They can be used as a recruiting tool, but so can a guy standing on the street holding a sign.

One thing is sure – if you aren’t at least reading blogs online, then you won’t understand what is happening online.

You have to put skin in the game – and the only way to learn blogging, is to blog.

http://www.stlrecruiting.com
http://www.recruiting.com

The tools are out there. They just have to be customized and implemented. The problem being that few if any companies have someone on staff to play with all the bells and whistles.

Rand (at seomoz.org) posted an interesting article about the untrustworthiness of blogs as a misconception, that indeed many visitors trust the sites they visit. One of the key benefits to a recruiter is not going to be sourcing immediate openings, but to establish trusted relations with the readership. This is a long-term pay-off rather than a short-term one.

It is no replacement for a high readership site like ERE, it is just one tool in the marketer’s arsenal – as it should be for recruiters.

I guess I take a non-traditionalist approach to marketing. I care less about the number of eyeballs on the medium and more about what it compels them to do (yeah, click through rates are great and all, but if you don’t have any sales, nobody cares). Results driven from the blogs have been hires, media attention (WSJ, NYT, Fast Company), coverage by business influentials, employment brand enhancement (good luck measuring that without a huge budget…I’m content to say that we are enhancing it without having to quantify it). Yesterday, I got a call from a new hire that was responsible for making systems recommendations at her last employer (and the choice was Linux, by the way..ugh). She now works here obviously, and told me the reason is Gretchen’s and my blogs…the content changed her perception of our company. That’s worth more than some marketing stats (especially because we hear this all the time).

I will say that blogging isn’t for everyone, but I’m not comfortable throwing out a whole medium (or dismissing it as a ‘fad’) just because it’s hard to measure. Journalists would like to have you believe it’s a fad too. I always tell people that if you blog, you need to be comfortable with squishy metrics. I obviously am, and our team budget for ‘traditional marketing’ like print ads can now be applied elsewhere. ; )

By the way, thanks for the coverage Dave (and for changing the subject!) ; )

Buzz marketing is great for building awareness among a relatively small audience in a limited geographic area. On a broader scale in a global marketplace, a buzz is far less effective than an ongoing dialogue through an established credible communication brand.

Experienced, qualified, business professionals who consider themselves passive job seekers seek career information through sources they consider credible. Great employment brands are like great product and service brands, it’s takes time and money to build a great brand and there’s no way around it. Microsoft didn’t build their brand on buzz marketing and know that when recruiting experienced, qualified professionals they get what they pay for.

The blog is and should be an element in a recruiting strategy but should not be viewed as replacement for advertising when attempting to build an employment brand. By their very nature blogs do not normally reach a mass audience of professionals to function as THE primary means of recruiting.

Anyone in advertising will tell you that the advertising vehicle is only as good as the audience. If you are willing to spend your time and money using a blog as a one-to-one marketing tool, then good for you. But, if you are aiming to build a brand and attract new prospects, then you need to mass market to your target audiences.

How many people in your target audience are reading your blog? How many people in your target audience will be attracted to, and read your blog? How many new readers will join each month. I think if the pro blog enthusiasts use the same kind of metrics that advertisers use with other media, then the true nature of blogs for marketing will be revealed.

Don’t get me wrong, I think blogs are cool and companies are using them to do some marketing. But, the buzz is really small when compared to what traditional mass marketing can do.

Mass marketing does not mean spending millions of dollars. Marketing can easily be done on a mass scale using email.

Whoa!, you say. That’s spam. No it is not! We send out over 25,000 emails every month to our candidate lists. We provide a free jobs list for the pharma and biotech clinical research marketplace. Typically our monthly email jobs list has over 150 open positions. Recepients of our emails often write us back and thank us for the list.

This is just one example on how you can mass market with email. Unless I can get 25,000 of my target audience to read a blog, I am much better off promoting my jobs list.

When you read the next ‘Blogs are Great’ article, see if you can find the numbers of readers there.

Blogs are quite interesting. There certainly are plenty (going by your stats) and I would say a very large percentage possibly never get read by anyone other than the creator, or by very small numbers of people. So does that mean people should stop writing or putting the effort in – NO. Whether you use it as a work or personal diary or attempt to SPIN one into a disguised sales, marketing, recruitment drive, etc – they can be valuable for a variety of reasons. Maybe I should start one?

I would however question the reference to LOW COST. This is a typical statement we often hear from government employees in Australia – they only measure expenditure ($) and rarely (and have difficulty understanding) take into account Salary costs, productivity losses, priorities, job function, etc. Large companies can (and do) make the same mistake. ‘boss aren’t you happy, have a look at this blog, it hasn’t cost us a cent, fantastic isn’t it?’
Not mentioning that X hours per week (or day) of a senior employees time is spent writing it, and who knows how many other staff involved in reading, commenting, checking, editing, etc.

If a CEO is spending time writing a BLOG in their own time (leisure time)- then fine. If a CEO was working for me, I’d certainly want to make damn sure the ROI was proven. Maybe it’s a good stress management tool.

Microsoft can use it – why not. After all they’re a technology company. They also generate an incredible amount of hits (by being Microsoft) equating to great ranking, etc. So they have a higher chance of someone in the world finding the blogs or searching for them. Microsoft should do it. eg. If I owned a Fishing Tackle shop I’d encourage my staff to go fishing pretty regularly.

Anyway, the point to this reply is that Blogs ARE an interesting tool and have a potential use in many circumstances, however you would want to be very clear about the ROI. Writing effective articles does take a reasonable amount of time.

Not only HOW many people are reading them, but WHO is reading them and where are they LOCATED.

I still wonder HOW people have the time to read blogs. Must be better time managers than I??

You can be the judge of whether I am a credible source on career info, but frankly, I believe a blogger just needs to be able to point to credible sources in order to provide relevant content for readers. I’ll try not to take your comment personally since we haven’t met ; )

I don’t think anyone is saying replace advertising (and I differentiate between brand ads and job ads). I’m not using my blog to build a new employment brand, just augment the ones we’ve got.