From budding startups to multinational corporations, hiring managers share a common goal: attract top talent. It’s no secret that companies vie for high-quality candidates. In fact, a 2017 study by PWC found that “ 77% of CEOs see the availability of key skills as the biggest threat to their business.” However, there are actionable strategies firms can implement to recruit well-qualified candidates.
Below, 8 thought leaders share their advice on hiring the best talent.
Focus your Search
One of our beliefs that we preach to clients is to “focus.” The more focused a recruiting search, the more qualified candidates that our clients receive. The same can be said for an SEO strategy. The more focused a Human Resources department can be on the types of roles they anticipate needing on a recurring basis, the more an SEO strategy will help support. For example, if a high turnover role is a Customer Service Specialist, an SEO strategy can create content targeting that role to keep the top of the candidate pipeline full.
Michael Bratta, HR Staffing Agency
Develop a Talent Pipeline
One of the best things a company can do is develop a talent pipeline. When a website attracts organic search traffic, what are the calls to action? One of those calls to action can be to join a talent community for future employment opportunities. This is especially helpful if your company has put a pause on hiring, but still want a head start for future searches. Simply have a Careers page with a form prompting visitors to join for future opportunities. That way, you can leverage your SEO search positions to help fill future hiring needs more quickly.
Ryan Nouis, Executive Staffing Agency
Keyword Research
Ensure you have done your keyword research and have decided that whatever you are going to highlight in your content is consistent throughout your online persona. There cannot be any incongruence or both the algorithm and the human will sniff it out.
Thomas Ahern, Embark Behavioral Health
Put Time and Energy into Marketing Open Jobs
It’s funny that companies will spend a lot of energy and resources marketing their products, but they just assume that job seekers will respond to just another boring ad. Anyone looking for a job at your company will do a Google search. So what will that applicant think about you after reading the results?
Create Content
There’s no better way to attract talent using SEO than to get into the psyche of those attractive clients. Understand what they are truly looking for and create a tremendous amount of content (audio, written, and video) to solve their issues and indirectly hope you’re position that is or could be open solved their problem.
Gresham W. Harkless Jr., Blue 16 Media
Use Common Job Titles
Look at common job titles for your industry and make sure yours line up with what others are calling it. While ‘SEO Wizard’ may sound cool internally, nobody is going to be searching for it. Make sure you have a dedicated page on your website for each job opening as well. This will give you a better chance of showing up in search.
Be Consistent with Keywords
Be consistent with the use of your keywords, and use them inside every post, every blog, every article. Discipline and focus will pay off.
Nicole Spracale, Nicole Spracale Coaching & Consulting
Add Structured Data
Search engine result pages are now dominated by Google Jobs listings. You can attract more job seekers by adding job posting structured data to your job posting web pages. By adding structured data, your job postings will be eligible to appear in the Google Jobs search box in Google Search results. Alternatively, if you don’t have development help to add structured data to job posting pages, you can also integrate with Google by using a third-party job site.