Let's talk sourcing. What does your playbook look like? How are you developing leads, traffic to your job listings, traffic to your career site, and traffic to your email inbox and phone? Are you primarily relying on paid methods such as job boards like Monster and Careerbuilder, and paid search listings on Google, or maybe even paid services such as Jobs2Web to produce desired job seeker traffic? These are paid strategies and can be very expensive. Also, guess what? Your competition is doing the exact same thing! But you already knew that didn't you? It's time to think in terms of organic for your sourcing strategies moving forward, as in ramping up organic traffic vs. paid traffic. It's a lot cheaper than paid strategies. In fact, it's free! Let's explore this concept of organic sourcing further.
I'm no SEO expert, but I've been tinkering with using different sites and communities online to generate organic traffic, as well as trying new things with this site right here. Specifically, I've been playing with metadata, metatags and watching and using specific key words carefully in each place I post something, say a job posting for instance. My ROI has been pretty good. I've been measuring with Google Analytics and a few other tools to get a clear picture of where my traffic is coming from, and see what's been working and what hasn't.
Here are a few things I've noticed that I think most recruiters will find helpful. First, Google works fast! I'm talking 24 hours fast. I put the keywords "location-based recruiting" in a recent post on this site (in several key areas of the post and in the metadata), and within a day, I was the #1 result on Google for that term: location-based recruiting. Getting into every specific detail on how to arrange your key words and other SEO tricks could fill a book, but I will give you a few things to explore on your own. Take a look at The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web and also Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. No joke, these two books helped give me a new perspective on how to improve my sourcing skills, specifically in pulling more traffic and leads organically.
