Jobinablog

Your own FREE Recruiting Channel on YouTube

You are looking to sell your company to prospective employees aren't you? Well YouTube have a great slant on their product that enables you to set up your own FREE recruiting channel. So when you have set up your new career site or Jobinablog site, you can simply insert the videos you have made about your company and what it is like to work there. What a nice and easy way to freely promote your company - which is still a relatively unique way. Not many companies show video of their company on their websites, so it will really make yours standout! Chris Russell of JobsinPods has put together this nice guide of how to set it up.

Employee referral schemes - now online and easy to manage

The SME marketplace is a competitive recruitment environment, with these companies needing to make sure they maximise their recruitment opportunities. One area that seems to get missed, either through lack of time or inclination is employee referral schemes. Companies need to take their blinkers off because the staff are some of the best sales tools they will have at their disposal, and will happily be involved in the recruitment process.

One forward thinking company, who have already brought us Jobtonic, have now developed an online employee referral scheme aimed particulalry at SME companies.

It is called ReferitLite, and they provide a fully trackable way of extending out vacancies from an internal employee referral network, out to many levels of referrals externally. The beauty is that the clever software handles all the tracking of fee splits and even manages the payments, to save the companies the hassle. So if your employee referral scheme has become dull and unproductive, take a look at this!

Jobinablog.com - a new breed of career site.

So Jobinablog - what is it then apart from a catchy name? It has been designed to target SME companies to help them recruit staff directly through their own website. Using blog functionality and flexibility, Jobinablog can become a fully branded career site or jobs pages that fits seamlessly into an existing website. It is a very simple but effective way of being able to recruit staff in an exciting way.

Download jobinablog_how_it_works.ppt  (you will need sound). This a easy to watch/listen presentation that will show you exactly how Jobinablog works. Alternatively, here is the presentation in a video format.

So if a company is fed up and disillusioned with recruiting via third parties such as recruitment agencies, Jobinablog will give them a very cost effective method of  direct recruitment, that becomes a key part of a recruitment strategy. And because it is in a blog format it is very good for search engine optimisation (SEO) and naturally high search engine rankings which is great for a company and their marketing budget! More importantly, candidates now want to see exciting career pages, they want to take a 'good look' at a company before they even send a CV, so having an appealing career site is now becoming an essential part of any companies recruitment strategy. Take a look at a Jobinablog client example, and how it works.

Drive more traffic to your Career Site - Part 3

So after looking at SEO and PPC in my last two posts on driving traffic to your career site, which one should you be using to help your business?

Research has shown that in terms of searchers, the organic search results are what they pay most credence to, but only if you are on the first page - and to a lesser degree - the second page. Past that and most people don't even bother! Nearly as many people look at the adwords adverts that appear above the organic search, but only one third of people look at the adverts on the right. So it is important to be in the Top 10 (Top 20 lesser)) organic searches on Google and Top 6 on the PPC adverts.

So what are the advantages of SEO and PPC?

Drive more traffic to your Career Site - Part 2

Following on from Part 1, this looks at something that everybody has heard about, but not necessarily something that too many people understand - Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. What I am primarily referring to is Google Adwords, as they are the most prolific method in the UK, as as Google has 78% of the UK search traffic you can see why!

PPC advertising allows you to get your adverts (and website) appearing on the results pages of keyword searches carried out on Google and therefore directly under the eyes of the searching buyers! - I am sure you have seen then (highlighted below) and you have probably even clicked on them!

 

Drive more traffic to your Career Site - Part 1

This is the start of a short series looking at driving traffic to your career site (or jobs section of website). This first part is to do with organic (the best ) traffic, that comes from your site appearing high up in the search results on Google, Yahoo or MSN etc.This is achieved by addressing your website's Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

So, here are three key steps you need to do to improve your search engine ranking (obviously establish where your starting point is by carrying out some test searches on the three primary search engines):

Recruiting staff in a SME

Recruiting staff at SME's can be problematic at best, as owner/managers do have a slightly different approach to hiring their staff. I thought that an article I wrote last week elsewhere was very relevant for the subject matter of this blog. I was looking at how recruitment can be improved within SME's.

Here are some of my thoughts on how SME's should go about recruiting staff in an practical and cost effective way. The first steps to do are:

You thought a blog was radical??

And you thought that putting jobs in a blog was different!! Here are seven social media methods that could well give you nightmares (if you could manage all the time you needed for them all), if you really wanted to stay ahead of the game!!

1. Microblogging - Twitter, Pownce & Jaiku
2. Blogging - Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad
3. Podcasting - live using BlogTalkRadio or Talkshoe, recorded using Podango or Wordpress
4. Social networking - Ryze, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook
5. Social bookmarking - StumpleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us
6. Photo sharing - Flickr, Bubbleshare
7. Video sharing - Blip.tv, YouTube, Revver

Don't worry I am not advocating you using all of these, but it is easy to see how confusing it can all be!!

Why will companies accept social media as a recruiting tool?

Chris Russell  - a Social Media expert, highlighted a very interesting post on his blog, regarding getting the 'management' to accept social media as a valid tool in recruiting staff by Jeremiah Owyang. I have slightly ammended the content for british eyes!!

He was conducting a webinar and one of the questions from the crowd was “how do I convince my management to embrace this new social media world?” Many people were having a hard time convincing their management to join in this scary new online world, where customers are talking directly to prospects and your employees are no where to be seen. Convincing management to join the online world can be challenging.

Referrals and networking - simple AND cost effective

One of the most talked about, but least actioned recruitment methods (in my humble opinion!) within organisations is networking through referral schemes. It uses some of the best sales tools you have (your staff), to provide you with a very cost effective recruitment tool.

This image gives a very good representation of how quickly you can reach a whole new circle of people you didn't know existed. Setting up referral and  networking schemes can be done very simply, and there are even some good referral products that even allow you to advertise your jobs to an external referral network.  This is just one of a number of direct recruiting methods that can be used, but for some reason there are many companies that seem to find an excuse not to do it.

Why don't companies want to make their life easier and with efficient, cost effective recruitment methods?  I can't answer this, because it does leave me scratching my head sometimes!!