Candidate Sourcing through SEO
You talk to any web developer and one of the first phrases they use is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). You talk to any recruiter (in-house or agency) and one of the first things they say is “how hard it is to find candidates”.
Yet very few Managers of recruitment agencies, think beyond the local job board or LinkedIn. Why is that?
For most of us, when we hear Search Engine Optimisation we become the proverbial “Deer in the Headlights”. Our eyes glaze over and we nod as if we understand what is being said but all we hear is blah blah blah blah blah.
However if the WebDev (Web Developer) guy said, “hey, I can find you so much Talent using SEO its will blow you away”, then you would probably listen.
Little do we know that SEO is probably more important to you then you think. The world is a very different place today then what it was even five years ago. The world today is a marketing world. A world where the internet rules. You won’t be left behind if you aren’t up with it, but you will make life very difficult for yourself.
So how does SEO fit in with Strategic Sourcing 0f Talent?
Before we get started, lets talk about SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. There are two parts to this,
- Search Engine and
- Optimisation.
A Search Engine is what you use to search the web. The most common search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.
Optimisation is manipulating the content on your webpage so that the Search Engines find your site when certain key words are entered.
For example, this article has been optimised for the phrases, “SEO, Strategic Sourcing, Recruitment, Candidate Sourcing”. So when someone types in SEO or Strategic Sourcing, or Recruitment into Google, then Google looks through its library of keywords and say returns all the articles that have these words in them in seconds. hopefully, this article will be in the search results.
Why is this important?
If you run an internal recruitment function, or are an organisation that hires a set number different roles per year, or are an agency that is in a niche market e.g., accounting, then you are a prime candidate for using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to attract talent.
The best way to explain this is through some examples.
The following approximate searches done via Google per month across Australia
- Accounting jobs x 1,800
- Banking Jobs x 2,400
- Real Estate Jobs x 2,600
- Retail Jobs x 165,000
- Engineering jobs x 9,900
- Automotive jobs x 2,300
- Aged care jobs x 14,800
Lets put this into perspective. On seek.com.au today there are 6,000+ jobs in the retail sector. Now we have no way of knowing how many of these are real, and how many are duplicates.
If we assume that each ad costs $150, that is $924,600 in advertising costs. Great for Seek!
Yet there are an average of 165,000 potential candidates searching Google every single month looking for retail jobs.
When you complete a search “retail jobs” in Google and limit the results to Australia only, there are only five companies that come up on the first two pages (not including agencies).
- BP
- Coles
- Vodafone
- Apple
- Australia Post
Lets look at the Aged Care sector.
On seek, there are over 1,000 ads that are related to Aged Care. As we know from above, there are an average of 14,800 searches performed for the phrase “aged care jobs” on Google every month.
That search shows the following companies on the first two pages (not including agencies).
- Bupa
- Regis
- ARCare
- Our Lady of Consolation
- Anglicare
In both of these cases there are a few organisations that are getting access to candidates that the rest of the market may not be.
A word on Search Engine Page Rankings.
Marketing analytics company HubSpot (you need to subscribe to their blog by clicking here), published an article in 2002 saying that 70% of people do not go past page one of the search results. Therefore you either need to be on page one, or don’t bother, and its a lot worse now.
Conclusion
If you think a webpage is to sell your products only, your are sadly mistaken. Strategic Candidate Sourcing for Talent has moved beyond ads on job boards. There is a pool of candidates out there that are looking for you, but cant find you because your web presence isn’t built for them. Search Engine Optimisation is not dead; it is alive and well. You need to understand it and use it to attract your candidates.
I will leave you with this.
If you build it they will not come. If google cant find you and figure out what you do, no one else will either.
Recruitment School has a course dedicated to this topic which you can find here. We have over 20 years experience in the recruitment industry. Couple that with an in-depth understanding and knowledge of Internet Marketing and you have a very powerful combination.
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good post.