Simply tips to increase candidate attraction

Are you struggling to attract candidates?

Would you like to know how to increase your application levels?

Below, I've outlined some simple yet affective tips to increase your application levels and help to reduce both your "Time" and "Cost" to hire. Following these tips will drive more engagement to your job adverts and convert for a better ROI (Return on investment).

Tip 1) Job Descriptions: In recent years, I've seen an increase in job descriptions that start off with the a few paragraphs detailing the company history and future goals. This is great for employer branding, but lets be honest not so great for a job descriptions. Most job hunters when browsing are limited to time and in most cases will scroll past this to jump straight to the job description. (thats if they even get to see your job)

In my opinion the best practise is to jump straight into the details of the job and grab the attention of the jobseeker. You only have a few seconds to do this, so make it compelling and straight to the point.

For instance:

"(Your company name) are currently looking to recruit a Mechanical Design Engineer to work within our Design Department. As the/a Mechanical Design Engineer you will be responsible for (add a quick brief of the job in hand) working from our office in (location) on a (permanent/contract/temp) basis."

Use a second paragraph to outline the activities of the Design Department: "Our Design Department are responsible for Mechanical Design activities for New Build Nuclear power stations within the UK and overseas. Due to an increase in work we are looking to grow our design team. Operating form our offices in (Location) you will be part of a best in class department providing mechanical design solutions.

"As the Mechanical Design Engineer you will be required to:" after this bullet point responsibilities, keep them straight to the point and incorporate as many keywords as possible.

After this simply add your next heading: "Skills and Preferred Experience"then to finish off add a brief about your company, keep it brief. If the candidate is interested they will visit your corporate website and make their own mind up.

*Why is it best practise? Well it's simple, the majority of job boards and search engines will return results based on relevance (as shown below), i.e how often the words search by the candidate appear in the top part of a job description, or sometimes known as above the fold.

Tip 2) Google Adwords or PPC (Pay Per Click): This is an attraction technique that is commonly over looked by employers, but yet a great way to drive candidate attraction. I guarantee if you were to Google something like "Mechanical Design Jobs" you will most likely see Ad's at the top of your search results, and they will more then likely be from job boards.

You may think this is a costly exercise? But no, remember you only pay if the link is clicked. Plus you set a budget for each campaign and it's great for exposure for your company. I'm not saying you should compete with the most common search phrases as this would be mad and wouldn't be as affective, what is best is to use more unique phrases for instance:

Using the JD from above and made up location, instead of a campaign for "Mechanical Engineer Jobs" you could try "Mechanical Design Jobs London"the competition will be lower. I've provided a couple of examples below:

* To create your Adward campaign, you will need access to your companies Google account, commonly manned by marketing/webmaster. Then simply go to your key word planner and have a play around with which you feel would benefit your business and drive candidates to your jobs.

My Final Tip) SEO or Search Engine Optimisation: Now I won't lie to you this process takes longer to see the affects, but done correctly will result in lots of traffic and better candidate engagement.

So where do we start, key factors of a good SEO campaign are:

• Link Building - Links from other sites are import and show google you have authority in said topic. However make sure you have links from relevant sites such as Schools, Colleges, Uni's and informative sites within the field you are looking to recruit candidates. Do not pay for links as you may get penalised by google. But the bottom line is the more links you have pointing to a page on your site the likely hood is it will appear higher up the rankings.
• URL structure - Another key factor for search engines as you can populate your URL's with key words. Most direct employer sites forget about this and tend to just add a number for instance:

companyname.com/job/188907.asp this in most instances is because your ATS is not configured properly. Best practice would be: companyname.com/vacancy/mechancial-design-engineer-london as it will index better in google. Plus Google will give better authority to the originator of the content, so if your job description is the same as on the job boards you should rank well, but this does take time.

I would also recommend building Dynamic pages on your careers sites. What are these you ask? This is affectively a static and is permanent within your careers site, here is an example: companyname.com/jobs/mechanical-design-jobs this page will return all job listings when clicked, as it will perform an automatic job search for the jobseeker. It is also permanent so will rise up the rankings, as the content is always changing and content is king.

• Anchor Text: This is where you use text to support your links for instance rather than just adding links such as companyname.com/jobs/mechanical-design-jobs, it should have an anchor text "Mechanical Design Jobs" this is called key word linking and google loves it. You can use this tip on your companies blog, press releases, write a post about your success in mechanical design and how candidates can find a Mechanical Design Jobs and then link that text, simple really.
• Content: In the world of SEO content is king. As a business and leader in your field it is import for your business to be in the public eye with news articles, blog posts and more. This is a great opportunity to add links using anchor text and direct candidates to your career pages.

On your dynamic pages add content, add a paragraph to the top of the page and add some keys words, content above the fold is key to index your page better. Above the fold is the area at the top of your page that google and other search engines including job boards use to find the most relevant details about your page/job. Do not key words stuff it, write content that is appealing and engaging and the search engines will love it and rank your page better and you'll soon be competing with others for higher ranking.

H1tags are important, this is the page header. So in this instance you would have a H1 such as Mechanical Design Engineer Jobs. See if you can also add breadcrumbs to your page, this will be content which is automatic and describe what your page offers.

Add video here to, video is great for SEO. Create a careers page on YouTube if need be and link your video's by embedding the content on to the page. This is simple to do, youtube provide everything you need. You don't even need to embed your own videos, find a video that is informative and featured around Mechanical Engineering.

To implement an SEO strategy you could either pay a company to mange this or simply employ an SEO Consultant within your recruitment team.

I think I've rabbited on enough now, I do hope the above has been both informative and eye opening. If you follow these simple processes you will see results.

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