Web 2.0 Candidates Are:

• Faster. Candidates can gain access to more available jobs within minutes on any day.
• Smarter. Access to salary, compensation, and corporate performance data is everywhere.
• More Connected. Social networks help candidates identify insiders at any employer before or after they apply for any position.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Faster

When job boards came on the scene 10 years ago, they made accessing available job information much easier for candidates. No more digging through the classified section of the Sunday newspaper, crafting up witty cover letters on fluorescent letterhead to get attention and postal mailing resumes. Remember when we’d put our fax numbers on our ads? Come on: how many candidates really had fax machines in their houses? Today, there are “job aggregators” such as indeed.com and simplyhired.com which put all the jobs from multiple job boards into a single search engine that stream directly into any candidate’s personal home page on Google via RSS feeds every day.

I think one of the main reasons that recruiters are after “passive candidates” is that we think we have more time to get them through the interview process, versus “active candidates” who machine-gun apply from job boards to a dozen jobs on any Monday. With the latter, we have to get them setup with an interview within 24 hours and make a hiring decision within two to four days. That’s how fast the market is moving with so much job data available online.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are Smarter

In addition to having access to an ocean of jobs, most candidates tap into salary and compensation data via sites such as payscale.com and/or salary.com. Not to mention that the younger generation of workers aren’t shy about sharing their comp levels in the lunchroom or over beers, unlike our parents’ generation who considered salary discussions to be so taboo they would only share this information with the IRS when filing their annual tax returns.

Many recruiters have candidates show up with a salary report printed from one of these salary sites and demand that their pay be at or above the level on the report. Candidates don’t care if our job descriptions aren’t perfectly matching the ones on those websites; they just see the numbers and get an expectation that’s usually out of line with our compensation levels. Regardless of how you handle this situation in your interview process, employers are under pressure to know how their pay grades compare to other major employers in their markets.

Web 2.0 Candidates Are More Connected

Remember when you would get an applicant resume, see which companies a candidate previously worked for, and then quickly find which of your internal employees had worked with the applicant in the past, in order to get “inside information” to determine if they were a good or bad prospect? (Never mind that 51% of people will comment positively or negatively on someone because of how they liked their personality — and not their actual work performance.)

During the interview process, candidates were lucky to run into a former colleague in the hallways. Or if they get lucky in the interview, they will discover who they might know in common with the interviewing managers and try to discover which “moles” they could find within the prospective company, which would help them do their own due diligence on the employer — not to mention that they will try and gain advocates to help them get the job should their interest grow.

Well, because of the growth of social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and many more), the minute most candidates apply for any job (and sometimes even before they apply for a job), they can now instantly see who they know at any prospective employer, all the way back to their old high school or college buddies.

This tilts the access of information toward the candidate community — who can now see if there are bad previous bosses or old enemies working within your company, which they may wish to avoid. The candidates’ reasoning will be if your company hires personalities the candidate disliked, it indicates that your culture prefers those types of individuals, which will have an impact on your employer brand whether you get a chance to enter the conversation or not.

This puts a new pressure on employers to create a working culture that will attract these more web savvy candidates. These Web 2.0 candidates don’t believe most of our career sites’ language about having an exciting work environment. They want to find out for themselves (via networking) what it’s really like to work within the sub-cultures within our company, which are driven by management personalities and business cycles which are exciting to certain candidate types, and a turnoff to others.

Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:

TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs – 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs – 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs – 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs – 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs – 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs – 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs – 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs – 301,000 searches

TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs – 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs – 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs – 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs – 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs – 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs – 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago – 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs – 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs – 550,000

After you play with this Google keyword research tool, you’ll see how huge the opportunity is for employers who optimize their career site and job content, so that you can drive these Google users directly to your career site.

While most corporate career sites look very snazzy and are designed for employer branding, those efforts can in many cases hurt your chances at getting your career site optimized. By using flash animations, pop up windows, pull down selections, and frames, you could be making your site very cool for users to experience, but at the same time making it so that nobody will find your cool site to visit in the first place.

Try it yourself. Try to Google one of your own job titles and see if you can find your job online.

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is a difficult game, and it’s not helped by most of the ATS players out there, who never built their platforms for marketing purposes, only to manage the recruiting process.

Most employers’ job content is hidden behind a keyword search engine which is great for a candidate who knows what they’re looking for. Google does not, and therefore won’t execute the keyword search, thereby never seeing your job content.

Even if Google did find your job content online, in many cases the basics of optimization aren’t followed by most ATS systems, which means the job titles, locations, zip codes, and other important content components aren’t put into the key areas of each job (titles, headers, meta tags, filename, etc.), which would be necessary to achieve any level of search engine placement. There are dozens of other aspects to optimization that need to be executed in addition to these, but we’ll save those for another day.

Another problem with getting your career site found by Google (using job content only) is that jobs go on and off your career site on a daily basis, which makes it difficult for you to get a higher placement ranking with the search engines using job content which is very dynamic.

Employers would be better off developing “talent landing pages,” which are job profiles for their key hiring need areas that stay online constantly (whether you have open jobs in that category or not), so that Google can always find that page, and that the content within it holds your currently open jobs matching that job profile.

If you’re a smaller employer, then you might be able to do this with HTML pages (talk to your webmaster) that you create and put online for a few of your locations and job titles.

However, enterprise clients with hiring needs in multiple locations and categories will need to seek an alternative. First, try a solution that can interface with your ATS system and automatically pull the open jobs into these pages. Second, the solution will then route candidates back to your ATS system when they want to apply.

This provides candidates with the best possible experience and gets you highly placed in the search engine rankings on Google and other search engines. (By the way, this is a similar strategy to how job boards do their search engine marketing, but rarely do we see employers using the same tactics in their interactive marketing).

In summary, innovative employers (or those looking to go beyond using job boards to do online recruiting) will learn how to compete for these candidates at their first search for jobs on Google, and drive them directly to their career site using either search engine optimization, or search engine marketing to cut recruiting costs dramatically.

Now’s the time to get started. Fall is coming faster than you think, and you’ll need to get started today in order to get on Google’s first page of search results if you hope to be there by September or October.

Quick, look at the following real job titles found on company websites and tell me what they mean:

• Cnslt Sys Eng
• Tech Del Mgr
• Occ Ther Asst
• Phys Med Supv
• P2 Fld Comp Sup
• PA-III

While most of us in recruiting might be able to translate some of these abbreviations into actual job titles, the reality is that most candidates would be completely confused by what role we’re trying to communicate. They would definitely never search for these kinds of keywords within the major job boards or search engines when seeking opportunities.

The primary cause of most job-title abbreviations is corporate payroll/HRMS and ATS systems, which have short character limitations for the job-title field. In addition, their internal language for job titles may cause them to truncate all their job titles. Finally, our corporate desire to create acronyms for our job titles, which seems to help save space on organizational charts, carries over to our external advertising where it may hurt our recruiting efforts.

One of my current tasks is to help companies convert their job titles to “Google speak” so that the candidate marketplace can have a shot at understanding what companies really mean by these job titles. In addition, this enables companies to use candidate and marketplace terminology to help them get the most success when advertising their positions online.

Maximize Job Descriptions with the Right Keywords

Recruiters definitely need to know how to use the appropriate keywords in their job titles. However, don’t stop there. Make sure to have the right keywords within your job descriptions as well.

Getting the job function/title right is a great start and could double the response rate of applicants for any job. But including the skill names (multiple times if possible) and location names is also important in order to ensure the maximum response.

For example, if you are seeking an Oracle Database Analyst in San Mateo, California, include “DBA” (Database Analyst) in the title, as well as the locations near San Mateo, which could include “San Francisco,” “Bay Area,” “Silicon Valley,” and the related ZIP codes for that area to ensure that candidates searching online will find your positions.

Learning how to integrate all these keywords into your jobs is simple. By adding a “Similar Functions:” area and a “Nearby Locations:” area within your job description, you will optimize your chances that your job is found.

For example, if you’re seeking an “Account Manager” who might actually be more like an Inside Sales Representative, you might include “Similar Positions: Inside Sales Rep, Telesales Rep, and Account Executive” in your job description just to catch anyone searching for similar types of positions.

A best practice in building any job listing is to make sure the following data points are in the job title or description:

1. The job title + any acronyms associated + similar or affiliated job titles.
2. The job location + any similar location names + the ZIP code of the job.
3. The skills required and/or desired.

Polluted Job Boards Compound the Problem

The reason writing clear job titles and descriptions is becoming more important is that many of the major job boards are over-polluted with jobs that aren’t relevant to what the candidate is seeking.

For example, if you were a Peoplesoft Developer and do a search for Peoplesoft online, you might find accounting jobs that require the use of Peoplesoft, or sales positions where they are selling Peoplesoft-compatible software, or recruiting jobs that specialize in finding Peoplesoft candidates.

As a result, many of the boards and classified search engines have implemented a “Search in Title Only” feature, and/or have only indexed the job title content. This means that if your keywords aren’t embedded into your job titles, you could be missing out on 50% or more of your potential online job seekers.

This could spell real trouble for companies that do batch exports of their jobs from their ATS systems, because there is no way for you to change your job titles prior to pushing them out to the online job boards. However, you may be able to gain access to your account and can fine-tune titles after they’ve been imported into the sites that you’re advertising on.

Beware, however: you might invest an entire day updating all the titles on your job board location, only to find out that your daily import wipes out all your changes the next business day. Find out ahead of time if this is the case so you don’t lose a day’s work.

Here is a short list of examples with alternate titles that everyone should include in their job descriptions:

• Project Manager = PM, P/M
• Programmer = Developer, P/A
• Quality Assurance Tester = QA, Q/A
• Chief Information Officer = CIO, IT Executive
• Nurse Practitioner = NP
• Registered Nurse = RN
• Licensed Practical Nurse = LPN

Here’s a quick example of how to bundle the title and acronyms: “Project Manager (PM, P/M)”

Invest Some Time in Learning Job Terminology

To learn your “Google speak” titles and acronyms for your job families, simply spend time on the major job boards, go to Wikipedia, and of course search Google to find out how other companies are describing the same jobs that you are promoting. Build up your own library of terms for future reference.

At a minimum, identify clearly abbreviated titles within your own position descriptions, and make the easy changes to your job titles. You’ll likely see some very quick results and a rapid increase in your applicants.

Measure the average number of job applicants prior to investing your time so you can show improvements and make a case for investing more time or effort into this important area of your recruiting strategy.

TTFN. Of course, that is ta-ta for now!