Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

A new study by Booz Allen Hamilton, via eMarketer, was released today entitled "Employers Favor Internet Recruitment." According to the story, "51% of new hires in 2005 came about through the Internet, and only 5% through newspapers."

Consistent in their findings was that employee referral systems and the company’s own Web site topped all other recruiting options, saying "companies
are most satisfied with new workers that were referred by current
employees, and from the ones that came about through their own site,
both in terms of return on investment and the general quality of
applicants."

It’s always amusing to me, year in and year out, how well corporate sites do in studies like this while so little search engine optimization and marketing goes on to drive traffic to corporate employment sites. Fortunately that’s beginning to change, albeit slowly. The survey says, "Almost three quarters [of employers] plan to use their own Web sites more as a recruitment tool."

In my experience, the jobs section of every corporate Web site is always one of the most highly trafficked areas. In most cases, the employment landing page is the second most visited page after the homepage.

As a result, corporate sites need to be thought of as destination sites, just like a job board. Once employers come to this realization, the gradual evolution of adopting search engines to drive traffic to job opportunities ideally will occur.

As recruiting icon John Sumser recommends, "Develop a plan to improve the search engine
  placement of the jobs in your database. If you are hiring nurses in 
Providence, you should be trying to be the top result in Google for ‘Nurse Providence,’ ‘Healthcare Providence,’ ‘Nursing Jobs Providence’ and a dozen or so other search phrases."

Amen.

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