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It's a dizzying realization. The greatest advertising medium to be invented in the last generation is being ignored by corporate recruiters for recruitment marketing. Search engines deliver hundreds of millions of advertising impressions with sponsored text ads worldwide every day. Pay per click advertising on search engines can deliver one of the lowest cost per acquisition ratios of any medium, reaching millions of potential job seekers of higher socio-economic and education levels daily.
Moreover, 10 billion searches are delivered by the top five search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and AOL) each month. Hello? Did you hear that? 10 BILLION SEARCHES PER MONTH! That's "Billion," with a "B." Ya. Ten of them each and every thirty days. (Did you just blink? I'm sorry, but you just missed about 3,800 search results pages to advertise your jobs on. Ouch.) The dollars exchanged by business transactions resulting directly from a search engine search result is in the hundreds of millions daily, but this medium is being largely ignored by corporate recruiters for employment branding and recruitment marketing. The room is spinning. I need a brown bag to breathe into.
No other advertising medium delivers the targeted, one-to-one messaging to specific, proactive audiences that actually, measurably works on three critically different levels for companies and their day to day survival: 1. Branding/advertising; 2. Lead generation; and 3. Direct sales. Oh, did I forget one aspect? Apparently so did most of you. And employment marketing too.
Where are the ads marketing your company as an employer of choice? Why is your company missing from search results? What are you afraid of? You don't understand it? Don't know how to manage it? Heard it was expensive? Think it's all hype? Well I'm here to quell your fears, answer your questions, and help you harness Google, Yahoo! and MSN paid search advertising for your recruitment marketing.
The good news is, you're not the only one missing the boat. The better news is, despite the maturation of SEM over the last few years, you could still use it to corner your job market and differentiate your organization.
Search Engine Marketing Scenarios for Corporate Recruiters - How It Would Work for You
One may argue that the ideal use of SEM would be to deliver ads only against search phrases that are attached to keywords like, "employment," "job," "career," "opportunity," etc. Yes, high Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) are achieved when the content of the message matches the search phrase or keyword. I suggest setting up different "campaigns," aka "AdGroups" that target various aspects of your business for both active job seekers and passive job seekers.
Many active job seekers will start with a major search engine (cuz you can't expect everyone to start at major job portal). Or, more to my point, use SEM in a passive marketing strategy -- deliver an employment branding message when the talent looks for something specific to their profession that is not about jobs. Stand out among the research reports, products, and services related ads and be the only employer hitting that target candidate with a "Hey, don't just buy our product. Work here. We rock," message.
Be willing to sacrifice a high CTR. In this case, that metric has less meaning. This is about reaching the passive audience, and done strategically, SEM can source high quality resumes for pennies compared to other recruitment advertising channels. Remember, this is not broadcast. You can target your audience more precisely than any demographic profile of a TV viewing audience, any magazine readership, any radio buy. Only direct mail has targeting capabilities similar to SEM, but SEM is less expensive than printing and mailing to a list purchase and it's a "green" recruitment marketing tool. Quick, alert the PR department! Next to none can be measured and adjusted in real time like SEM. It's truly unique.
So, here are four scenarios that demonstrate how to use Search Engine Marketing to reach your target candidates. You can deliver a paid/sponsored text ad when your target prospect searches online for:
Here's an example of how one of the passive scenarios would work for a recruiter. Jane is a nurse in Roseville, CA. It's about 10 pm, American Idol is over (shocked that the more dynamic David justifiably prevailed). Jane is cuddled up with her laptop researching the price of nursing scrubs online and needs to buy some cool new designs (Jane's favorite brand of scrubs is Dickies). Jane goes to Google.com, types in "dickies nursing scrubs" and is delivered a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) of organic and paid search results.
When you see the results for yourself you see lots of links to sites selling that brand of nursing scrubs and several, but not too many paid ads for similar sites (indicating less competition and potentially lower cost per click for the keyword/phrase). What's missing? There are no ads at all from local Sacramento market health care employers like Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Catholic Healthcare West, or others.
The best use of search engines in this passive scenario is to use paid/sponsored ads to A. Get your ad out quick and reach Jane immediately, and B. Not jeopardize any optimization efforts of your corporate web site (a whole different issue). So, in this case, any one of those local health care employers could have placed a paid ad against that search phrase to be delivered to the local Sacramento market level only. Yes, Jane sees the ad because she lives in the local market. If she were in Oakland, no ad. Yes, that really works. The ad headline could be, "Wear Cool Scrubs at Your New Job" or "We Provide Dickies Scrubs," and use the rest of the ad space to promote your company as the best nursing employer in town. If you did, you would be the ONLY one...for now.
The real world stories are few and far between, but Boeing gets it and they've used SEM with tremendous success. According to The Chad, "AdWords provided the lowest-cost advertising method employed by Boeing, yet it generated the greatest amount of traffic to the Boeing Careers sites - more than 14,500 prospects were delivered to the Boeing careers page during the course of the (three month) campaign." Quoting the search manager from Boeing's recruitment communications agency, JWT, "AdWords let us use local targeting and optimize ads quickly to help maximize results." When you peak under the hood of Boeing's careers page, you quickly realize this company gets it. But this case study was from nearly 18 months ago. Why hasn't anyone else used SEM in this way? Now's your chance to corner your market while you can!
Eight Steps for Getting Started with Search Engine Marketing
Now that your curiosity is peaked, next you want to know how to get started and give SEM a shot. Here are some steps for getting started.
To Be Continued....
In the next installment next month, I'll demystify the costs and the hype and go deeper into the available campaign controls that help make SEM the wunderkind of the online marketing world.
What are you waiting for people?! Want to learn more? Contact me about how GLR can help you manage your Search Engine Marketing for Recruitment.
Are you using SEM for career marketing? Have good stories to share? Got yourself a horror story? I want to hear from you.
Erik Foss is Vice President, Marketing and Research for Global Learning Resources, Inc. For 14 years, Erik has helped companies improve their strategic recruitment and employee development results by through research, marketing, analysis, and consultation. Erik began in recruitment communications 14 years ago with Rogers & Associates, TMP Worldwide, and ran a strategic marketing and research division for Bernard Hodes Group before joining Kevin Wheeler and GLR. Erik has worked with dozens of global and local companies to improve their staffing strategies, and has conducted staffing related surveys and authored reports for GLR. Erik has been managing Search Engine Marketing campaigns for non-recruitment clients for the last four years. Erik is currently chapter president of the American Marketing Association, Sacramento Valley. He's a husband, a father of three, an original rock band lead singer, songwriter, author, softball player, movie lover, and learned to snowboard at the age of 40. Contact me at efoss@glresources.com. Follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/Erik_Foss.