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Teaching Company Culture to a Newly Hired Employee

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I am not the newest member of the ExactHire team, but I still remember my first day well! Being the new kid on the block can be a little intimidating, especially at a small company. So, ease the fears of your new hires by teaching company culture from the start. You know…the informal, generally accepted ways of doing things in your company that the employee won’t necessarily read about in the employee handbook.

Times Have Changed in the Workplace

In most cases, workplaces are much more flexible and relaxed places to be than in decades past. If this is the case with your office, make sure the new hire is aware of dress code, lunch policy and other activities/tasks on which flexibility is given. This is true for companies that are still very traditional, as well. Think about how uncomfortable a new employee would feel coming to work way overdressed (or way too casual) on the first day of work. Let him/her know the expectations right away…especially since new employees may be hesitant to ask these types of questions directly when first beginning work at a new organization.

Part of the Family

If you utilized pre-employment testing during the hiring process, than you should already know a lot about what makes your employee “tick” and why he/she is well-suited for the role he/she has accepted. Keep that in mind when acclimating him/her to the new work environment and co-workers. If your company has any social media pages, make sure to invite the new employee to optionally view or participate in these pages. LinkedIn will provide a sense of the company’s industry presence or overall market view. Pages like Facebook, will allow the employee to see some of the fun activities your company has to offer (examples could include office parties or working retreats that the employees attend together).

Know Your Company History

It is helpful to teach the new employee about the background of the company, as well as the industry in which it participates. Knowing how the company started and what major milestones have been reached, paints a clearer picture of why the company is what it is today. Some businesses have traditions they keep in place to remind them of humble roots at the start of the company or even just reminders of the original owners. The new employee will more likely feel more in tune with the overall culture of the company as a result of knowing these facts.

By proactively instilling a sense of your organization’s culture with new employees, you are further helping to make the employee onboarding process a pleasant and informative experience. In the long run, employees who engage more quickly are generally more likely to be productive sooner and stay employed with your company longer.

Technology can augment your company’s employment brand which is certainly a key component of the organizational culture. For more information about ExactHire and how we can help, visit our resources section or contact us today.

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3 Tips to Engage Your Applicants During the Hiring Process

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Any decent recruiter knows that it is critical to have an active pool from which to source candidates for jobs, but that doesn’t just mean a large number of any past job applicants. A truly good applicant pool includes applicants that are interested in future positions with your organization and have the qualifications required. Here is an overview of three tips to engage your applicants throughout the recruiting and selection process.

Have relevant and diverse content on your careers site

Maintaining a company careers site with current and RELEVANT job-related and company-culture inspired content will help attract top talent. Your website or career page may be your first impression with the applicant…so make sure it’s a positive and informative experience! This effort shows potential future employees that you are serious about your industry and your team, and it can provide compelling information to elusive passive job seekers who are just dipping their toe into the pool and contemplating job transition.

Moreover, feature this information in various forms and locations:

Acknowledge applicants’ efforts to apply for jobs on your site

Once the candidate has applied to the job, make sure he/she receives some confirmation of his/her formal interest in the company. Making this communication more personalized will help the candidate stay intrigued…think of it as a call to action. Invite the candidate to follow your company via Twitter or LinkedIn in the correspondence text, itself. By doing so, you can start to expose glimpses of your company culture early in the relationship and the right applicants will more likely stay interested in your company throughout the process, as a result.

Make the first meeting unforgettable

Most of the time, the first meeting between a candidate and an organization’s recruiting representative is an interview, so try to find ways to make this experience more positive and remarkable…not just a stiff meeting at an office in a conference room. Set clear expectations about what to expect from the rest of the interviewing process and then be accountable to following through with promises in order to bolster your organization’s credibility and employment brand.

When interviewing top talent for hard-to-fill positions, meetings could take place at a nice coffee shop. This would put the candidate at ease and also make the experience stand out in his/her mind. After all, when courting A players for critical positions, as a recruiter, you are competing against others that want this applicant at their organization, as well.

Finally, thank all applicants for their time…while not a radical idea, this is sometimes overlooked since normally it is the applicant thanking the hiring manager. These types of small details will leave a lasting and positive impression with your candidates.

As a recruiter, part of your job is to “sell” the position to the potential employee and make sure that each candidate is truly interested in the job. Keeping candidates engaged throughout the hiring process will help to ensure your top contenders accept a job offer, start off engaged and succeed at your organization.

For information on how ExactHire’s hiring software solutions can aid your efforts to engage applicants, please contact us today.

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Is Paperless Hiring More Efficient?

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Would paperless human resource processes be more efficient for my small- to medium-sized organization? My cut and dry answer is yes. Since we are all grown-ups, however, we know that there are rarely instances when answers are cut and dry. So, let’s explore, briefly, why my answer is yes.

What do I do with all of these paper resumes?

Do you remember that seminar where the instructor says, “Try to make all of your paper ‘one-touch!’” Could you imagine a world where employment applications were one-touch? That’s a mind-boggling concept.

What do you do with hard copy applications these days? Let’s say you currently accept them electronically (perhaps via email) and/or in printed form (perhaps via mail/fax or at a job fair in person) and put them into a collection pile/email folder (touch #1). Then, you sort through the pile (touch #2) to see which ones you like the best. Oh darn! You’ve just knocked over your coffee; let’s hope this was an electronically submitted version. Then you walk the application stack over to the hiring manager for review if you are lucky enough to be in the same building (touch #3). I’m sure you can sense that this process is getting lengthy.

With an electronic application, there is no need for you to “do” anything with the applications until you’re ready to sort through the proverbial pile. If you want to forward an application to the hiring manager for review, then its three clicks of a button and the hiring manager can check out the application. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even make it to some of my co-workers offices that quickly. Plus, the process of sorting is a whole lot easier when using a web-based hiring software application that allows you to use automatic scoring and disqualification filters on application screening questions.

Paperless hiring helps you to be more productive with your time and de-clutters your office & email inbox.

I can’t read this application; do you know what it says?

I hear school systems are doing away with cursive writing. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it is all of the buzz with this new school year starting. But if focus is diverting from penmanship, then I have a feeling concerns with chicken scratch writing (per my question above) are only going to increase. If everyone completed his/her application or new hire paperwork online electronically, then you would not have to worry about the difference between an applicant’s handwritten number one or seven.

Paperless hiring software makes documents more legible.

We have compliance reporting deadlines coming up. Have you been keeping track of that spreadsheet?

No more need for manually documenting applicant information in spreadsheets! Because all of the information is captured automatically in a database, there is no need for anyone to manually enter information into an applicant flow log spreadsheet for affirmative action reporting, for example; nor, would there be a need for anyone to “catch up” the spreadsheet if it was not kept current.

Human resources software takes the tedious manual tasks out of the reporting process.

The two big efficiency questions are: will paperless hiring save me time and will paperless hiring move the process along more quickly. Yes, paperless hiring will make a compelling impact on both fronts.

To learn more about efficient software solutions for the hiring process, please contact ExactHire today.

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5 Easy Enhancements to Make to Your Company’s Careers Portal

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When was the last time you took a good look at your organization’s recruitment site through the eyes of a potential applicant? I’m talking about just the career-related content you feature on your branded applicant tracking software portal. You can’t remember? Well, whether you don’t recall or perhaps just need a gentle nudge to revisit the candidate experience side of your ATS software, in this blog I’ll outline five simple adjustments to make to the content you feature to entice individuals to apply to job listings on your company page.

While we may work in the HR/recruiting realm and therefore be intimately familiar with the inner workings of our recruiting software, all too often our familiarity may be too focused on the administrative side of an applicant tracking system. And even though much care was undoubtedly given to the intricacies of your employment application and career-related content during your implementation process with an ATS vendor, odds are it’s not something you regularly consider now that you are actively using the tool. Give the following ideas some thought periodically and then make adjustments to keep your career site visitors engaged.

1 – Make the Transition from Corporate Web Site to Career Site Seamless

Careers Redirect Link to ATSIf your organization utilizes an applicant tracking system, then you have the option of easily controlling the presentation of employment-related information on your external ATS site, rather than waiting on your corporate site’s webmaster to make changes to company site pages on your behalf. Some organizations will opt to host career information on the company site and then just list job openings on the ATS site; while others will simply have an “Employment Opportunities” link on the company site that points straight to the ATS site where all employment information is housed.

Regardless of the approach your business takes, just make sure that it doesn’t take your company site visitors too many clicks to get to your job descriptions and application on the applicant tracking software site. Also, since your job listings will live on the ATS site, make sure that you don’t duplicate your efforts by having the descriptions available on your company site, too. Not only would this be confusing for your applicants, but it also could potentially hurt your job listings’ rankings in search results since your two different sites would be competing for the same traffic in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

I recommend keeping things simple by having a redirect link on your corporate site that says something like “Careers,” “Employment” or “Job Opportunities,” and that points to the URL for your applicant tracking system’s external welcome page.

2 – Use a Welcome Page With Pictures and Clear Site Navigation

Careers Site Welcome Page PicturesWhether potential applicants are redirected from your main company web page or are referred from job boards or social media sites, it’s important that you have a general welcome page available to provide interested applicants with more information about employment with your organization. People that come to your careers portal after leaving your corporate site will obviously land on your welcome page first; however, those directed from external job boards will land on a specific job description page within your careers site. Nevertheless, before the latter site visitors apply, they may wish to click on your welcome page link in the site navigation and investigate your organization further.

As a result, it is critical to have an engaging and informative page within your ATS site that serves as a welcome to site visitors. It can briefly describe the types of employment opportunities generally available with your company, as well as what you are looking for in the individuals for hire. Be sure and include interesting visuals such as photographs or videos of the people and products or services that make up your organization.

3 – Customize Your Jobs Page With Instructions & Social Media Tools

When applicants take time to peruse your available job listings, it’s important to make the experience pleasant. For example, if you regularly have many jobs open at a time, then make sure your Jobs page offers applicants the ability to filter job listings by criteria such as location, employment type and department. That way applicants can get to relevant information more quickly. Also, if you occasionally do not have any openings listed, make sure there are clear instructions inviting site visitors to return to your careers portal regularly as well as encouraging them to subscribe to your automated job alert notices.
Get Notified of New Jobs | ExactHire
Lastly, if your company manages any social media pages, then include social media “follow” icons to make it easy for potential future employees to engage with your organization on social networks.

4 – Create Page Links That Discuss Your Company Culture, Benefits & Hiring Process FAQs

ATS Career Content Navigation LinksIn the age of information, your potential future hires want to find out about your organization when they first land on your careers portal. Make it easy for them by creating links in your site navigation that take visitors to more information about what its like to work at your company. Those of us in Client Services at ExactHire are always pleased to see clients featuring lots of rich, relevant content on their ATS portal – it goes a long way in driving more people to your site, as well as engages them to be more likely to finish submitting an application. Here are some ideas on content to feature:

  • Describe the culture of your company
  • What to expect from the interview process
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about working at your company
  • Employee benefit information (insurance, vacation, tuition reimbursement, etc.)
  • …And a page devoted to employee testimonials (more on this below)

5 – Feature Employee Testimonials With Pictures, Quotations & Even Video

Use Employee Testimonial Videos | ExactHireWho better to convince job portal visitors to apply than your current employees who love their jobs! If you haven’t already, round up a group of your top talent…particularly, the individuals who truly are employment brand ambassadors for your organization. Once assembled, solicit your team for candid testimonials about why they work at your business. Pose different questions to different people so you have some variety in your responses when you feature their statements on your employment site:

  • What attracted you to this company?
  • What advice do you give to applicants?
  • How do you describe the culture of this organization?
  • What surprised you most about the company once you started here?
  • Where do you see your career going within the company?
  • What does it take to succeed and thrive at our organization?

Then, record video of their enthusiastic answers to the employee testimonial questions and/or feature their picture next to their quotation on your Testimonials page.

Regardless of which career site enhancement techniques you may employ, the bottom line is that its best to regularly take stock of your approach to ensure that your employment brand is putting its best foot forward. Please share your own ideas for boosting the effectiveness of your career-related content in the comments section!

Ready for a more professional, branded careers portal presence for your company? Visit our resources section or contact ExactHire today for more details.

 

Image credit for video thumbnail: R&L Truckload

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How Do I Choose the Right Applicant for My Company?

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In the June 2013 issue of Inc. magazine, you don’t have to get to page 30 to have a clear understanding that the differentiating factor setting companies apart from their competitors is which individuals they select to hire. The culture fit of a hire is one of the greatest make or break qualities the person can possess.

Luis von Ahn, the co-founder of Captcha, is very forthcoming about what he’s doing differently at his new company, Duolingo, in an article titled “Hire People Who Play Nice. This is Really Important,” Von Ahn mentions team dynamics and cohesiveness. A few pages later in the magazine there is an article, “How Do You Keep a Company Together When the Employees Are Thousands of Miles Apart?”, where Niner Bikes CEO, Chris Sugai, also talks about company culture-related elements such as bonding and diversity.

Don’t Teach an Adult New Behavioral Tricks

You can’t teach your preferred behavioral traits to someone who is old enough to enter the workforce…which sets us up for the ultimate question, “How do I find the right people for my organization?” Simple – you take advantage of the hiring process. Von Ahn spends an hour talking to people who come to interview at his organization. Also, at ExactHire we know that employee assessments that assess both cognitive and behavioral traits can be complementary to the interviewing process in terms of unearthing an applicant’s potential for job fit.

In addition, ask the odd questions up-front. I’ll never forget the day I interviewed with Harlan, our Chief Visionary Officer – he asked me what extracurricular things I was involved in during high school and college. Then he asked, out of those, which was my favorite and what position I held (the answer was soccer and I was either a full back or a marker – defensive positions). For what type of person was Harlan looking? What did my answer tell him about me? I think Harlan was looking for someone who wasn’t going to give up easily and was in it for the long haul.

I have a friend who is a hiring manager for his company and conducts oodles of interviews. He needs someone who is good with numbers and very technical, but also able to think on his/her feet. He will give the applicant several hard numerical questions back to back, firing one off after another, and then ask an off the wall question like, “What animal would you be if you were an animal?” What the answer is doesn’t matter in this situation, it’s if the applicant can think on his/her feet and provide an answer.

Avoid Hidden Hiring Costs

If you are using Applicant Tracking Software (ATS), you can ask questions similar to Harlan’s extracurricular one on the employment application. If you need to see how quickly people adapt to change – because people with those abilities thrive in your organization’s culture – ask during the interview. If you don’t, and you hire the wrong person, consider all of the costs – hard and soft – that have been expended. The soon-to-be employee’s fit with your organization is critically important.

Looking for technology for hiring tools to improve the results of your hiring process? Contact ExactHire today.

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Improve Your Hiring Process: Bring Objectivity to Final Decision

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We’ve covered a lot in this blog series — a variety of ways to make your hiring process more efficient. At the same time, I’m very fond of pointing out to our clients that this process still ultimately boils down to people hiring people. As obvious as that sounds, it’s easy to be misled by various solutions in the talent acquisition space that seem intent on turning hiring into another algorithm. It’s not that simple.

Often, hiring people who have the right skill set and can work well with your team can feel like trying to solve a puzzle. No matter how well you interview or how much you trust your gut instinct, hiring mistakes happen. When they do, they’re painful and expensive. This is where objective data comes in handy.

Discover Behavioral Traits With Pre-Employment Testing

In the case of hiring, I’m referring to employee assessments. More specifically, I’m referring to behavioral assessments that are normed against the adult working population. In addition, these tools should always be validated to ensure that they measure what they purport to measure.

Using tools like these will allow you to get a better feel for how your final applicants are “hard-wired” — not just how they appear to be. Depending upon which assessments you use, you are able to gain insight on behavioral traits like assertiveness, communication style, willingness to change, rules adherence, team orientation, desire for recognition, etc. These so-called “soft skills” almost universally tend to be the reasons why employees don’t stay as long or produce as well as their counterparts.

Just as importantly, most all of the better employee assessment solutions available will allow you to assess your current top performers for these same traits. In doing so, you are then able to generate patterns or benchmarks of what good performers look like for your particular organization. As you can imagine, this significantly adds to the value proposition for these tools.

In most cases, you likely will not use assessments for all candidates — that is often cost-prohibitive. Rather, these tend to serve as another layer of information about your final candidates — information that you typically don’t have until someone has been employed for several weeks or months. Adding this objective data to all of the other information gathered in your process will improve overall hiring results and help you solve the puzzle of building teams.

Regardless of whether your company takes advantage of some or all of the previous efficiency tips offered in this blog series, the use of employee assessments in your hiring process should at least be considered. Getting the right performers in the right positions more consistently will pay huge dividends for your company.

For more information about ExactHire’s employee assessment and job skill test solutions, please contact us today.

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How to Write a Job Description Optimized for Job Boards and Internet Search, Tip 5

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Location, location, location! No, I’m not talking about prime land real estate; however, the same old catchphrase can apply to your job listings and job board real estate depending on how well your company’s geographic location aligns with the location of your targeted applicant pool. In this fifth installment of the “How to Write a Job Description Optimized for Job Boards & Internet Search” series, I’ll discuss how strategically using features available within your applicant tracking system can remedy an organization’s ailing efforts to get listings in front of out-of-town applicants.

Skills Gap: Qualified Applicants Don’t Live in Your Neighborhood

Awhile back I was chatting with one of our clients. She works for a company within the automotive industry and frequently needs to hire individuals skilled in trades, such as mechanics and technicians capable of working on large diesel engines. She usually has a number of similar positions open across multiple facilities, but the facilities are not in really large metropolitan areas…rather bigger towns scattered across the Midwest. In particular, one of those larger towns happens to be about thirty minutes from Indianapolis via interstate.

She has found that if she can get the word out, sometimes skilled individuals who reside on the edge of Indianapolis are willing to drive to her facility for work…after all, it is in the opposite direction of most rush hour traffic. However, it is much more challenging for her to engage qualified applicants that are closer and, perhaps at times, more aware of her job openings. She is definitely experiencing a skills gap in her town when it comes to technical positions.

So naturally, having had some success reaching Indianapolis residents and engaging them to come to her town for work, she wants to continue to get the word out and expand the geographic scope of her applicant pool. However, with so many postings skimmed by job seekers, she needs to do it in such a way that it is still clear that the opportunity is based in her town…and not in the city thirty minutes away. After all, she doesn’t want to waste her time, or even the time of her hiring managers, if a few applicants that don’t realize the position is really in the smaller town (and therefore do NOT want to make the commute) get through the cracks.

Strategic Job Locations & Setting Expectations Clearly

The key to this obstacle is to use your job description to make it clear that your opportunity is based in the town, but also ensure that it appears in the search results for applicants who may not be specifically looking for jobs in that town…but rather in the nearby city. Check with your applicant tracking system provider to see if alternate job locations can be enabled for the job boards to which you push your job ads.

For example, it is important to be upfront about the fact that your position is based in your town on your careers page. You may go so far as to also say as much in the first two sentences of your job listing to be sure that the town name appears in snippets of your posting in search engine and job board results pages.
Setting Location Expectations - Job Listings
Then, when pushing certain job listings to free and paid external job boards, designate the larger nearby metropolitan area as the “job board city” since applicants often do geographic searches on external job boards. After all, many more searches are likely to be done on the city than on the smaller town. And, while some of those applicants will dismiss the small town job opportunity when they note in the first few sentences that it is based in the town a half hour away; others will check it out–as they might reside in an area of the city that is relatively close to the town. Plus, they never would have thought to search for opportunities in that town, specifically. This can be especially compelling when you consider that a city like Indianapolis is so spread out that it can take nearly an hour to go from a suburb on one side to another on the opposite end of the city.
Specify Job Board City | ExactHire

Big City Skills Can Meet Small Town Opportunities

If you ever find yourself in a similar scenario scrambling to entice applicants to come to your quaint out of the way town, consider the approach I’ve outlined here. However, bear in mind the importance of still making it clear to applicants that do view your job description that the position is indeed located in your town…and not the big city. This technique isn’t about bamboozling applicants with the location bait and switch, it’s about harnessing the power of job board geographic searches to put your listing in front of applicants when it might not otherwise have been seen. Then, it is still up to the applicant to consider the merits of the scenic drive.

Improve Your Hiring Process: Communicate With Applicants

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How often is your recruiting department fielding unsolicited calls from applicants that are inquiring about the status of their application with your company? Too frequently? Well, its time to proactively communicate with your candidates so they don’t even feel the urge to pick up the phone or shoot off that next email inquiry.

In the fourth installment of this “Improve Your Hiring Process” series, I talked about managing your pipeline of applicants effectively. A major component of that is keeping your applicants informed as they travel through your selection process. Otherwise, you will likely find yourself fielding numerous phone calls and/or emails from applicants wanting to know if they’re still being considered, what are the next steps from here, etc.

Similarly, this also ties in with the idea of protecting your brand — both your employment brand and your business/consumer brand. You don’t want to give people the ability to take shots at your organization. But if they feel their resume/application goes into a “black hole” or if they hear back a month after their interview (or not at all) that they’re no longer being considered for your position, you’re feeding the most common frustration of applicants. That complaint? Not hearing from you!

Keep Applicants Informed of Recruitment Progress

Now, if you fill 3 positions per year and only receive 5-10 resumes/applications per position, you likely don’t have this problem. You can keep your applicants up to date pretty easily with email and/or an occasional phone call. At the same time, if this is your situation, you probably lost interest in this topic long ago!

The more common scenario is that you have dozens (or hundreds) of applicants per position and multiple positions open at any given time. In this scenario, you have three options for keeping your applicants informed:

  1. Ignore the issue because branding isn’t applicable to your situation.
  2. Keep your applicants organized in a spreadsheet and utilize Outlook or Gmail templates to correspond with those applicants as you move them to different steps in your recruiting process. This is pretty involved and requires a good deal of effort, but it can be done.
  3. Use an applicant tracking software tool to automate this process for you.

This happens to be a pretty big sweet spot for quality applicant tracking system tools. Because you now have all of your applicants in a single spot, including where they are in your process at any given moment, the chore of logging that data is taken care of for you. From there, a good tool of this sort will allow you to automate mass emails in a one-to-one format to applicants as they move through your hiring process. You save time, applicants are kept posted as to where things stand, and you dramatically cut down the phone calls and emails asking for updates — everyone wins.

Next up is the final installment in this series — Bringing Objectivity to Your Hiring Decision.

Image Credit: By Einar Faanes (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

How to Write a Job Description Optimized for Job Boards and Internet Search, Tip 4

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Is writing job descriptions more of an art or a science? It is perhaps less of a science than it used to be since practices like keyword stuffing are now counterproductive while the focus is truly on producing quality content (as it should be) these days. I’m going to take the easy way out and claim that its a blend of both art and science…or perhaps, strategy is a better word. Gone are the days of packing job descriptions full of keywords to improve on-page optimization and propel your careers portal and job listings to the top of the search results list.

The Three P’s of Job Description Keyword Use

However, many factors have changed in the mystical realm of search engine optimization (at least it seems mystical to me at times) over the past few years and one thing is clear…relevance is king. So while keyword stuffing to the point that a reader was tripping over the same word every paragraph in a text used to be a somewhat effective trick, search engines like Google have since put algorithms in place to penalize such practices.

So what’s a savvy recruiting and HR professional to do to make sure new job opportunities are seen by inquiring applicants? In this fourth installment of the How to Write a Job Description Optimized for Job Boards & Internet Search series, I’ll highlight the Three P’s of Keyword Use in Job Descriptions: presence, popularity and placement. We’ll demonstrate keyword optimization for Indeed as an example.

Are Relevant Terms Present in Your Job Description?

While this is the simplest concept of the Three P’s, it nonetheless is the foundation for success in optimizing your job listings for search results. It really just requires that the most relevant keywords for your target applicant pool are present in your job description. The tricky part lies in the fact that you may not always know which keywords resonate with candidates that are well-qualified for your available career opportunities. To rectify the situation, think about employers in your market that source applicants from the same talent pool – in particular, the ones that seem to be beating you out when it comes to attracting potential new employees. Scour their job listings and take note of the terms they use in job titles and the first paragraph of job descriptions. Are you using the same types of terms in your jobs?

For example, let’s take a construction firm that is seeking a new electrical superintendent for a large industrial contract. When I did a search on Indeed for “construction superintendent electrical,” there were only 707 listings nationwide (since I didn’t specify a location).
Electrical Superintendent Construction Job Results | Keyword Optimization For Indeed
However, with a little research of my competitors, I might find that they have job listings titled “Project Manager” with very similar descriptions to my own Superintendent listings. A slightly modified search for “construction project manager electrical” on Indeed yields 4,752 jobs.
Electrical Project Manager Construction Results | Keyword Optimization For Indeed
So, you might find that it becomes important to include the phrase “project manager” in your listing a few times…perhaps more so than “superintendent.” This may affect your job title decision, as well.

Keyword Optimization For Indeed | Density Considerations

Once you are confident of the right one or two key terms or phrases that you’d like to pepper into your job opportunity text, you must consider the frequency with which these words are used. As I mentioned before, in the past some recruiters stuffed words into the text for best results, but that won’t work anymore. In fact, while “keyword density” isn’t as integral an ingredient in your rankings recipe as before, you definitely don’t want to use terms too often…probably not much more than three percent of your total word count in fact. As with salt, a little can help bring out the flavor in your soup, but too much can quickly ruin the whole recipe. Similarly, too many of the same words in a job description will seem artificial and boring to the potential applicant. Remember the law of diminishing returns.

Consider writing your job description to flow naturally without minding keyword use. Then, go back and reread your text and insert your desired terms a few times. Lastly, think of synonyms and other related phrases and place those in the listing, as well. For our construction example, other words/phrases that might naturally occur with “construction project manager electrical” might include: field labor; electrical superintendent; industrial project; construction project; bid analysis; electrical contractor; and, lead electrical consultant.

These “co-occurring terms” will be recognized by search engines as complementary to your true targeted terms and are just another ingredient in the rankings effort. Plus, they offer the reader more variety and depth…which is more likely to result in the site visitor converting to become your applicant.

Mind the Placement of Job Description Text

So far you’ve learned to use just a few instances of relevant phrases in your job description…but not too many. Truth be told, a little can go a long way as long as you are using the right terms thoughtfully. That’s where placement comes into play. Even though you might include desired phrases only a few times in your job listing, they can pack a punch in rankings battles if you position them strategically within your text. Here are some effective placement techniques:

Now that you have a better understanding of how to use keywords strategically within your job listings, including being mindful of the Three P’s, you are well on your way to becoming a job listing ninja!

To see how ExactHire’s recruiting software can help streamline your job description optimization efforts, please schedule a live demo.