Paul Bannister » Talent Management

SEO your CV …or is it Resume?

Paul — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:24:00 +0000

As social media, web3.0, mobiweb and clouds advance forward as a raging technology tsunami – a job seeker might well be asking themselves whats the best way of getting my CV or resume to a recruiter in a way that I can give myself the best chance of getting noticed.

Naturally we’ve all got our paper based version tucked away in the coffee stained folder marked “Job applications” that of course is a few years old or at least as old as the last time you were in the position of looking for work.

Any design oriented person would have ensured that their name was in 34 point bold, the font styles were consistent and serif’less, the kerning of the letters would be perfectly formed together with a nice pantone #344 border around the CV ensuring that if the document was in a pile on someone’s desk – then the border would make it stand out and entice the reader to view it.

Line managers will soon turn to their trusty Google and query you.

Nowadays – of course your CV and application would be formatted, stored and searchable within monster.com, or uploaded to an applicant tracking system like ours, and presented to the client in a nice structured manner together pre-filtered and qualified with automated scoring and evaluation criteria already wrapped and calculated. In essence you need to make sure the skills you are strongest in are of the appropriate keyword density and your location is clearly stated as in most cases recruiters love to hire local candidates.

Thats all great but how will it evolve. I expect as time moves on – the line managers (who get presented with the shortlist) might well turn to trusty Google and query you. Yes you! If you are at management level or advancing in your career then chances are someone may look for you on the search engines with a view to checking you out. So how do you make sure you will get found – especially if your name is quite common.

Setup your online CV

Today – its easy and I mean really easy..to setup an online profile of you. At a basic level you can go to wordpress.com or blogger.com (part of Google) and setup your own blog page. You may be a little more advanced and have already bought your domain name (well done) – if you haven’t, get it now as an exact match… ie. “FirstnameFamilyname.com” .. or .org .net .co.uk .org.uk. The next step would be to make sure you have a good profile on LinkedIn – in fact make sure your external URL has your name in it now. (its a bit of landgrab – just like facebook was when it let you choose your public URL)

Once you have something setup – if have read any of my previous articles you will know you need to focus on two areas. On and Off-page SEO. For On-page you need to follow these rules:

1) Ensure that your URL contains your name (firstnameFurname) or with a hyphen (firstname-surname) – but keep it simple and leave out your intials.

2) Then make sure the page title has your name and jobtitle.

The page title is set in the html right at the start under and looks like this for example:

 Paul Bannister | Expresso Coffee Expert | London

Its important that the job title is generic and is commonly used. Put yourself in the recruiters shoes and think what they might be looking for.

3) Then set the header H1 – and here I would put your name, but also your location.

Should look like this:

Paul Bannister - London

4) Lastly – use the description. It should look like this:

So the objective is to get your 2 or 3 key skills in the description.

The rest of your CV should sell yourself as normal. I’m not going to tell you how todo that as there is plenty great information our there for you.

The next step is the off-page SEO and backlinking – watch out for the next post where I’ll go into where the magic happens.

Image credit: SocialIsBetter

If You Pay Peanuts You Get…

Paul — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:32:04 +0000

I‘m amazed sometimes that large enterprises with great brands sometimes completely forget the basics of procurement for talent management software.

We have been talking to a couple of companies recently, and have found ourselves being compared to a competitor we have never heard of. That obviously concerns us – but what’s really worrying is that from an analysis of the provider in question we find that the service they are selling is extremely basic, and probably represents a tenth of the functionality we provide – so why is this prospect looking at it so seriously? Sure enough it turns out that the client likes the idea of a simpler solution. Ah – so fair enough, we have to get better at delivering our products that are not only completely flexible, configurable with a great UI but also simpler to use.

Then I thought, how robust are they? – After looking at their applicant tracking website and to my horror you can see their entire online application internals (ie. their log files) are completely open to the public Internet, including their data cache. So anyone with a snooping mind could not only look at all their customer url requests, but could also potentially expose the candidate personal data. If that is not a breach of data protection I don’t what is.

But lets give them the benefit of the doubt – they must be new to this game and their customers will run a simple penetration test, and I’m sure they can close all the holes quite quickly. They must be a company in good standing for the customer to be even talking to them? – I tell myself. However a quick check at companies house reveals that not only have they got a revenue of peanuts – they are also insolvent, and have been so for the past few years.

The point of all this is that being a SaaS provider you have a duty to deliver a quality service that is available, secure and has proper disaster recovery so that your customers can trust you. If you do not subscribe to these principles – then don’t compete in this space! If SaaS starts to get a bad reputation for poor reliability, insecure and flaky delivery then we all suffer. At the end of the day we are managing other peoples data and we have duty commercially and morally to respect that.

And to the blue chips who are buying services like this – please – do the due diligence and don’t buy in to every person who comes through the door with a nice story on social media.

Are Your Vacancies Optimized For The Web?

Paul — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:45:28 +0000

If you are in recruitment or HR you know that getting quality response for your jobs is essential. Many of you are using job boards and job board aggregators like Broadbean to get your vacancies broadcasted. Hopefully you are also using indeed.com and trovit as these are free and all you need to do is make sure your posting is well structured (specifically the xml) in order to get the best out of them.

What about your job posting page itself? If you are using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or recruitment software that creates the posting pages you need to check whether these getting reach. By that I mean if you go to one of your pages on your website – is it optimized for SEO?

Firstly a quick primer on Search Engine Optimisation basics:

With SEO you need view your site/pages in two ways. These are called “on page” and “off page” seo factors and these are what contributes to your page being found online.

Offpage factors are what Google (and others) use to assess the quality and demand for your type of information, and it uses the concept of backlinks to measure these. Think of them in terms of votes. Links to web pages with anchortext set to your keyword will create higher rankings in Google. The quantity and quality of the links dictate the ranking. You can measure the quality of the link by analysing the Page Rank (PR) of the page the link is coming from.

Onpage factors relate to the structure of the page itself, the content and the words relating to the search phrase or keyword. The following points are the most important:

Ensure that there is traffic for the keywords you are trying to rank for.
The keywords are in the Meta Title and description of the page.
The keyword is in the URL
The keyword is in the H1 tag.
The text on the page should be at least 400 words, with the keyword being mentioned at least 1% but no more than 4% of the text.

So how does this apply to my job postings?

Ensure the job posting has its own page and is well formed (ie meets the points above)
The page title must be accessible directly – ie. no iframes – Check with your ATS vendor that your jobs aren’t framed.
The page title must be the role, location and skills
The page description (Meta Description) should include the same elements, but written as text someone can actually read. It should also include similar locations and skills and roles.
The job role should be in the H1 and should be written similar to the title.
A google compliant sitemap.xml file needs to be published with the references to the pages, with the correct indexing frequency defined.

OK..so that seems straightforward…but what about traffic?

One of the key factors to check is that your Job Title keyword is searched upon using generic traffic. What this means is that if you post a vacancy with the jobtitle directly related to the position the candidate is going to fill and not what candidates are searching for, then you will your time. For example if your position is “Head of Prepay Voice Commercial – Wapping” then the job posting should be written “Sales Manager – Telecomms – London”. So you need to put yourself in the candidate’s shoes and think about the types of positions that they will be searching for and write your postings with that in mind.

Of course your ATS vendor should be doing that for you, and automatically converting your specific titles into generics to reduce the work and streamline your posting process whilst optimising your postings to get the most traffic possible. They should also be mapping for similar locations and job types to ensure you are covering the maximum possible searches both short and long tail.

Let me know if you have any questions with this, as although I’ve tried to keep this topic simple, it can get very advanced and detailed, and its a key point to get right with your careers site or recruitment agency job board.

image credits: flickr.com/photos/sillyjilly
Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army

Behind The Cloud Is a Silver Lining

Paul — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:18:51 +0000

Just finished reading “Behind the Cloud – Marc Benioff.” This is the man and the story behind Salesforce.com. If you want to get into the mind and understand the company ethos of the biggest success story of the last 10 years in the software as a service space its a must read – in fact Salesforce.com started SaaS as we know it now. He calls it a playbook – the whole story divided into 10 Parts and each part split in to around 10 “plays”. It covers his philosophy from startup to marketing, sales, technology and most importantly corporate philanthropy. The style of writing makes the book easy to dip in and out of as well as a cover to cover journey through the trials and tribulations of the evolution of startup to corporate.

To be honest his startup was a lot more glamorous than the ones I’ve been involved with (after all he seeded it with $6m from his pocket) – I’m not talking expensive jets and so on – but certainly great locations and interesting offices employing the true dot com lifestyle of relaxed attitudes, Hawaiian shirts combined with through the night working sessions. He talks about some of the guerilla marketing tactics employed to challenge Siebel, the then crm leader by camping next door to their offices, interrupting and picketing their (Siebel’s) conferences and trade shows – it makes for great entertainment. I can imagine when you have little to lose (in marketing terms) and much to gain, controversy like this will certainly win out against the establishment (old style ERP software for example).

To me it was not like a typical “I’m a great Entrepreneur – look at me” story, but something that will provide many people with some valuable tips or principles about how to approach business, run startups and run an organisation with real culture while providing value to the world around them. Its really worth looking at his 1-1-1 model (1% equity, 1% time and 1% product) model for using business to promote and contribute to good causes. The time element is probably worth more than anything else – as it allows all employees 6 days a year todo something that actively contributes to their community of choice.

Why is this important for HR? – Attraction and Retention of employees. GenY (Is that term overused?) candidates want to work for companies with a greater mission than profitability. They want not only a rewarding career and environment but also for a company that has values and contributes back into their community. But we know this right?

Grab the book – read it and enjoy it. It has an upbeat style and moves along with a compelling pace. Who knows you may feel inspired to implement a couple of ideas in your organisation.