Staffing Management 101: Three Hints to Maximize Your Job Postings

There are over 5 million job-related searches every month on Google alone. This high density online traffic can easily be taken advantage of in staffing management. By optimizing your job postings for search engines you can generate more prominence in search engine results, expose your company to larger amounts of traffic and promote your brand, all of which will help you find the people you want. And you don’t have to be an SEO guru to start seeing better results.

Your ATS isn’t the answer.

Many companies today use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to handle the applications they receive. This system helps to manage the large volume of applications per job. They allow for job seekers to create a profile, upload a resume, and apply for open positions. However, if you think your ATS is helping your postings gain prominence in candidate searches, you have another think coming. ATS serves primarily as an internal database. They are not intended to extend your employment brand, promote job openings, or attract more qualified and right-fit talent. So what can you in staffing management do to enhance your company’s profile? Below are a few hints for increasing Search Engine Optimization, with the aim of gaining greater visibility on search engines.

Hint #1 – Review Your Job Titles

When search engines crawl the web, titles are the first thing they look for. Ensure your job titles are both candidate friendly and search engine friendly. Word your titles with the keywords you imagine the jobseeker will use to search for them. Without a proper title, your job posting has little chance of showing up in search results.

Hint #2 – Clarify Job Descriptions

Review your job descriptions to ensure they are properly optimized and search engine friendly. Again, consider whether the words and phrases you use are those that would be used by the jobseeker. Using brand, industry, and occupation-specific phrases can often boost the search rankings for your job when searchers choose those keywords and keyword phrases, especially if you use them more than once in a single posting. 

Hint #3 – Spell Out the Words and Titles

It may seem like an obvious tip, but using complete words with proper spellings will optimize your results. Rather than writing “Jnr” for a Junior position, write out the complete word. This way the job posting will turn up in the search results for both ‘Junior’ and ‘Jnr’. The same goes for other abbreviations; instead of using “admin”, use “administrator” Similarly, using plurals will boost your traffic, because by adding the ‘s in a word such as ‘system’, you capture results for both forms of the word.

You wouldn’t think these three simple and common sense techniques would make much difference. But enacting them can boost your web traffic and optimize your job postings. For staffing management professionals, this is a valuable tool in generating the greatest interest and accessing the largest amount of talent.