companies must understand it and master it, if they are going to attract top talent going forward. In future articles we'll explore other ways to drive quality traffic to, what should be, our most important source of great candidates - our career websites.