If you’re a recruitment agency with a decent marketer, your organisation’s digital strategy right now focuses on three separate channels: Search (paid and organic), Social Media and Mobile.
Now, imagine a world where search optimisation, social media and mobile can be pulled together into a single integrated digital campaign. How can this be achieved? Here’s a big idea, use Google+ to bring everything together!
What you need:
- Company Website: your company website should be able to publish every open job that your recruiters have.
- Google+ Profiles: every recruiter in your organisation would need to have an active Google+ account and in their “About” page under the “Contributor To” section, would link to your company homepage.
- Google Authorship Tags: – snippets of code that provides verification between a Google+ profile and that individual’s published online content. For each advertised job there should be a link to the recruiter’s Google+ profile which includes the rel=”author” tag. (Using the free Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool can verify whether or not Google Authorship has been set up successfully.)
Once implemented, a typical search result should look like this:
Disclaimer: The author is currently employed by Experis Switzerland as a Digital Marketing Assistant.
The theory:
A typical recruitment agency website will have SEO “champion pages” based around skill sets or job types, e.g. a page optimised for the phrase “.NET jobs” will list all the open vacancies relevant to that skill. For agencies where recruiters specialise in sourcing for one or two skills, it’s a great opportunity to showcase their authority in that area, and increase the exposure for their advertisements. By adding the Google+ authorship tags to these champion pages, you can increase the traffic to your website easily without having to constantly fight your way up the page ranking.
Basically, the headshot of the recruiter which appears alongside the text listing in search results draws the eye and attracts clicks. The user’s attention is naturally drawn to the image of the person, which makes the issue of position in the search results ranking almost irrelevant.
Google hasn’t explicitly stated this, but “Author rank” may influence search results further. So it is in the recruiters’ best interest to publish high-quality and shareable content in the form of job postings as well as stimulating interaction on their own posts on Google+. At the very least, this should increase the recruiters’ activity and number of connections on the network.
So where does mobile come into play?
Google has recently expanded the reach for the Google+ platform by introducing a content recommendation for mobile sites. By adding a single line of code to your mobile site, Recommendations will start to appear on your site. Google has aimed to make content discovery as seamless as possible so that when a user reaches the bottom of an article and starts to scroll up (indicating that they have finished reading), recommendations for similar type of content will appear.
The recommendations are based on content from your Google+ circles (if you’re signed in), what the content was about and the content’s author.
What does this mean for a recruiter?
As long as the authorship tags have been added, jobseekers will get recommendations for similar jobs published by the same recruiter as they browse through the company’s mobile site.
From a candidate’s perspective, this will offer a better experience as they seamlessly discover other jobs which are more relevant to them or have been endorsed by their circle.
As search results are increasingly influenced by social media, recruitment agencies can take advantage of Google+’s features to differentiate themselves in search results instead of competing solely on rankings against other agencies and job boards. By using the authorship function, it inherently promotes the recruiters and creates brand ambassadors out of them. It should also drive traffic and engagement both on the website and the recruiters’ Google+ profiles. This strategy essentially creates an ongoing loop that supports the website and the recruiters’ online visibility and credibility.
