How to Generate Canidates for Free!
When I first started writing this blog I had a plan to be on the first page of Google for the term Recruitment Tips, as time went on I stopped checking, partly because my focus had changed and I had turned into a blogger, scary as it may sound.
What has pleased me is that all the work I put into making Recruitment Views successful for this term, has paid off, and now I am at number one position on Google.co.uk and google.com for recruitment tips and would you believe recruitment blog.
Although I may be at number one that could and will probably change, as other sites will continue to try to compete using various SEO tricks, but none the less it certainly made me feel chuffed with myself.
What has surprised me is how few recruitment companies have taken on blogging to generate quality candidates for free, even though I have mentioned it a few times in the past.
To give you an example of how it can work, a couple of years back I was involved in finding welders. Although this was an industry that didn’t appeal to me I was able to generate candidates via Google Adwords, which I wrote about here. What I have not mentioned until now is that I set up another blog at the same time as this site purely for finding welders.
Although I hardly write on International Welder, it generates welding candidates every single day for Indeed.
So if it is something you want to try then I will give you a few of my tips.
- Get a domain that represents the keyword that a candidate would hunt for, such as welding jobs NB anything with jobs in the domain will probably have gone, so look at alternatives i.e. international-welder.
- Get a co.uk domain if you are recruiting in the UK and use a UK hosting company, I used Fasthosts.
- Optimise your site for google, ie include a site map
- Get quality links to your site, maybe from Recruitment Views, just ask.
- Update your site on a regular basis
- Use wordpress as it does most of what you need with some excellent plugins making the process painless.
- Get free advice using Aaron Wall’s SEO Book
- Get someone to do it for you and contact Adam Taylor from Brand Attention, whom I can recommend as he has worked with a few recruitment companies to date.
And if you still don’t believe me Andy Headworth is so convinced at Sirona they offer a jobinablog as a package!
I hope this helps but if you want to know more feel free to contact me direct.
Name and Shame
I have been holding back for a while before I wrote this post, as I wanted to give the company in question time to respond!
It seems not, so I will continue. I was partly inspired by a recent post from Gareth Osborne on “It’s time for a change at the top of recruitment”, because when looking back on my career I was happiest when I was just recruiting. OK it’s fantastic being promoted to Manager then Director, but the heartache of training new young things just to loose your clients was so frustrating, Gareth is so right in how it could be done better.
There is unfortunately an obsession in this industry to recruit young guns to train and promote, when in truth the best are not necessarily the young. How can someone in their twenties give good careers advice to any job hunter or client, as a professional you want to deal with professionals.
I couldn’t help laugh at a recent thread on UKRecruiter “don’t call me mate“, can people honestly believe this is acceptable when it comes to doing business, it almost sums up what some companies produce these days.
The second part in wanting to have a dig, is to name a so called professional company who recently advertised for a European Recruitment Consultant on Linkedin. As it was so relevant I couldn’t help get in touch, knowing how ideally suited I was even though I wasn’t serious in a move. I thought it would be at least worth getting Linkedin and seeing their reaction.
Guess what this company did not have the decency to reply as someone worth Linking in with!
Still I persued the contact just in case the email went missing, on the third attempt I managed to get a reply
Hi Stephen,
Your background is not relevant for any positions we have available.
Rgds
David
Now I maybe assuming here that Robson Taylor fits into this bring them in young and burn them out, I will let you guess, but it certainly strikes me as though they are a company full of their own self importance or was it me?
Fortunately I was not looking for a job, but I cannot help think how short sighted David could be or was David Greenwood just being ageist!
So to finish on one thought;
I had the pleasure of working with a very successful recruiter who billed more business than anyone else at this well known Recruitment Company, but what made her achievement so special was she worked part-time to bring up her children.
Recruitment Views Face Lift
Well I suppose I had to do it at some stage, but I have to admit playing around with any website can be a little dangerous and something I try to avoid. Unfortunately at the weekend Recruitment Views started to play up with its images, so as it was a bank holiday I thought I would chance some maintenance.
While I was at it, I thought I would give the site a complete overhaul.
Firstly I had to upgrade Wordpress, which was a small nightmare last time hence the long delay, but this time it was a breeze as I used the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin from Techie Buzz no problems whatsoever!
Secondly I thought I would change the theme, which is some ways I was sad about but it had to be done and
with great regret I had to take away those seductive eyes, which have stared at me for what must have been close to two years.
So out with the old and in with a new template from Brian Gardner, whom I have to say has some of the best designs for wordpress you can find and this one is free, you are just too generous Brian!
So I hope you all don’t find the the change too over the top, while I do some tweaking.
Grab those contacts from Linkedin
On Recruitment Views I found the following comment from Ravel Lee from eGrabber, in regards to their new capture tool for candidates on Linkedin. Basicly it collects the details and populates an excell spreadsheet which you can upload onto your database.
As we are all interested in Linkedin as recruitment consultants, I thought it would be better to have its own post rather than as a comment.
Update After writing this post Andy made a very relevant comment here, which should also being taken into account at a price of $649 it is a bit steep although it is part of another package, resume grabber. The bigger issue I suppose is that it is taking away the whole point of Linkedin and with that should linkedin let scrapping of details be allowed!
Hi
I thought you will be interested to
know that my company, eGrabber (www.egrabber.com), has just
released Social Network Grabber for Excel.This tool enables recruiters to capture and import all LinkedIn profiles
from LinkedIn search results into Excel with a single click!
There is no programming to do. This tool can be given to admins
and others to help create an initial database of prospects.The tool automatically opens each individual profile and imports
every attribute from the LinkedIn profile into a column in Excel.
All formatting is automatically and professionally handled.Recruiters can quickly shortlist candidates and forward the Excel
list to hiring managers. Links within Excel allow hiring managers
to directly access resume. This is a real time saver!For more information, please visit
http://www.egrabber.com/resumegrabberpro/rg_lidriver.htmlRavel Lee
408-705-1106
408-516-5671
Business Development Associate, eGrabber.com
Developers of resume sourcing tools for 12+ years
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